(soft music)
- Welcome, everybody, to New Evidences
for Joseph Smith's presentation
on Nephi's wooden bow.
There it is. (laughs)
Well, something like this, we think,
is what he may have made
out of a wood called
atim from Saudi Arabia.
So let's talk about that
and let's understand,
first of all, who Nephi is.
Nephi is a prophet from the Book of Mormon
that was translated by
the Prophet Joseph Smith.
It tells the story of a
family that leaves Jerusalem
600 years before Christ.
The father of the family is Prophet Lehi
and Nephi is his son.
They travel south of
Jerusalem to the Gulf of Aqaba
and then they travel along the borders
near the Red Sea.
The borders are generally believed to be
the mountains near the Red Sea.
As they travel southeasterly
down the Arabian peninsula.
And then at about modern day Yemen,
they turn eastward and then they go to
the shores of the Indian Ocean,
where they find the land that
they refer to as Bountiful
because of its much fruit and honey.
So from there the Prophet
Nephi is instructed
on how to build a ship
and he builds a ship
and the family then
travels across the ocean
to South America.
And they land a little south
of the Isthmus of Darien,
which is the Isthmus of Panama
according to the Prophet Joseph Smith.
Now, Nephi kept a record on gold plates.
He had two sets of records.
One was referred to as
the small plates of Nephi,
where he kept his kind of sacred stuff.
And then he had the
larger plates of Nephi,
which were to record the
history of his people.
He essentially is the
founder of the Nephite
civilization that then
dominates the American continent
up until 385 years after
the time of Christ.
Now, Nephi is considered to members of the
Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints
to be a great character of faith.
And so Nephi and his story is often told
to encourage members to be faithful.
And that's part of the
theme that we have also
for this presentation pointing out that we
can be like Nephi and who
overcame his challenges
in the desert by turning
to the Lord for help.
Here you see an area
close to the city of Bisha
in Saudi Arabia up on the escarpment
in the area where we think
they may have been traveling.
The white mountain you see there is made
entirely of quartz.
As you can see, it's
a pretty barren place.
So we're going to talk about
this story of their journey.
We're gonna start up in Jerusalem.
Of course, there is Israel.
And the family is going
to travel down near
the Gulf of Aqaba, where
Nephi has what I refer
to as his conversion experience,
where he finds out for
himself that his father
really is a prophet and that
God has a plan for his family.
Now then travel down the
borders or the mountains
along near the Red Sea down
into this area near Bisha,
and we're going to learn about atim,
which is a tree that
is found in that area.
Khamis Mushayt is where
I was living at the time.
This would have been 1998 with my family.
And then we're going to
continue with the family
down into Yemen to a place called Nahom.
And then from there they traveled across
to the borders or the
coastline of the Indian Ocean
to a place that they call Bountiful
where they then construct the ship.
This is just a picture
of me and my wife Pat
and our three youngest children,
Eliot, Jeremy, and Alanna.
And we're up on top of Mount Souda,
which is at 10,000 feet
close to the town of Abha.
This is one of the royal palaces up there.
And so that's just to
give you some perspective
of what we were doing.
And that picture was taken in '96.
Now, some general things
about Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia came into the
modern world fairly recently.
So things have changed dramatically.
As you can see here, Toyota
trucks, the small ones
and also the land cruisers,
are just found all over
the place, extremely popular vehicles.
Camels, of course, were used
for transportation in the past.
But now they get the ride.
So it's fascinating to see
camels being transported
in these little pickup trucks.
It's a fairly common sight.
It's okay to take pictures
of men in Saudi Arabia.
Of course, they would need
to give their permission.
All of these men in this
picture are all Saudis,
except for the young man in
the back with the blue pants.
And so he's probably Indian or Pakistani.
What used to be, what
was referred to generally
as third country nationals.
We were also as Americans
third country nationals
living in Saudi Arabia.
But there are a lot of them
there that provided labor
and so they were all over the place there.
Previously up in the
mountain areas particularly,
and in the area where
there was water and oases,
homes were made of mud, dried mud.
And going into those
homes, pretty amazing.
It provides a nice, cool place to live.
Of course, out in the desert
and when they're mobile,
they're using tents made of animal skins.
But of course, wherever there's water,
that yields some civilization.
Here's another example of that.
Here's an oasis that's at the bottom
at the base of this long escarpment
that runs along near the Red Sea.
In the north, it's not very high,
but then as you get close to Yemen,
you get up above 10,000 feet.
And so it's hard to see the
mountain there behind it.
But this is a little town that was nestled
at the base of the escarpment.
Interestingly, it's now
completely abandoned.
But you can see that rock was used as the
natural resource for
building that little town.
In general, as new technology came,
the people along the
base of the escarpment
tended to move up to the
top of the escarpment
where it was cooler, where
they could still get water
from pumps and things like that.
So a lot of the...
There was a big transition
in the population
up to the higher elevations.
All right, so back to our story.
So Lehi and his family
leave Jerusalem, as I said,
about 600 years before Christ.
And they travel down into the
area of the Gulf of Aqaba.
And there is described
in the Book of Mormon
a Valley of Lemuel and the River Laman.
Interestingly, it's in about the same area
as two other very
significant historical sites.
Al Badr is actually the
site of Jethro's well.
Jethro, of course, was
Moses' father-in-law.
This is where he lived and Moses fled
to this area from Egypt.
Also close to there is a mountain called
by the Bedu, the Bedouin, Jabal Musa.
In other words, the mountain of Moses.
We hear about Mount
Sinai over here as where
the 10 Commandments were received.
That's probably not accurate.
That site doesn't match the scriptures.
Whereas Jabal Musa, when you...
And we visited that.
That is another subject, of course.
But matches descriptions
in great precision.
So interesting historic area there.
This is a picture of what may be
the River of Laman and
the Valley of Lemuel.
There have been a number
of good books written
about Saudi Arabia and the travels of Lehi
and his family in that area.
This one here is Lehi in the Wilderness
by George Potter and Richard Wellington.
I actually worked with
them to help research
what wood Nephi could have
used for making a bow.
And my discoveries are
talked about in this book.
In addition, there's what
they call the Nephite project.
And they have some DVDs.
This series called
Discovering Lehi's Trail.
And on the number two disc,
there's an interview of me describing how
the wood was discovered for
the research that was done.
There's also another book that preceded
Potter and Wellington.
This was written by Lynn
Hilton and his wife Hope.
And they wrote an excellent book about
the possibilities of where Lehi was
as he traveled in the Arabian peninsula.
For example, they've got
a great piece in there
about the Lehianite
culture, the Lehian rulers,
and that it appears
they practiced baptism,
the Jewish faith, apparently.
And this is along the route
that the Prophet Lehi went
and the timing of that
civilization seems to match also.
So there's a lot of interesting things.
We don't know for sure if
this is the spoken of place.
The River Laman, excuse me,
is really just a trickle today
because it springs from
underground further north.
And in that area, there
is a lot of wells now
that draw, that lowered the water table
and taken a lot of water out there.
So what may have been a river
at one time or a stream,
more accurately in Western terms, I think,
is now barely a brook.
But what's interesting is
that it flows continuously
all year round and according to reports,
it is the only stream
in the Arabian peninsula
that flows year round into the ocean.
So it was in that area that Nephi
has his conversion experience.
As I said, we've been in that area.
We were exploring at the time Jabal Musa.
The desert there is
extremely rocky and barren.
You can imagine from
the Book of Mormon story
why it was that Nephi's older brothers,
Laman and Lemuel, were very
upset with their father.
They wanted to go back to Jerusalem.
They thought their father was crazy.
Why would you leave Jerusalem?
Here Lehi is saying no, we need to leave
because Jerusalem is
going to be destroyed.
And God has a plan for us
to take us to another land.
Well, Laman and Lemuel
weren't buying this.
What's interesting is that from
the Book of Mormon account,
it appears that Nephi,
who was younger than them,
may have been listening to his brothers
and was very sympathetic to their view.
This is apparent from
this chapter and verse
in 1 Nephi chapter two, verse 16.
As we read that, notice the wording.
Nephi says, "I did cry unto the Lord."
So he obviously had decided to pray
and ask God concerning his father.
"And behold, he," meaning
the Lord, "did visit me."
So here Nephi is very similar
to the Prophet Joseph Smith.
And he, meaning the Lord,
"did soften my heart."
Now, that's significant.
So there we see that his
heart must have been hardened
towards his father.
He was probably tending
to side, as I said,
with Laman and Lemuel.
But the Lord softened my
heart that I did believe
all the words which had
been spoken by my father.
And because of this, wherefore,
I did not rebel against
him like unto my brothers.
So this is a very, very
significant scripture.
It is perhaps the most significant event
in Nephi's life, because here
he turns to God in prayer.
The Lord visits him and
essentially calls him
to be a prophet and gives
to him the knowledge
that his father is a
prophet and that the Lord
has great work for him to do.
So this significantly
changes Nephi's life.
It allows Nephi to later,
in fact, reported in the
next chapter of the Book
of Mormon, chapter three,
a scripture which is used
very frequently in LDS talks.
And let me just read that to you.
It's 1 Nephi chapter three, verse seven.
He had received an
instruction from his father
to go back to Jerusalem
along with his brothers
to obtain the records of labor.
And the brothers, of course,
complained about this.
But Nephi says, and it
came to pass that I Nephi
said unto my father, I
will go and do the things
which the Lord hath commanded.
For I know that the Lord
giveth no commandments
unto the children of men
save he shall prepare
a way for them that they
may accomplish the thing
which he commandeth them.
Well, clearly Nephi was
able to make this statement
because he had been converted
to the Lord recently.
Well, from the Valley
of Lemuel up here near
the Gulf of Aqaba, the
family then travels southeast
down the Arabian peninsula in
the vicinity of the Red Sea.
There are postulated to
be two routes of travel.
One is the coastal plain.
The other is the frankincense
trail up on the escarpment.
Now to clarify, the
escarpment starts up here
in the north just a few hundred feet above
the coastal plain, but then
as you go further south,
it gets higher and higher.
For example, down in this
area is Mount Soudan,
where we were at 10,000 feet.
And down in Yemen, it
actually gets a couple
of thousand feet above that.
And then there is a very steep drop off
down to the coastal plain.
So there are some arguments for both.
I tend to favor and so does George Potter
and Richard Wellington in their book
the frankincense trail
for a couple of reasons.
As you can see, the coastal trail was hot.
There were a lot of lava fields there
that had to be crossed and would be tough
on the camels' feet.
So therefore, it'd be slow.
The advantage though is
you're close to the ocean
and you can get fish.
Interestingly, that seems
to support the argument
that they were not on the coast.
Because the frankincense trail
was up at a higher elevation,
therefore it was cooler.
The terrain was less constrained.
They could travel faster
in this direction.
It would have taken a
great deal of difficulty
to get down the escarpment back up again
if you wanted to go get fish.
So if fish wasn't
available, not practical,
but there were animals
at the higher elevations
that they were able to get.
And we learn from Nephi's
broken bow experience
when he makes the wooden
bow that he then is
able to go into the
mountain and to get animals.
So it appears that mostly
likely would have been
on top of the escarpment
they were traveling.
So they, of course, so the
Book of Mormon says that
they were traveling in
the more fertile parts
of the wilderness, which of course,
were few and far between.
The more fertile parts of
wilderness were typically
in the borders or in the
mountains near the Red Sea.
Because at the higher
elevations in the mountains,
you do get some precipitation.
And as you can see through
the vegetation there,
you've got also areas
where you can cultivate.
And so you can see these terraced fields.
And so there were villages and stuff out
along the top of the escarpment.
And the area referred
to there is the Hejaz,
which was actually populated
by many of the house of Israel.
After the house of Israel
left Egypt and went into
the wilderness, some of
them actually did not
all go with Moses up into Palestine,
what we call Palestine today.
But some of them split
off and went down into
the area of the Hejaz
and populated that area.
So there's actually a
very strong Jewish history
all the way down this coastal escarpment.
All the way down into Yemen.
But as they traveled, they
had a crisis about food.
And this is how it developed.
Nephi was using a bow.
By the way, he described himself as very
large in stature.
So perhaps that's why
he was the one who was
using the steel bow,
which was hard to pull.
But it broke.
And so that resulted in a problem.
The scripture says that his brother's bows
had lost their spring.
So those were wooden bows and wooden bows
over time lose their spring.
And so they could obtain
no food for our families
and they did suffer for the want of food.
They suffered so much,
in fact, that even Lehi
began to murmur against
the Lord because of the
hardness of the situation
that they were in.
Now, what we want to
notice here is that Nephi,
he essentially demonstrates
his strong faith
and leadership characteristics.
Here he kind of takes
the lead for the family.
He says, I did make out of wood a bow.
And therein raises the question,
where was the wood that
Nephi got to make a bow?
And an arrow, and I said unto my father,
so he's respecting his father still,
where shall I go to obtain food?
So then he did go forth into
the top of the mountain.
Okay, so they were
already in the mountain.
He's describing going into
the top of the mountain.
Or he could have been
on top of the escarpment
and gone a little bit
higher up to the edge of the
escarpment where the peaks were.
And did slay wild beasts, plural,
and so did obtain food for our families.
It may be then that those
beasts were not very large
as he returned them to
his family for food.
We found up there a lot of baboons.
But also there is also the
oryx, which is an antelope.
If he had killed one of those,
it would have been one
beast that he probably
would have carried back to his family.
Okay, so trying to find
out what wood Nephi
could have used in the Arabian peninsula
was going to be a challenge.
So we needed to have some
faith, scripture study,
of course, from the Book
of Mormon to understand
the particulars, prayer,
and just plain hard work.
One of the things that
I found very quickly
is that my sources within
the Saudi community
were not good enough
to be able to determine
what wood could have been
used anciently for bows.
We knew that they used bows anciently,
but we also know that they, of course,
transitioned to modern
weapons and nobody knew
of any bows that were laying around.
The reason why became known to us later.
Also we did not know what they...
Most of the guys I talked
to didn't have a clue
what would have been used for bows.
We had relied a little bit
on Hugh Nibley's speculations
as to where the broken bow
incident probably occurred.
He had also referred to nab wood.
It turns out that nab is the canine tooth.
And so nab wood, most of
the Saudis I've talked to
thought it was probably
a reference to some of
the thorny trees that exist
out there in the desert areas.
But none of that wood was
any good for making bows
because it was extremely dry and brittle
and not effective at all.
So we didn't know what to
do other than to perhaps
go to the areas that
Hugh Nibley had suggested
higher up on the escarpment
and start looking
on top of the escarpment
and down the escarpment
to see what trees might be of use.
You saw in the picture of me and my family
on Mount Souda, a Juniper tree there.
Those, of course, were
no good for making bows.
And so we didn't really
have a solution in mind
as we began our exploration.
So what we're going to
find out here is that
in the area of Bisha
between Jeddah and Abha,
particularly in the area
between Taif and Abha,
there is an area where there is atim.
Now, atim is a wild olive tree.
We'll talk more about this.
But it's found in elevations
between 5,000 and 7,000
feet elevation on the
sides of the escarpment.
And in fact, it was also cultivated
it appears in the past for its qualities.
So we'll talk about that.
So here is pictured an atim tree.
You can see me there on your right.
And Matt Fortner along with me.
And that tree was
identified by a Saudi man.
I'll explain that.
But the atim tree is a wild olive tree.
There were actually a
little small little olives
on the ground that you could pick.
But insufficient flesh
to be of any use to eat.
So interesting though.
All right, so here's
how we discovered atim.
We after much exploration
and trial and error
and talking to people,
not finding any experts,
we finally went up to the mountain that
Hugh Nibley had talked about, that area.
And we found a road that then zig zagged
down the escarpment.
It'd literally been bulldozed out
of the side of the escarpment.
You can see from this picture
how steep the escarpment is.
And so we came onto this dirt road.
And as we came down the escarpment,
we saw some trees that
looked somewhat promising.
So I got up into those
trees and I was cutting
a piece of wood out when
a Toyota land cruiser
stopped and a nicely
dressed Saudi man got out
and asked us in Arabic what we were doing
and what I was looking for.
I don't speak Arabic.
I tried to explain that
we were looking for
(speaks foreign language)
bow and arrow wood.
He very quickly detected
that I really didn't speak
Arabic and so then he
switched into perfect English
and explained to me that
the tree that I was in
was the dahru tree and
that it was not any good.
That wood was not any
good for making bows,
that the wood would dry and
break and be very brittle.
So I asked him, I said,
well, are there any trees
here that are good for making bows?
And he said, atim.
And I asked him if there
were any atim trees around.
And he briefly looked around and said no,
but there's some further down the road.
And he offered to take us
down so we could see some.
So we followed him.
And he pointed to this tree here.
He said, that is atim, and
that's good for making bows.
Well, there was another
tree which is outside
of the picture that was
actually larger than this
that looked to me to be the same.
And I asked him if that was atim.
And he said no, it's not,
and that the wood would
become brittle and break.
Well, we thanked him.
We started to walk over towards this tree.
And as we all would do, we
turned to wave goodbye to him
and he was gone, simply gone.
There was a curve in the
road where we couldn't see
a portion of the road.
But there was no dust or anything.
And as we continued to wonder where he was
and to look, there's a road
there come back into view
that there was nobody on the road.
He was the only one we saw
on the road that entire day
except for one vehicle much further down
the escarpment that we
saw later in the day.
And of course, any vehicles
traveling on that dirt road
were picking up a fair amount of dust.
So it was interesting to
us that he knew the names
of the trees, he knew their qualities,
and when we turned to thank
him, he simply was not there.
So later I took a look at the tree that
I had wondered if it was atim.
And we found a piece of wood on it.
And it was dry and it simply snapped off.
It was obviously no good for making bows.
And by closer examination, we
noticed that the atim tree,
the leaves of the atim
tree, are green on the top
and silver underneath.
And this was the distinguishing difference
between this tree and the other one.
So we called that one false atim.
Now, we did find a piece
of wood on this tree
that had died that there
was no growth on it
and we tried to break it off.
It would not break off.
We had to cut it off the tree.
And it is from that wood
that I made this bow
in just less than four hours.
What I did is that piece of wood
looked very much like this one.
What I did was split it in half
and then use the two of the pieces
from the halves to make the bow.
Later on Richard Wellington
and George Potter
came out to our area
because I had provided them
the results of what I had discovered
with respect to atim wood.
They wanted to see atim.
And so they came out to
our area to look at it
and we arranged a rendezvous
in the area of Bisha
and we went out to the
edge of the escarpment.
We found there at the
edge of the escarpment,
and this was at a different
location than this one
in the previous slide, this here.
We did not go back to this location.
We were further north.
And then that further north location,
we found a lot of false atim.
And so I was a little
frustrated as we were trying
to find a decent atim tree for him.
They needed to camp that night.
I had to go back to Khamis Mushayt.
And so we were somewhat
perplexed as we tried
to find some real atim.
We ended up taking this
picture with false atim,
because they needed a picture.
So we took this one.
But as I indicated, it
was not an atim tree.
Sister Holland,
interestingly, prayed about
the situation as I was becoming
more and more frustrated.
I asked Matt Fortner to go
off and to find a campsite
that the guys could use, which he did.
And then when he came back, he got us and
took us to that location.
As we were driving towards that location,
sunset was upon us, so we
were starting to lose light.
I was desperately looking
at the trees around us
trying to find a real atim
and having no success.
But then we arrived at the location that
Matt had found for them to camp.
And it was underneath
the largest atim tree
I have ever seen.
So Sister Holland's approach worked.
Praying for help, the
Lord through Matt took him
to a place where there was an atim tree.
So this picture is taken with that tree.
And this piece of wood here was taken
off that specific tree.
And it's a good, solid piece of atim.
And I'll talk more about
the wood and its value
here in just a minute.
The point of that story is, of course,
that we really are no
different than Nephi.
We face our crises in life and we have to
work with them and handle them.
How do we do that?
Nephi, of course, had his
crises in the wilderness
when his steel bow broke
and their wooden bows
were no good and he needed
to make a bow of wood
to be able to provide food for the family.
So he used faith and righteous leadership
to overcome that problem.
We can do the same thing whenever we live
and whatever our challenges are.
So that's kind of the lesson
that we get from Nephi
and this wooden bow.
I'd like to go back for just a minute
and talk about atim.
It was later that I was
able to find an expert
in Arabic culture.
There was a gentleman by
the name of Dafur Benhamsen
who was setting up a
cultural village in the town
of Khamis Mushayt where we lived.
And so I went over to talk
to him and I took this
bow with him to find
out if he could tell me
whether or not this
was actually atim wood.
And he did an interesting thing.
He took a sliver of wood
off the bow and chewed it.
And he said, yes, this is atim.
He then told me what atim was used for.
Let me show you here.
If you look closely, you'll
see at the end of the
piece of wood there, the center is black.
What that is is it's oil.
So the wood is heavily
impregnated with oil.
What Dafur told me was
that atim was extremely
valuable in their culture.
Besides making bows, what
they did with the wood
is they cultivated it, but
they would harvest the wood
and then they would boil
it down and they would
extract the oils from the wood.
And as the oils came out of the separator,
they would separate into three layers.
The black bottom layer
was thick consistency,
kind of like tar, and it
was used for waterproofing.
Kind of like a paint.
The next layer was also fairly thick
and it was used as a perfume.
And then the layer on the top
was much thinner, of course,
and lighter in color and it
was used as a skin treatment
for any kind of skin ailment.
So it was very valuable in their culture.
He said that once modern
firearms came along
and bows weren't used
anymore, they were discarded.
But not only were they discarded,
the wood was put in the processor
to get the oils out of the wood.
Because those oils were valuable.
So that explains atim.
Now, I did find at one
point also close to Taif
a younger atim tree.
And I did harvest a couple
of pieces of wood off of it.
If you look closely at this end,
you can see a little bit of the black.
But this is a younger piece of wood
and it's not as prevalent.
I got into some trouble
when I got that one.
I didn't realize that tree
was on private property
so I got a real chewing out when I went up
into that tree and cut
that piece out of it.
But anyway, that's atim.
All right, so in conclusion,
we're going to do two things.
I want to ask a question, first of all,
about the Prophet Joseph Smith
and how some of the things
on the Arabian peninsula
transpired and how he possibly
could have known about that.
First of all, we learn
that after the broken bow
incident and from the way
they tell their story,
everything else, we all know that that
occurred in this area.
Well, certainly there
was wood there that could
have been used by Nephi to make a bow.
And that that wood was
available in the elevations
between 5,000 and 7,000 feet.
Some of those further
south would have been
down from the top of the escarpment.
So just where we discovered the atim wood.
But further north up
towards Taif and as you
got closer to Jeddah,
some of that atim wood
would have actually been
up on top of the escarpment
and would have been available to him.
Certainly from what I
was able to do with this,
he would have been able to make a bow
and be able to use it.
And we're going to demonstrate that
at the end of the video.
So the question, and after
that experience though,
the family continues to move
in the southeasterly direction.
And then we read in the
Book of Mormon that Ishmael,
there were two families that
were traveling together,
there was Lehi's family and
there was Ishmael's family.
Ishmael's family had most of the girls.
It appears that Lehi's
family had most of the boys.
So you see how that worked.
But Ishmael died.
And the Book of Mormon says that he died
in the place which was called Nahom.
And so that's interesting
because many of the
places they named themselves,
but this one was named Nahom.
And it was not until
approximately the mid 1990s
that it was the archeologists considered
that this location here was Nahom
from the inscriptions on
altars at that location.
And so how did Joseph
Smith know about that?
There was a German
cartographer who had identified
a place in this area and
named it similar to Nahom.
But that was in German
and to our best knowledge,
that was not available
to the young Prophet
Joseph Smith as he was
starting to translate
the Book of Mormon and
it wasn't translated
into English until much later.
So how did he know about Nahom?
Well, I don't think he did.
But then it says that
they then turned eastwards
and traveled nearly eastward
until they reached the sea.
And there they found an area
that was lush with vegetation.
Lots of fruits and honey.
And so they called it Bountiful.
And of course, there
they were able to make,
build a boat that they would then use
to sail to the Americas.
Well, it's interesting
that in this location,
there's two locations
here along the bottom
of the Arabian peninsula
where the monsoon rains
hit the peninsula, and
it's the only place where
you have that amount of
vegetation and lush growth.
And so that's interesting.
That would seem to match the story also.
And I'm not aware of
Joseph Smith being that
knowledgeable of geography to
have known about that either.
So these are interesting questions.
But suffice it to say that
as far as I am concerned,
this is another evidence
for the Book of Mormon.
I think it's highly
improbable that the Prophet
Joseph Smith knew some of these details
about the Arabian peninsula
when he translated
the Book of Mormon.
So it's my witness that
Joseph Smith was a prophet,
the Book of Mormon is true.
I certainly have found that to be true.
Be a great spiritual work.
And the life of Nephi is
very encouraging to folks.
The faith that he demonstrated,
the righteous leadership
that he demonstrated.
How he overcame the
problem of the broken bow
and was able to provide for his family.
So thank you very much for joining us
and now we'll go out and try the bow.
(soft music)
Well, good morning.
It's a beautiful morning
here and here we're going
to talk about the bow and
demonstrate its capabilities.
So this is the proposed bow that
Nephi could have made with the atim wood.
Now, you'll notice here
that the bow is made
in basically four pieces.
We have two pieces for each length.
And they are joined at the
middle with another piece
that is then bound.
Now, Nephi's tools would have consisted
pretty much just of a knife
and a few other rudimentary things.
And I literally took a piece
of atim just like this one
and with nothing but a knife I trimmed it,
split it in half, and
created the two lengths.
Then taking another piece of wood
and binding it with leather.
Now, leather, of course, would have been
available to Nephi.
The bowstring itself I'm just
using a piece of nylon string.
Nephi would have used
the intestinal leather
from an animal, most likely
what they would have used.
And so also another thing
that Nephi could have done
and which I did, because
the bow already had quite
a bit of curvature to it,
you can actually steam
this wood and straighten it out,
giving it therefore more tension.
This bow is now 20 years old.
So it has kind of reverted to its
normal shape at this point.
I could steam it and straighten it out
and make it more tense.
But I haven't done that.
So as you can see, the
atim wood there at the end,
you'll notice the dark coloration there
at the end of the wood.
That is oil that is impregnated
into the wood naturally.
You can see it in both ends.
Here's a close up look at the bow.
Actually had it signed by Noah Danby,
who was the actor who
played the role of Nephi
in the Book of Mormon movie.
But just rough hewn with a knife.
Quite simple.
Let me now demonstrate the bow's
capabilities with an arrow.
So a fair amount of force to drive that
arrow into the wood.
Would have taken, of course, some practice
and skill to be very accurate with it.
But certainly shows that
you can send a projectile
with a fair amount of force.
Fair amount of force there.
I can't just pull the
arrow out of that trunk.
I've got to manipulate it to pull it out.
So here you can see how deep
it penetrated into the wood.
And that shot was from about 30 feet.
(soft music)
