The Book of Mormon Site
Nahom, or NHM
Apologists make a lot of hay regarding the word Nahom appearing in 1 Nephi 16:34. Simply put, the strongest argument against this alleged evidence for historicity is the presence of the book of the prophet Nahum in the Old Testament, and Bibles which taught the English meaning of the Hebrew roots of that word. For believers who find NHM to be convincing, one must weigh the actual claimed evidence (inscription about a donation of a building by a named Nihmite to a pagan state temple/record complex, not a burial site, not near the borders by the Red Sea, but 150 miles inland, 400 years prior, to a town twice the size of Jerusalem of 600 BCE). Feel free to get into the weeds:
If this Nihmite apologetics is an example of the best evidence of the historicity of the Book of Mormon, then the historical Book of Mormon is cooked. And even if we somehow granted this one point in favor of the apologists, and pretended to be convinced by this (thin) evidence, it is completely reasonable for us to expect the apologists to be convinced of all the other hundreds of points of evidence against the traditional narrative of a historically sound Book of Mormon. You don’t get to claim to care about evidence, but only when it bolsters your claims.
The use of apologists’ un-scholarly acrobatics to grasp about for near-hits is one important reason so many former-faithful exiters feel extra betrayed when they dive in to investigate the Church’s truth crisis. Bad apologetics, in the end, can be faith-destroying, when it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Using weak quasi-scholarship in the attempt to prop up faith tends to inspire a reactionary narrative that faith cannot have a firm foundation. It reveals confirmation bias at work. Hopefully we can all avoid falling prey to this.
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