1 Nephi 18

Nephi is supposed to be engraving this on metal plates, but he states three times what could have been stated once with something like, “Therefore I did not build the ship after the manner of men.”

Using Occam’s razor, which is more likely, that this redundant and verbose verse was engraved on metal plates by an ancient Israelite using hand tools, or that it originated from a 19th century man dictating an account to a scribe?

“I cannot write but a little of my words, because of the difficulty of engraving our words upon plates” (Jacob 4:1).

Bullet items from “The compass, a brief history” (New World Encyclopedia)

• Earliest records show a spoon shaped compass made of lodestone or magnetite ore, referred to as a “South-pointer” dating back to sometime during the Han Dynasty (2nd century B.C.E. to 2nd century CE), though not originally used for navigation.

• An early form was invented in China in 271 C.E

• The earliest reference to a magnetic device as a direction finder is recorded in a Song dynasty book dated to 1040-1044 C.E.

• In the Arab world, the earliest reference comes in The Book of the Merchants’ Treasure, written by one Baylak al-Kibjaki in Cairo about 1282. Since the author describes having witnessed the use of a compass on a ship trip some forty years earlier, some scholars are inclined to antedate its first appearance accordingly. There is also a slightly earlier non-Mediterranean Muslim reference to an iron fish-like compass in a Persian talebook from 1232.

Richard Packham describes the problem like this:
“It would be analogous to the passage in Washington’s fraudulent journal, where he looks into the future in America, and says: ‘There will come a time when every man will possess a wonderful device somewhat like a typewriter, yet it will have a picture before it, and the words typed by the typewriter will appear in the picture, and can be sent around the world…’ How could Washington explain what a computer is by comparing it to a typewriter, when there was no such thing as a typewriter in his day, and therefore the word ‘typewriter’ did not exist?”

The word "threatenings" or "threatening" only appear three times in the KJV bible, but Acts 9:1 also contains the highly similar "breathing out". While this combination is unique within the KJV bible, it is used five times within the Book of Mormon (see 1 Nephi 18:17, Mosiah 19:3, Alma 35:9, Alma 54:19, 3 Nephi 5:5). It is strange that these different authors accross the centuries (which are Nephi, Ammoron, and Mormon), would use variations on the same phrase which is only found once in the New Testament. Isn't it more likely that this was simply among the favorite biblical phrases of a singular author, which would explain its reuse?

To defend God regarding the problem of evil, apologists often explain that because of moral agency, God may not or does not intercede to protect the innocent. This verse is one of many examples rendering this defense indefensible.

With the exception of “wild goat” which could be interpreted as something like a mountain goat, these animals were not in the Americas until European colonization. That “goat” is contrasted with “wild goat” indicates that “goat” means a domesticated or farmed version of goat.

Regarding this verse, the current Book of Mormon Student Manual for Religion 121-122 copyrighted 2009 explains on page 40 that, “There was controversy regarding horses in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus arrived. However, modern archaeological discoveries have shed new light on the subject.” It then quotes from the New Americanized Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, p. 3197 that: “Fossil remains of true horses . . . are found abundantly in deposits of the most recent geological age, in almost every part of America. . . In that continent however, they became quite extinct, and no horses, either wild or domesticated, existed there at the time of the Spanish conquest.” And, then the article explains that this is a “curious but as yet unsolved problems in geographical distribution” (New Americanized Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, p. 3197). There seem to be multiple editions of the New Americanized Encyclopedia, but they seem to be published in the early 1900s, maybe as late as 1903. Based only on this citation from more than 100 years ago, one could speculate that perhaps pre-Columbian American horses went extinct after the Book of Mormon timeline.

However, there is no recent controversy whether horses were in the Americas during the time reported in the Book of Mormon. Horses became extinct in the Americas by 8,000 years ago (Horses in the United States). That’s 4,000 years or more before the Book of Mormon Jaredites, and horses were not reintroduced in the Americas until Europeans brought them back more than 1,000 years after the destruction of the Nephites as reported in the Book of Mormon.

(See also my If I Could Ask … Lesson 5 about horses in the Americas)