i think it’s the classic half glass of water situation. mormons who tend to reverse engineer conclusions from their desired end state look at things like this and believe “wow, this shows scientifically/historically/etc. that the BoM is true” because they believe that makes their claims plausible.
Non-mormons will look at this same “evidence” and say “that’s all you got?” and wonder how you could ever see those things as proof of anything.
Well, many of these “non-Mormons” don’t have a good grasp of the logical structure of the problem. Consider the fundamentalists who made the “Bible vs. the Book of Mormon” video. They believe that the Bible is all literally true, including the miracle stories and such. Now, these people think the Bible is all proved true because we know where Jerusalem and various other sites are, etc. But since many of these sites have existed continuously, and everyone agrees that the Bible is at least partly based on real history, who cares? It doesn’t prove a thing about the Bible being the Word of God.
On the other hand, the Book of Mormon was supposed to have been translated by some hick from the frontier in the early 19th century America, by the power of God. If we make archaeological discoveries to confirm this narrative, it is a MUCH BIGGER DEAL, because non-believers don’t believe the book is based on real history at all, except maybe a few things gotten from the Bible. A hypothesis is much more useful and powerful if it
goes out on a limb.
The NHM issue only appeals to mormons because the BoM is so vague on this that you could point to anywhere in the middle east and say that’s Nahom. NHM could mean anything. it isn’t Nahom, it’s NHM. we don’t know what it was referring to. this reminds me of the 70’s when everything in mesoamerica was linked to nephite cities as “proof” the BoM was true. now we have LGT trying to explain away the fact that was proven false.
The Book of Mormon is vague about New World geography–necessarily so, since none of the place names have stayed the same. On the other hand, it is much more easily tracked in the part that occurred in the Old World. They left Jerusalem (and we know where that is), traveled southeast along the western coastal area of Arabia, reached “a place called Nahom” where they buried Ishmael, and turned almost due east and traveled that way until they came to a place on the eastern coast of Arabia that they called Bountiful because it was very fertile, etc. They built ships and left from there.
As the FAIR video points out, Hugh Nibley and others had used this to posit a tentative travel route for Lehi’s party since the 1950’s or so. They figured that the party probably turned east at the old Frankincense Trail.
Well, guess what? Right about where the Frankincense Trail turned east, we find “a place called NHM,” that had an ancient burial ground, where Ishmael could have been buried. And if you go almost due east from there, you find a rare spot along the eastern coast of Arabia that fits all the criteria for Bountiful mentioned in the Book of Mormon. And furthermore, the place had been used as a small harbor for sea travel in the past.
But this isn’t good enough for you, because “it isn’t Nahom, it’s NHM.” Oh, please. Ancient Semitic languages had no vowels, so NHM inscribed on an ancient altar from around Lehi’s time is as close as we’ll ever get to direct confirmation of “Nahom.”
Considering the origin of the Book of Mormon, this one archaeological confirmation is a BOMBSHELL. It isn’t some random fact that seems to line up with an ultra-vague narrative. The narrative is reasonbly specific. Mormon scholars had already used it to posit a possible route. And now some archaeological finds have confirmed that route in spades.
Is that what passes for “scholarship” among Mormon “senior scholars”?
