Questian 4 The Unbelievers: How do you account for Lehi's Trail and "land of Jerusalem"?

[jmordecai]

Again, I ask, when we find that datum you insist on, what will you do?

Lehi

So you admit NHM is not the hit the ardent claim it is.

That's my point. If the data ever makes the case, fantastic.

[Vance]

So you admit NHM is not the hit the ardent claim it is.

That's my point. If the data ever makes the case, fantastic.

Lack of evidence is NOT proof of absence.

All the evidence that IS available supports this as being a hit.

And NONE of the evidence that IS available is against this being a hit.

So, now explain why we MUST accept your position?

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

Lack of evidence is NOT proof of absence.

All the evidence that IS available supports this as being a hit.

And NONE of the evidence that IS available is against this being a hit.

So, now explain why we MUST accept your position?

I have never understood the critics postion to explain away Nahom. I will admit that this hit does not prove the BoM to be true all it does establish is that Nahom is of ancent date and not known to JS. I am unaware of any documentation that JS had access to any maps that had NHM. Until a critic can come up with evidence that JS had access to this type of info all fo the exlpaining away does nothing but through up smoke.

[jmordecai]

Lack of evidence is NOT proof of absence.

All the evidence that IS available supports this as being a hit.

And NONE of the evidence that IS available is against this being a hit.

So, now explain why we MUST accept your position?

I already explained my position, so I don't intend to explain it again. I CFR'd for evidence that a place called Nahom existed in 600 B.C. That has yet to be demonstrated.

I have never understood the critics postion to explain away Nahom. I will admit that this hit does not prove the BoM to be true all it does establish is that Nahom is of ancent date and not known to JS. I am unaware of any documentation that JS had access to any maps that had NHM. Until a critic can come up with evidence that JS had access to this type of info all fo the exlpaining away does nothing but through up smoke.

That you don't understand the critics position doesn't by default prove Nahom was a place. My arguments have nothing to do with whether or not Smith had access to maps. If he did, I think he would have used Nehhm. But it's obvious he didn't since he identified the sea in Isaiah 9:1, JST (2 Ne. 19:1) as the Red Sea. I've made other points, like how the Jews survived a 7 year passage across the Empty Quarter that remain unanswered.

[Vance]

I already explained my position, so I don't intend to explain it again.

I didn't ask you to explain your position.

I asked you to explain why we MUST accept your position?

You have absolutely no evidence to support your position.

[jmordecai]

I asked you to explain why we MUST accept your position?

You have absolutely no evidence to support your position.

I don't have the burden to disprove what hasn't been proven.

[Vance]

I don't have the burden to disprove what hasn't been proven.

Ok, so you don't have a reason why we should abandon our position then.

Good to know.

And just to summarize. We have proof that the place was known as NHM from 50 AD to the present. That is about 1960 years of name stability that we can prove. We're 75% (with proof) there.

And you with no proof and NO evidence have zip.

Our position is rather comfortable. Thank you.

[jmordecai]

Ok, so you don't have a reason why we should abandon our position then.

Good to know.

And just to summarize. We have proof that the place was known as NHM from 50 AD to the present. That is about 1960 years of name stability that we can prove. We're 75% (with proof) there.

And you with no proof and NO evidence have zip.

Our position is rather comfortable. Thank you.

I can't help you if you can't comprehend my arguments.

My CFR for a place in 600 B.C. remains unanswered.

Despite your assertion, evidence for a place in 50 AD was not given .

Unless you bring new tangibles and data points instead of immature bickering, I'm going to ignore you the rest of this thread.

[LeSellers]

So you admit NHM is not the hit the ardent claim it is.

Not in the least. As far as I can tell, there is no reason at all to assume that the NHM was not a vi toponym. All the evidence points to its being just what we Saints believe it to have been. And, as I have said several times, we have pushed the archeological evidence to within a few hundred years.

If the data ever makes the case, fantastic.

"Fantastic" does not answer my question. What will you do when we find it?

Lehi

[blueadept]

"Fantastic" does not answer my question. What will you do when we find it?

Lehi

If similar reasonable evidence was found in the Americas, I would hope I would join the church.

[LeSellers]

If similar reasonable evidence [about the location of Nephi's Nahom] was found in the Americas, I would hope I would join the church.

So would I, so would I.

My follow-up question is, why require that it be found in the Americas, too?

NHM is so incredibly convincing, given it was virtually unknown to a XIX New Englander, and that the description of both NHM and Bountiful are so spectacularly, and impossibly, accurate, that it/they alone ought to tip the balance for anyone who sees them.

Calculating the odds of Joseph's coming up with the details of Lehi's Arabian trek that so closely match the actual terrain and cultural facts make any possibility of its being a coincidence trivial to the point of vanishing.

A further follow up is how much such "similar reasonable evidence" would it require? Do we need to find graffiti saying "Nephi is a total jerk!" or "My father brought me all the way from Jerusalem to this jungle?!? I want to go home!!", or would a simple sign saying

Bountiful Temple

[TAO]

LeSellers, you should perhaps also include the River and Valley Laman and Lemuel in the evidences... as well as 'the empty quarter'.

[Avatar4321]

They ignore it.

[blueadept]

So would I, so would I.

My follow-up question is, why require that it be found in the Americas, too?

Every good story should have a plausible beginning which, IMHO, NHM at least provides the ground work not to throw out the rest of the book. IMO, the incredible part of the story is believing it was feasible for a people of that time to make such a sea journey covering that distance. I'm glad members are overwhelmingly convinced with NHM. As a critic, I prefer evidence after what I consider the miracle part of the story of the BoM. It's unreasonable for critics to challenge if Lehi/Lemuel existed. It is reasonable to challenge if they existed in the Americas though.

I simply hope that I would be open to consider such evidence which is a reasonable position for a critic.

[jmordecai]

As far as I can tell, there is no reason at all to assume that the NHM was not a vi toponym.

Based on what? Does every Yemen tribe double as a toponym?

"Fantastic" does not answer my question. What will you do when we find it?

Hypotheticals don't contribute to the discussion. Do you intend to offer any additional tangibles and data points that answer my CFR?

[jmordecai]

NHM is so incredibly convincing, given it was virtually unknown to a XIX New Englander, and that the description of both NHM and Bountiful are so spectacularly, and impossibly, accurate, that it/they alone ought to tip the balance for anyone who sees them.

What is the description of Nahom?

Calculating the odds of Joseph's coming up with the details of Lehi's Arabian trek that so closely match the actual terrain and cultural facts make any possibility of its being a coincidence trivial to the point of vanishing.

7 years to cross the Empty Quarter is convincing.

A further follow up is how much such "similar reasonable evidence" would it require?

Given the lack of placing the Book of Mormon's New World geography, the lack of identifying the overwhelming majority of its more than 120 named places, its people, its language (ref. Egyptian), its culture (New World Christianity/Judaism)... there is no good reason to assume that a consonant equivalent with Nahom to Nihm is anything more than coincidence (provided a 600 B.C. toponym is ever proven).

[Robert F. Smith]

1. The LDS church has not endorsed any proposed location. Until then, claims made by apologists remain personal opinion and speculative.

2. The proposed link between Nahom and the Nihm tribe and altar inscriptions are based on linguistic assumptions.

Fair statements.

3. A linguistic link to Hebrew is also an assumption, as the Book of Mormon was written in Reformed Egyptian.

True, and (as James Hoch and Yoshiyuki Muchiki point out) Egyptian n?m may apply to those who are dead as having been "carried off, taken away." It is used in the tomb of Neferhotep I "Servants lament their deceased master: 'The shepherd of us both has been taken away from me'."

4. The name of a tribe does not give us a place

a. Today the Nihm tribe reside about 25 miles north of Sana'a, Yemen. This is not evidence that a location named NHM existed in 600 B.C.

b. The 7th-6th century altar inscription that reads: son of Naw'an the Nihmite is also not evidence that there was a place called NHM in 600 B.C. We have to make another assumption that the tribe was predominant at the time to have its area of residence called after itself and that is was in line with Lehi's travel.

There is no confirmed 600 B.C. place called NHM.

True. Still, this is an interesting "coincidence," and like all such odd facts, must be put into the overall database and evaluated as part of a cultural complex within anthropological systems theory.

5. 1 Ne. 17:4 informs us that the journey from Jerusalem to Bountiful took 8 years. The men took wives in the valley of Lemuel (1 Ne. 16:6-7). The women gave birth around Nahom (1 Ne. 17:1). For this reason, in the Journey of Faith DVD, S. Kent Brown deduces that it took them 1 year to reach Nahom from Jerusalem. This means Lehi and company spent the next 7 years crossing the Rub' al Khali nearly eastward to reach Bountiful. If there were a group of Jews traveling down the Arabian peninsula, it's preposterous that they would have abandoned the watering holes of the Frankincense Trail to cross the Empty Quarter. That's suicide, and is a fatal flaw to the Nahom/Bountiful model ignored by apologists.

False. There is no indication that the Lehites followed the regular Frankincense Route. In fact, they most likely continued traveling "in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea" (I Nephi 2:5), known as the Tihama. The Book of Mormon does not tell us how long Lehi & Co spent in the Valley of Lemuel, nor how much time is spent at this or that encampment en route along the Red Sea coast until they stop at Nahom and then turn obliquely, undoubtedly skirting the edge of the Empty Quarter, and finally reaching the coast of the Arabian Sea. Not only are we not given a detailed itinerary, but we have no concept of the time spent in the harshest areas.

However, we do know that the progressive dessication of the area is much greater today, along with the extinction of many game animals which roamed these areas anciently. Eating meat raw could be explained by the absence of kindling for fires on that side of the great mountain range facing the monsoon. The descriptions are true to the time and place (the mise en scene) and there is nothing improbable about the journey.

[LeSellers]

A linguistic link to Hebrew is also an assumption, as the Book of Mormon was written in Reformed Egyptian.

How many things can you get wrong in just one sentence?

First, the Lehites, or, at least, the Nephites, were cultural Jews, and for the first generation, political Jews, as well. There is every reason to accept that the language of the Book of Mormon was Hebrew.

Second, the characters on the Plates of Mormon were Egyptian, not the language. Whatever the connections between Lehi/Nephi and Egypt, and there were probably many, their language was Hebrew, and Moroni explicitly says that in the same verse where he describes the characters as reformed Egyptian. Please note the capitalization and the fact that the wording is emphatically about characters, not language.

Third, while there is no explicit language in the Book of Mormon that says so, it seems more than probable that the Nephites spoke a Hebrew dialect and wrote in a variant of Hebrew characters. The reformed Egyptian characters were a kind of hierographic notation used, as far as we can tell, exclusively by the official sacred historians like Mormon and Alma.

It is quite common in unrelated languages (like English and Russian) to transliterate proper nouns ("Smith" is "????", and we use "Putin" to identify the Prime Minister of the Confederation of Independent States), so we'd expect to see Nahom in an English translation of a Semitic word transliterated into Hebrew written in a modified form of an Egyptian "alphabet". It could be simpler if there were not so many variables, but there are.

Lehi

[jmordecai]

False. There is no indication that the Lehites followed the regular Frankincense Route.

You do realize that interpretation differs with the majority of Farms apologists I've seen, in particular the Journey of Faith DVD?

[jmordecai]

How many things can you get wrong in just one sentence?

First, the Lehites, or, at least, the Nephites, were cultural Jews, and for the first generation, political Jews, as well. There is every reason to accept that the language of the Book of Mormon was Hebrew.

Second, the characters on the Plates of Mormon were Egyptian, not the language. Whatever the connections between Lehi/Nephi and Egypt, and there were probably many, their language was Hebrew, and Moroni explicitly says that in the same verse where he describes the characters as reformed Egyptian. Please note the capitalization and the fact that the wording is emphatically about characters, not language.

Third, while there is no explicit language in the Book of Mormon that says so, it seems more than probable that the Nephites spoke a Hebrew dialect and wrote in a variant of Hebrew characters. The reformed Egyptian characters were a kind of hierographic notation used, as far as we can tell, exclusively by the official sacred historians like Mormon and Alma.

It is quite common in unrelated languages (like English and Russian) to transliterate proper nouns ("Smith" is "????", and we use "Putin" to identify the Prime Minister of the Confederation of Independent States), so we'd expect to see Nahom in an English translation of a Semitic word transliterated into Hebrew written in a modified form of an Egyptian "alphabet". It could be simpler if there were not so many variables, but there are.

Lehi

1 Nephi 1:2 (600 B.C.) says the record was in the language of the Egyptians.

[LeSellers]

1 Nephi 1:2 (600 B.C.) says the record was in the language of the Egyptians.

No, 1 Nephi 1:2 says that Lehi's teaching consisted of (included) the Language of the Egyptians.

1 I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days. 2 Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.

He recorded the words of his father ("the language of my father") and his record was that: the record of his father's teaching.

It is preposterous to assume, as you seem to, that a cultural, religious vi Jew (albeit a Mannasan) would speak Egyptian to his family, even though we know he read Hebrew (the Brass Plates were not in reformed, nor any other kind of, Egyptian. Their language was Hebrew.

Further, Moroni's statement, that their language was a Hebrew dialect and their ordinary writing was in a variant of the Hebrew script, is far clearer than anything Nephi wrote about it.

32 And now, behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. 33 And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record.

They ordinarily wrote in reformed Hebrew characters, but the plates, being small as they were (in Nephi's day, too

[Robert F. Smith]

You do realize that interpretation differs with the majority of Farms apologists I've seen, in particular the Journey of Faith DVD?

I take it that Clan Lehi continued the practice Nephi describes in I Nephi 2:5 "he traveled in the wilderness in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea," which is the lowland coastal plain known in Arabic as the Tihama. I know of no reason why they would follow the main Incense Route, and I know of no poll of so-called "FARMS apologists" which has been taken on that matter. There may be some people both in and out of the Maxwell Institute who hold that Classic-Main-Route view, but I am unaware of them. Even though I saw the "Journey of Faith" DVD, I can't recall that position being taken by the narrator. Perhaps you could name the persons who take that position?

[Robert F. Smith]

1 Nephi 1:2 (600 B.C.) says the record was in the language of the Egyptians.

You may be correct in that opinion about the meaning of I Nephi 1:2 (597 BC), even though your timing is a few years off. Certainly Nibley agreed with you on that (as do I), but there are some others who feel that the Book of Mormon was etched in Egyptian characters and Hebrew language. One way of determining the truth might be to decipher the so-called "Anthon Transcript."

[jmordecai]

I know of no reason why they would follow the main Incense Route

I think foreigners traveling in a foreign land would likely follow the main routes for trading and water.

I know of no poll of so-called "FARMS apologists" which has been taken on that matter. There may be some people both in and out of the Maxwell Institute who hold that Classic-Main-Route view, but I am unaware of them.

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/search/?fulltext=frankincense&jbms_vol=&jbms_num=&review_vol=&review_num=&author=&search=Search+The+Maxwell+Institute

Even though I saw the "Journey of Faith" DVD, I can't recall that position being taken by the narrator. Perhaps you could name the persons who take that position?

S. Kent Brown to name one.

http://www.mormonhandbook.com/nahom/

[Robert F. Smith]

2 Ne. 19:1 (c. 559-545 B.C.) quotes nearly verbatim from Is. 9:1 of the 1611 KJV, including 5 words added by the KJV (italicized). The bigger issue is that Joseph qualified the "sea" as the Red Sea, which a) Jesus also quoted Isaiah in Mt. 4:14-15, b) "Red Sea" here is not in any source MSS, c) the Red Sea is 250 miles away to the southwest.

That's a miss.

Jesus consistently quotes from the Septuagint Greek version of the OT (or at least whoever wrote Matthew used that source), except when he occasionally quotes an Aramaic Targum -- but translated into Greek, which Jesus likely never used. Our earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew are centuries later, and even the Qumran mss of Isaiah are at least 5 centuries after Isaiah. Aside from that, we do not know what was on the Brass Plates, including any possible errors. So drawing hard and fast conclusions from just this one item is nearly impossible. Biblical texts have many such "problems," but that is not taken to mean that there is something wrong with the whole. Simply a matter of textual criticism, and certainly to be expected.