"Not one, but
three ancient altars inscribed with the same three Semitic consonants of the place-name, Nahom, as mentioned in
1 Nephi 16:34.
You'd have to motivate that particular reading of the inscription, which I'm going to guess that your source cannot do (given the following).
Never mind the lack of vowels in the Hebrew alphabet that might alter the pronunciation: “Ni-ham,” “Nu-heem,” “Nehum”.
Why never mind the vowel pattern when that's part of the entire way that Semitic languages' root-and-pattern system works? I don't know Hebrew, but in Arabic (a related Semitic language), depending on the vowel pattern and the presence of any prefixes you could yield various verbs, nouns, and adjectives, e.g., kaatib 'writer', kitaab 'book', maktaba 'library', maktuba 'written', etc. This most definitely affects proper names, give how often they are derived from verbs or adjectives -- e.g., Muhammad literally means 'the praised one', from the same H-M-D root that yields hamd 'to praise' (I think technically 'he praised', since the citation form in Arabic dictionaries is the third person masculine singular), hamid 'one who praises', etc. Hamid and its feminine form Hamida are both also proper names.
So even while the vowel
quality is variable (i.e., Egyptians or Lebanese having E or sometimes O, rather than A and U as you can find elsewhere), the
pattern itself remains stable outside of cases of suppletion (the presence of an unrelated form with a different root from outside of the paradigm). The most you'll get is vowel deletion in certain inflected forms in the speech of users whose forms of Arabic developed under heavy pressure from previous native languages that allowed different syllable structures than Arabic does (e.g., the 'Berber' languages in North Africa, or Syriac in the Levantine countries). This is why Moroccan Arabic is pretty crazy compared to that of the Gulf, since the Berber languages are not very vowel heavy, so you can get tons of interesting consonant clusters that would probably be broken up by epenthetic vowels in other dialects. Witness names like M'hamed for Muhammed in Morocco and Algeria. This doesn't break the system at work (the underlying root is still H-M-D, not M-'-D or something), even though the resulting form looks different.
Also one of your source's suggestions, "Nu-heem" suggests a long vowel in the second syllable, which would thereby not be variable (since long vowels are indicated in writing by signs that can function as either long vowels or consonants, in this case long "ee" or y), so it's either in the actual inscriptions or not. You don't even really need to be able to read to understand that
نحيم (nu-heem) is different than
نحم (nuhim, with a short "i"). You can just look with your eyes. Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Amharic, etc. all work this way (though the writing system of Amharic is very different, since its a syllabary rather than an alphabet, so it functions more like various Indic scripts in that each consonant base character carries an inherent vowel to form a syllable; they're not your "ABCs", they're your "Ha hu hi"s or whatever), since it's a basic principle of Semitic word formation.
The coincidence remains staggering.
It's really
not staggering, but
is a coincidence. Again, the reading Nahom would need to be phonologically motivated, not simply asserted due to its being matched up with the BOM by Mormon apologists.
In fact, there is a "Nahom" out there connected to a Semitic-speaking people, but it's not where it would need to be to back up the BOM story: it's the Ethiopian version of the OT prophet Nahum, and is still used by Ethiopians today as a proper name, e.g., Nahom Mesfin Tariku, the Ethiopian runner who participated in the summer Olympics in 2008 and 2012.
Are you going to tell us now that the Lehites came from Ethiopia? (The Habesha people who are the natives of the Ethiopian highlands did originally come from Yemen, but far too late for the BOM narrative, c. 1st century BC, and anyway definitely intermixed with local Cushite populations. That's why highland Ethiopians are black people but with very pronounced 'Semitic' features not seen in other populations in other parts of the country.)
Not only are these altars found in the right place, they date to the right time. If that’s not enough, Nahom itself appears associated with the Hebrew word for “mourning”, which is precisely why the Lehites were there. Nahom was one of the largest burial areas in ancient Southwestern Arabia,
6 and the travelers were there to mourn the death of their beloved friend, Ishmael."
What Hebrew word for mourning? I looked it up, and apparently the Hebrew word for morning is אֵבֶל,
which is pronounced "aval". That is transparently unrelated "nahom". What other word does the writer have in mind?
"Book of Mormon readers are well aware of a tribal group who claimed to descend from a son of King Zedekiah named Mulek. (
Helaman 6:10;
8:21) Trouble is, history wasn’t aware of any “Prince Mulek”, let alone
any children of King Zedekiah who would have survived the Babylonian massacre. And one who found allies and migrated to the New World? That’s what makes this seal so interesting. Mulek is easily an hypocoristic, or shortened, form of
Malkiyahu, exactly as today we’d shorten Alexander to Alex or Nathaniel to Nate. Mulek may have also been mentioned in Jeremiah 38:6.
10 This artifact is so small it could fit on your fingernail, yet its implications could be enormous."
Mulek looks suspiciously like someone who is trying to appropriately deface other names that exist in the Bible (or maybe trying to write the word for 'king'?), like the name of the Canaanite deity Moloch. (
whose name comes from the common Semitic root for 'king').
So...'King King', then?
Next time you post what you claim is compelling scientific evidence for the BOM it should actually be evidence, not conjecture specifically based on what can be made to align with the BOM.
