New Light: "The Place That Was Called Nahom": New Light from Ancient Yemen

S. Kent Brown

A recently discovered carved altar from the southwest Arabian peninsula provides dramatic new evidence for locating "the place that was called Nahom," referred to by Nephi in his narrative.

Nahom was the location where Nephi's father-in-law, Ishmael, was buried (see 1 Nephi 16:34). The quest to pin down where that place might actually be in the vast desert wilderness of Arabia has raised issues for readers of the Nephite record that remain unsettled. Some LDS scholars have sought for years to identify where Nahom was located in order to understand the social and geographical circumstances of Lehi's trek through arid Arabia and grasp more fully what happened to the Lehite party as they sojourned there.

Hugh Nibley and others since him¹ have observed that the passive phrasing, "the place that was called Nahom" (emphasis added), connotes that the name had already been conferred on that area by local inhabitants before Lehi's clan arrived. Unlike the case of "the Valley of Lemuel," father Lehi did not coin his own name for this spot. Other people were already there and the little party had to cope with their presence. It has even been argued that the family faced serious economic and social dependency upon local inhabitants during and after their stay at Nahom. The first children of the recently married couples probably were born in this area (see 1 Nephi 16:7; 17:1),² and it may have been the birthplace of Jacob, Nephi's brother. Moreover, the party apparently stayed there for some time.

When the travelers resumed the journey from Nahom, their route turned "nearly eastward" (1 Nephi 17:1). That course took them to the shore of the sea—"Irreantum" they called it—that bounded the land they named Bountiful. Why did they pause at Nahom? Other travelers covered the entire distance of that trip from Jerusalem to the coast of the Indian Ocean in a matter of months, rather than in eight years (see 1 Nephi 17:4). Was this place a kind of "Winter Quarters"—a respite that allowed them to recover from the shock of the first long leg of their journey while they prepared for the last, grimmest portion?

One of the challenges facing LDS researchers has been determining where such a place might have been located. They have sought evidence in ancient sources of information that there was a spot, and a population, that was called Nahom. The first confirmation came twenty years ago, when the late Ross T. Christensen, an archaeology professor at BYU, discovered a place named "Nehhm" on an eighteenth-century map drawn by the famous German explorer Carsten Niebuhr. Presumably, the name Nahom was spelled with the same three consonants, N-H-M, assuring those knowledgeable in Semitic languages that "Nahom" could well be related to "Nehhm."³ In Hebrew, the combination of these three consonants points to a root word that can mean "comfort" or "compassion." (The meanings are different in the Old South Arabian language.⁴) The reason Nephi mentioned this name while remaining silent about any other place names encountered on their trip (with the possible exception of Shazer) was likely because he considered that the existing name of the spot, "comfort" in his language, was evidence of the hand of the Lord over them, although Ishmael's own family (including Nephi's wife) seems not to have been at all positive (see 1 Nephi 16:35).

Warren and Michaela Aston have been the most persistent in following the lead offered by Christensen. In their book, they have drawn together references to a number of Arabic sources that predate the work of Niebuhr by several centuries. These Arab authors, Ibn al-Kalbi and al-Hamdani, refer variously to a pagan god known as Nuhum (Ibn al-Kalbi), a tribal ancestor named Nuham (Ibn al-Kalbi), and a region and a tribe called Nihm (al-Hamdani), all in southwest Arabia. Even so, these references come from the pens of individuals who lived in the ninth and tenth centuries AD, 1,400 or more years after Lehi's party passed through the area. In reaching their conclusions, the Astons assumed that there was a continuity of such terms in that region for 1½ millennia because others had assumed it. After all, there is still a tribe and an area called Nihm to this day. Of course, the assumption was open to challenge, particularly because the earlier Greco-Roman authors who wrote about Arabia did not mention anything about a region or a tribe by the name of Nihm or Nehem. But that has now changed.

A German archaeological team under the leadership of Burkhard Vogt has been excavating the Baran temple in Marib, the ancient capital of the Sabaean kingdom that lies about 70 miles due east of modern San‘a, the capital of Yemen. (It is likely that the queen of Sheba began her journey to visit King Solomon from Marib.) Among the artifacts uncovered at the temple, the excavators turned up an inscribed altar that they date to the seventh or sixth centuries BC, generally the time of Lehi and his family. A certain "Bi‘athar, son of Saw�ad, son of Naw‘an, the Nihmite" donated the altar to the temple. The altar has been part of a traveling exhibit of artifacts from ancient Yemen that appeared first in Paris and has most recently been shown in Vienna.

The inscribed reference to the tribe of Nihm on this altar is the earliest known mention of this name, or a variant of it. It predates by almost 1,500 years the Arabic sources cited by the Astons which refer to such a term. Moreover, the inscription establishes that a tribe by this name had produced a person of means who could donate a finely carved altar to the temple. Although we cannot determine that at that time there was a place called Nihm or Nehem, it is reasonable to surmise that the tribe gave its name to the region where it dwelt, evidently a few dozen miles north of modern Sana, in the highlands that rise to the north of Wadi Jawf. Was it this name that Nephi rendered Nahom in his record? Very probably.

Notes

1. Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, The World of the Jaredites, There Were Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 79; Lynn M. Hilton and Hope A. Hilton, In Search of Lehi's Trail (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 95–98; Ross T. Christensen, "The Place Called Nahom," Ensign, August 1978, 73; Warren P. and Michaela Knoth Aston, In the Footsteps of Lehi (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), 4–25.

2. See S. Kent Brown, "A Case for Lehi's Bondage in Arabia," JBMS 6/2 (1997): 206–8.

3. The exact equivalency of the root letters cannot be assured. It is probable that the term Nahom was spelled with the rasped or fricative Hebrew letter for "h" (�het or chet) whereas the name Nihm, both in modern Arabic and in the ancient Sabaean dialect, is spelled with a softer, less audible h sound. See G. Lankester Harding, An Index and Concordance of Pre-Islamic Arabian Names and Inscriptions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 81, 602; and Joan Copeland Biella, Dictionary of Old South Arabic: Sabaean Dialect (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1982), 296. One has to assume, it seems to me, that when the members of Lehi's party heard the local name for "the place that was called Nahom" they associated the sound of that local name with the term Nahom, a Hebrew word that was familiar to and had meaning for them.

4. Biella (Dictionary, 296) defines the root nhm as "pecked masonry," that is, finished stone work whose surface has been chiseled purposely to make it rough to the touch.