Hi all,
Perhaps all these points have been covered on Controverse-E and/or Critical Canon before, but I thought I'd share some recent thoughts of mine on the use of the NHM altar find as an evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Mormon.
I sent the below as a response to Guy Briggs on ARM. Guy, are you on here?
I'd be interested in hearing what both believers and nonbelievers think of the NHM evidence and how it should be assessed. What, in your opinion, would be necessary to 1) show that the NHM find offers substantive support to the historicity of the Book of Mormon (if you are not a believer) or 2) show that the NHM find offers little or no substantive support to the historicity of the Book of Mormon (if you are a believer)?
My ARM post:
The NHM/Nahom thing is very interesting. I would regard it as one of
the best evidences uncovered to date for the Book of Mormon, which,
in my opinion, isn't really saying much.
The subject deserves a great deal of thought and additional research.
My comments below don't cover all the ground I'd like, but they're the
best I have time for right now.
netzach@GeoCities.com (Guy R. Briggs) wrote: Here's what we have
learned:
>
> 1) Nahom is a transliteration of a Hebrew place name. Hebrew
> has no vowels, therefore the most likely spelling of the
> place is NHM (nun-chet-mem),
You are correct, of course, that vowels would not have been written in
the name "Nahom." So, if we found an inscription referring to Nahom,
we would expect to find something like "NHM." But while such a find
would be _consistent_ with the name "Nahom," it would not necessarily
be a match since _we don't know what vowels were supposed to be used_.
Without this information, "Nahom" is only one of a number of
possibilities for the name of the place referred to in the
inscriptions as NHM (e.g., Nahum, Niham, Nohm, Nuhm, Nuham . . . ).
So, we cannot even claim that we have found a place called "Nahom,"
only that we have found a place that _may_ have been called "Nahom"
(among other things).
In fact, the situation is worse than that. The only clue that we _do_
have regarding the correct vowel-substitution/pronunciation of NHM is
the extant pronunciation: "Nihm". Since the place is now known to its
people as "Nihm", we are safest in assuming that this was its name
anciently as well - and we are positively unsafe in assuming that it
was something else.
It is certainly quite possible that the group calling themselves and
their land "NHM" changed the pronunciation over the generations; but
it seems at least as probable that they kept the original
pronunciation. (Recall that "NHM" in the altar inscription is actually
the name of a group of people - a tribe [and hence _possibly_ of their
_place_ as well]. How likely were they to lose the pronunciation of
their own tribal name, even while they retained its spelling?) In any
case, their pronunciation of the name is our only available clue to
the correct ancient pronunciation: we cannot simply assume it is
wrong.
> a Hebrew word (Strong's 5162)
> which means "to be sorry, to console oneself, to repent,
> to regret, to comfort or to be comforted."
>
> This works well in the context of the story.
Either 1) "Nahom" was an existing place, and so-named, when Lehi et
al. arrived there, in which case the NHM altar could refer to this
place, OR 2) it was not already named "Nahom" and was called that
because of "the context of the story." But you can't have it both
ways. If you are trying to argue for the Nahom-NHM identification,
then the supposed relationship of the NHM word to Ishmael's death is
simply irrelevant.
It may be countered that the Hebrew word "to be sorry" _is_ a good fit
since there is an ancient cemetery near NHM. But we should keep in mind that NHM is attested on the altar as the name of a tribe. Why would a tribe take a name on itself based on the fact that it had a cemetery? Surely, very many, if not all, ancient Arabian tribes had burial places. How many named themselves "the sorry ones" because of this?
And by the way, if NHM is, as you say, spelled nun-chet-mem, as in the Hebrew
term for "to be sorry," then it should be pronounced something like
Nachom, not Nahom, since chet makes a "k" sound, as in "Bach.
> 2) There is an actual place, NHM, which lies southwest of the
> Red Sea and due west of our best candidate for Bountiful.
Actually, well before the NHM find, the Hiltons and others had
identified _several_ places with names like "Nahom" in the Arabian
peninsula. If there were only place with such a name, and it turned
out to be conceivably where Lehi's group stopped, this would be more
impressive. That one of several such places would turn out to be
somewhere in the range of where the Lehites _could_ have gone is not
quite stunning.
The Bountiful link is interesting, but highly speculative. If we
aren't sure that's Bountiful, then we can't be sure that NHM is in the
right place relative to Bountiful.
> In other words, it's a real place, it's right where the Book of Mormon says it should
> be, it has the right name
As I mentioned, it's several real places. And it _may_ have the right
name. As for it's being "right where the Book of Mormon says it should be," I
have to agree with Duwayne that the Book of Mormon doesn't _say_ "right where it
should be." If it did, LDS scholars would have been looking for it
_only_ in the vicinity of the NHM altar find, not in all the other
places considered by the Hiltons, et al. The fact that the Book of Mormon account
did not allow them to _predict_ where a NHM could be found shows that
NHM is only "right where" Nahom should be in retrospect. In other words, the Book of Mormon
text really wasn't specific enough to make a determination of where
Nahom should be found, except possibly that it should be within a
certain very broad range. Had the Book of Mormon data allowed someone to predict
before the fact where a NHM could be found, this would have been far
more impressive. A general after-the-fact correlation such as the NHM
find is less impressive because it is more likely to be due to chance.
Lehi's route simply is not clear from the Book of Mormon. Serious LDS
scholars have proposed varying routes for him, including some that
avoid the Arabian Peninsula altogether and cut through the Sinai. Just
how "exact" can a correlation of any place with the Book of Mormon be under such
circumstances?
Ask yourself this. If a place called NHM had been located fifty miles
to the north of where this NHM has been found, wouldn't you still be
saying that it was "exactly where the Book of Mormon says it should be"? How
about 50 miles to the south? To the east? A hundred miles? Two
hundred? If, in fact, a new candidate for the Book of Mormon Nahom were found
tomorrow that was definitely named "Nahom" (not just something
consistent with "Nahom") and existed in Lehi's time, but was, say, 100
to 300 miles distant from the current NHM find, would you reject it as
being _not_ "right where the Book of Mormon says" it ought to be? If so, what
sense does it make to speak of any location being "right where the Book of Mormon
says"?
>and it fits the context of the narrative.
In at least one major way it does not. The Lehi group had been
commanded by God not to light fires and hence not to cook their meat,
but to eat it raw - in violation of the Torah. Why? The only
suggestion anyone ever seems to have found plausible is that Lehi's
group was to avoid detection by others. If so, why travel down (or
next to) a major trade route and enter a trade crossroads settlement -
NHM? A trip to the populated NHM is actually a very poor fit with the
context of a surreptitious flight through the wilderness.
> > Oh, and by the way. Nahum is the name of a book in the Bible.
> >
> Yup, and it could have simply been borrowed, just like you suggest.
>
> However, Smith could barely write English
No published historian of Mormonism will agree with you.
You might want to examine some of Joseph's early writings before you
make this kind of judgment. Check out, for instance, _Personal
Writings of Joseph Smith_. Joseph's October 22, 1829 letter to Oliver
Cowdery, for instance, (written just a few months after the completion
of the Book of Mormon), contains spelling and punctuation errors, but is
certainly coherent:
"Respected Sir I would in form you that I arrived at home on sunday
morning the 4th after having a prosperous Journey, and found all well
<etc. etc.>"
> You would have us believe that he picked a name out of the
> Bible which, oh by the way, just happens to have been a real place,
??
Given that Arabia is a Semitic-language area bordering the lands of
the Bible, it would seem quite unsurprising to find that biblical
names were also used for people and places there. In fact, it would be
surprising if they _weren't_. _Many_ of the Hebrew names in the Bible
have probably also been used as place names in Arabia. I'd make a
handsome wager on it. Would you bet against it?
> has a meaning consistent with the narrative of the story, is unknown
> at the time of the Book of Mormon translation but is discovered 170+ years
> later, and dated to the proper Book of Mormon timeframe by an independent
> archeological discovery.
A better summary of the evidence provided by the NHM find would be
this:
The Book of Mormon refers to a place "which was called Nahom." And
there are several places in the Arabian peninsula with names like
"Nahom" which have been suspected by students of the Book of Mormon of being the
Book of Mormon Nahom. However, no information specific enough to narrow the field
of possible Nahoms, much less predict where the true Nahom would be
found, is contained in the Book of Mormon. _Prospectively_, the location of Nahom
was impossible to pin down from the information in the Book of Mormon; but now,
_retrospectively_, one of the possibilities is alleged to be an
uncannily perfect fit with the Book of Mormon data. This is because this
candidate, referred to in ancient inscriptions only as "NHM," has now
been shown to have been so-named before 600 BC.
"NHM" also happens to be a Hebrew word referring to being sorry, which
must have seemed very ironic to the Lehi group, if Ishmael _was_
buried there, but is simply irrelevant as an evidence for the Book of Mormon
since the people of NHM presumably did not name themselves and their
land that in anticipation of a foreign visitor dying in their vicinity
centuries later.
The place NHM appears to be in the broad range of places where Nahom
could have been. But it was populated and a crossroads of major trade
routes, and hence an unlikely stopping place for a band so determined
to avoid other people that they ate raw meat rather than risk
detection.
The inscribed name "NHM" is consistent with the name "Nahom" and could
be the Book of Mormon "Nahom," assuming (as no one does now know and
perhaps can know) that the "a" and "o" vowel sounds are the ones
anciently used in the name. But the most likely pronunciation based on
the extant evidence is "Nihm," suggesting that NHM is probably not the
"place which was called Nahom" in the Book of Mormon.
I'm not saying the NHM find is of no value in Book of Mormon studies. But before
this, or virtually any other, evidence that has been offered in favor
of the Book of Mormon can be taken seriously, LDS scholars need to raise their
methodological sights, carry out more systematic studies of the
evidence, and stop just preaching to the choir. A real evidence is one
that will sway a dispassionate observer, not just those who are
already believers.
Don Bradley