The Book of Mormon is a vast and epic story that spans hundreds of years on two continents
while detailing the rise and fall of unique, previously unheard of civilizations.
Which may lead you to wonder: is there any archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon?
To begin looking for archaeological evidence you have to know where to look.
And to know where to look for evidence of the Book of Mormon, it’s best to go back
to the text itself.
If you read First Nephi, you’ll notice that as Nephi’s family journeyed south out of
Jerusalem, they named valleys, rivers, and seas along the coast of Arabia.
But there was one place he mentioned that was different.
When Ishmael died, Nephi wrote that he was buried in a place “that was called Nahom.”
Not only did Nephi imply that this location already had a name, but he gave details about
where it could be found.
So, if you followed Nephi’s journey into southwestern Arabia on a map, you’d find
the best location for the evidence you’re looking for.
In the 18th century scholars actually recorded the location called Nehhm or Nehem on maps
of the Arabian peninsula.
Now here’s the thing: it appears no one noticed these maps or drew any connection
between them and the Book of Mormon until the 1970s.
But it was still hard to know whether or not Nehhm from the maps was the same place as
Nephi’s Nahom.
Until 1997 when a team of German archaeologists found an ancient altar in southwestern Arabia
with the name of a local tribal region inscribed on its side. That name: Nihm.
This altar, which dates back to about 800 B.C., predates Nephi’s time period of about
600 B.C. and it’s location is exactly where you’d expect it to be.
It’s important to note that in ancient southern Arabian languages, the vowels were left unwritten,
so the inscription reads N-H-M.
This requires speakers of English to add the vowels later,
hence the difference between Nahom in the Book of Mormon, Nehem on the maps,
or Nihm on the altar.
Another interesting aspect of the name Nahom is that it sounds similar to the Hebrew word
for “mourning”: nicham.
This would explain why Nephi wrote “that the daughters of Ishmael did mourn [nicham]
exceedingly” at the place of their father’s burial: Nahom.
Biblical authors often utilized puns and wordplay in their writings.
Here Nephi appears to have made a pun of his own, which is consistent with ancient Israelite
literary tradition.
Additionally, Nehem was one of the largest burial areas in ancient southwestern Arabia,
making it a natural location for Ishmael’s burial.
But on top of all of these correlations, there is another way of verifying that the Nahom in
the Book of Mormon is the same as the Nihm region of Southern Arabia.
In First Nephi 17, Nephi wrote that his family "did travel nearly eastward" from Nahom until
they reached the place they called Bountiful, where Nephi constructed his ship.
Amazingly, due East of Nahom is a place that matches Nephi's description of Bountiful.
If there were only one or two of these elements they could be written off as a coincidence.
Skeptics might be able to say that Joseph Smith just got lucky by picking the letters
"N-H-M" as the name of his fictional burial place.
However, when multiple elements combine and converge, they make it nearly impossible that
this is just a coincidence.
It's not just the name, or the location, or it's relative position to bountiful, or the
wordplay or the chronology - it's all of these combined together that show Nahom is archaeological
evidence for the Book of Mormon.
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