Abstract: For decades, several Latter-day Saint scholars have maintained that there is a convergence between the location of Nahom in the Book of Mormon and the Nihm region of Yemen. To establish whether there really is such a convergence, I set out to reexamine where the narrative details of 1 Nephi 16:33–17:1 best fit within the Arabian Peninsula, independent of where the Nihm region or tribe is located. I then review the historical geography of the Nihm tribe, identifying its earliest known borders and academic interpretations of their location in antiquity. My investigation brings in data on ancient Yemen and Arabia that has not been previously considered in discussions about Nahom or Lehi’s journey more generally, and leads to some surprising conclusions. Nonetheless, after establishing both where we should expect to find Nahom and the most likely location of ancient Nihm independent of one another, the two locations are compared and found to substantially overlap, suggesting that the “Nahom convergence” is real. With the convergent relationship established, I then explore four possible scenarios for Lehi’s stop at Nahom, the burial of Ishmael, and the party’s journey eastward toward Bountiful based on the new data presented in this paper.

In his seminal work Lehi in the Desert, originally published serially in the 1950 Improvement Era, Hugh Nibley pointed out a subtle detail in the wording of 1 Nephi 16:34: “Note that this is not ‘a place which we called Nahom,’ but the place which was so called.”1 In the mid-1970s, Lynn and Hope Hilton also noticed this detail, and reasoned that Nahom “was almost certainly a settled place, because Nephi says it already ‘was called Nahom,’ while every other campsite … was named by [Lehi’s [Page 2]family] themselves,” leading them to ask: “Called Nahom by whom?”2 As a place name known to others on the Arabian Peninsula, Nahom could possibly be found in other historical sources. Sure enough, a year after the Hiltons published their exploration of Lehi’s trail in the Ensign,3 archaeologist Ross T. Christensen identified the name Nehhm on an old eighteenth century map of Yemen prepared by German explorer and cartographer Carsten Niebuhr and suggested it might be “the place which was called Nahom” (1 Nephi 16:34).4 In a short note published in the Ensign, Christensen recommended three steps be taken for further research,