Nahom

The place in the wilderness where Ishmael was buried. Unlike the river Laman and the valley of Lemuel — names Lehi himself bestowed — the text does not present Nahom as a name the travelers gave. It reports only that the place “was called Nahom” (1 Nephi 16:34) — a passive that credits no namer at all. What that silence implies is weighed below, not settled here.

In 1 Nephi

Arrival and the death of Ishmael (1 Nephi 16:33–34)

After the broken-bow episode, the group resumes travel: “we did again take our journey, traveling nearly the same course as in the beginning; and after we had traveled for the space of many days we did pitch our tents again, that we might tarry for the space of a time” (1 Nephi 16:33). The next verse records the death without elaboration:

”…Ishmael died, and was buried in the place which was called Nahom.” (1 Nephi 16:34)

The text gives no cause of death, no duration of illness, and no description of the burial rites. The entire notice is one clause. Nahom is named at exactly one verse in the frozen corpus — this one; the name does not appear again anywhere in raw.

Mourning and murmuring at Nahom (1 Nephi 16:35–36)

The death is followed immediately by an account of his daughters’ response:

“…the daughters of Ishmael did mourn exceedingly, because of the loss of their father, and because of their afflictions in the wilderness; and they did murmur against my father, because he had brought them out of the land of Jerusalem, saying: Our father is dead; yea, and we have wandered much in the wilderness, and we have suffered much affliction, hunger, thirst, and fatigue; and after all these sufferings we must perish in the wilderness with hunger.” (1 Nephi 16:35)

Their complaint names grief and accumulated suffering together. It echoes, in condensed form, the murmurings of earlier chapters: the wilderness journey has meant deprivation, and the death of a father in this place sharpens the despair. The murmuring continues in the following verse: “they did murmur against my father, and also against me; and they were desirous to return again to Jerusalem” (16:36). Laman then calls for Lehi and Nephi to be killed (16:37); the text presents the daughters’ mourning and Laman’s conspiracy as sequential but does not fold the daughters into the conspiracy itself.

The crisis is resolved when the Lord speaks and chastens the group; they turn away their anger, repent, and are blessed with food again (16:39). The journey itself resumes only at the opening of the next chapter (1 Nephi 17:1).

The turn eastward (1 Nephi 17:1)

The first verse of chapter 17 marks the directional shift from Nahom: “we did again take our journey in the wilderness; and we did travel nearly eastward from that time forth” (1 Nephi 17:1). The phrase “from that time forth” links the eastward turn directly to the Nahom narrative that has just closed. Nahom is therefore the hinge point in the journey’s geography: all prior travel was “nearly a south-southeast direction” (16:13) or “nearly the same course” (16:33); from Nahom onward it is nearly eastward, leading eventually to Bountiful.

The “was called” detail

The text’s phrasing at 1 Nephi 16:34 is passive: the place “was called Nahom.” The table below covers every place the journey narrative names after the departure from Jerusalem, with the phrasing raw uses for each:

Every place the travelers name themselves carries an active namer. At Nahom the construction is passive instead, and no agent is named. The Red Sea is the one other case where the text credits no namer, but it differs again: raw supplies it with no naming phrasing at all — the name simply enters the account at 1 Nephi 2:5 and recurs at 2:8, 2:9 and 16:14. (Jerusalem, the journey’s point of origin rather than a place named along the route, sits outside the table’s field.)

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. The passive “was called” construction at 16:34 appears to indicate that Nahom was a pre-existing place-name rather than one coined by the group. Whether that distinction carries narrative weight — whether the text intends to signal that the travelers were passing through named territory — is not stated. The observation that the phrasing differs from every other named location in the journey is textual; the inference that this signals pre-existing inhabitation or a known toponym is interpretive.

Key references

Related

People: Ishmael · Lehi

Places: Places & Geography · Bountiful

Navigation: Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon (1 Nephi). All quotes are drawn verbatim from the frozen source text. Chapters cited: 1 Nephi 2, 1 Nephi 16, 1 Nephi 17, 1 Nephi 18.