Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Are the names in the Book of Mormon real or are they fantastical? That is the question that many critics and scholars of the Book of Mormon have debated for many years now. So to get to the bottom of the names and the onomosticon of the Book of Mormon, we are joined by Matthew Bowen, who is a professor here on campus at BYU Hawaii. By the way, for those of you who are watching this on YouTube, watching the video version, you are not going crazy or having a stroke of any kind. This is in fact a different set from our normal Saints set because Neil and I, as you can tell from our matching Aloha shirts, we are here in Laie, Hawaii on the campus of BYU Hawaii to visit with Matt. So Matt, thanks for coming here with us. Thanks for coming onto the show and hopefully we can nerd out about Book of Mormon names, Book of Mormon Onomasticon and Play on Words and all that good stuff.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: I can't wait.
Aloha to both of you. I'm grateful to be here and aloha to everyone who's watching this. This. And we're going to get into some really good stuff, I think.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: So, Matt, before we begin our conversation on names and naming conventions in the Book of Mormon, would you like to introduce yourself? Tell us about yourself, your background, and you brought some books with you today. We want to highlight the tremendous scholarship that you've done over the years on this very interesting topic. So tell us about yourself, Matt.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, my name is Matt Bowen. You usually see if you follow my work at all, Matthew L. Bowen is usually how I
[00:01:29] Speaker C: publish.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Publish under.
I am originally from Orem, Utah. I grew up there.
Graduated from Orem High way back in the day when it was the old Orem High. Graduated from BYU Provo with a major in English and a minor in Classical Studies with Greek emphasis. Then came back to BYU and did some more work in baccalaureate work, post baccalaureate work in Egyptian languages and Semitic languages. I took everything they had before I headed out to Washington D.C.
where I earned a master's and a PhD. I met my wife Susie. I've been here at BYU Hawaii since 2012.
I started here as a visiting professor.
Came with only the expectation of being here a year and that was renewed a second year and then a third year. They still needed me. And then when Aaron Shade left for BYU in Provo, I applied for the open position. I was very, very fortunate and blessed to be able to slide into that. I was a known quantity at that point.
I finished my PhD dissertation and defended it in 2014 and just had. I've had a really good life.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Well, this is a very hard place to live. You know, you get these brutal winter snowstorms and, you know, really hard conditions to live in here in Laie.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Someone's got to fall on the sword
[00:03:10] Speaker A: and, hey, I very reluctantly accept this position in this tropical paradise to teach ancient scripture in the Book of Mormon.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: I think the course thing, though, the weather's very lovely, but the community here, the people that I've gotten to know and love here, the students here, that is why I love the job so much. That's why it's the dream. It's better than a dream job because of the people I get to be with and work with and teach and learn from.
[00:03:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we've had some opportunity to interact with some of the students here over the last couple days.
And last year, Jasmine and I were here on campus and had a chance to interact with some of the students, and they really are phenomenal.
What an opportunity to be able to be here in such a diverse community.
And for a lot of them, taking a class from someone like you is probably the first real solid introduction. They're getting to, like Book of Mormon scholarship and things like that. And so what an opportunity to be out here and to be such a resource for, first of all, to be in such a great community itself, but to be such a resource to that community.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, let's jump right into it if we shall. Gentlemen, we have a fun topic for today. We've got a couple, and we want to highlight your most recent publication. So we've got Name.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: This is the oldie but a goodie. It's only eight years old now, but seven years old.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Name as keyword. So this was a collection of your articles with like Interpreter and others and
[00:04:49] Speaker B: some new research which sums up a lot of the early work that I did. And I think some of the best work.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, so you got that one. And then what's the follow up, the other Interpreter volume you can show for us here?
[00:05:00] Speaker B: And then the.
About three years ago, here's. It's in effect a sequel, I guess,
[00:05:07] Speaker A: sort of Ancient Names in the Book of Morals.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: I mean, it's a little more focused on Book of Mormon names than the Name is Keyword. I did some other.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: Some biblical New Testament stuff.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And then finally your third one there. Let's see. Perspectives on Latter Day Saint names and naming names. I didn't believe this one's because we're outledge.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: I'm not the.
This is an edited volume and this was edited by Dallin D. Oaks, Paul Baltus and Ken Mitchell.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: Don't get that twisted. Dallin D. Oaks, Dallin H. Not Dallin H. But still very cool.
And your article in there striking while the irony is hot.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: A great ironic honey name by the
[00:05:51] Speaker C: way, excellent Hebrew onomastics and their function within the Book of Mormon text. And this is actually in a lot of ways this is a summary of a lot of the work that shows up in those other two books.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: I was actually asked to if I would be interested in contributing something on.
And John Gee Hit was already who's a real Egyptologist and unlike our Egyptologist over here, but so I think he handled a lot of the Egyptian matters.
So I focused on Hebrew names in the Book of Mormon.
You remember John Tavetnis had an article decades ago in the Ensign entitled something to the effect of if the Book of Mormon peoples were Hebrew speaking peoples, does the Book of Mormon reflect Hebrew language? Hebrew language. I slaughtered the title, but that was the effect.
So it was kind of in the spirit of that the Nephite on a Masticon is heavily Hebrew.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: So that then can we find evidence then of their knowing the meanings of these names?
Because the idea is if the Nephites are using Hebrew as a spoken language or a literary language, the idea is then shouldn't we expect to find traces
[00:07:37] Speaker A: of that in the text? Right.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: They're aware of the meanings of the names. And when I started looking at that, I was actually just shocked at the degree to which they do and the ways in which that understanding of the meaning of those names shows up in the biographies, autobiographies and the narrative parts
[00:08:03] Speaker C: of Book of Mormon to maybe break that down a little bit, basically?
And a lot of people have done. We don't want to make it seem like Matt Bowen is the only one who has done names research. A lot of people have done research on Book of Mormon names and found either Hebrew or Egyptian or sometimes other ancient Near Eastern meanings or etymologies or attestations of those names.
But what your research does that is a little unique, a little bit of it had been done before you came along, but is illustrates that the authors of the text seem to actually know the meanings of those names in their Hebrew or Egyptian context.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, they seem to play with that. Yeah. I wasn't the first to look at the issue, but I'm the one who thought, don't you realize the full potential of this vein of what we've got
[00:08:59] Speaker C: here and what's really cool about this last article that we're talking about striking while the irony is hot. This volume, I can't remember if we mentioned it already or not, but it was published by Routledge. So this is not like a little Latter Day Saint apologetic press or anything like that. Like this is a mainstream, mainstream scholarly venue that published this whole book on Latter Day Saint names and naming conventions and included this work by Matt on the Book of Mormon.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we are standing on the shoulders of giants in many ways. Hugh Nibley a generation ago in some of his pioneering work, pointed out potential Egyptian names. Nibley had some limited data at the time he was working with, but he kind of paved some ground. He and some others.
John Twentnes came along. Paul Hoskisson John Gee, right.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: So yeah, I've really tried to acknowledge when I've been standing on their shoulders and acknowledge the work that they've done.
We should talk about Alma and maybe in vein because Hugh Nibley was the first to point out that Alma might have the meaning of young man or a sign or he had a list of possibilities and Paul Hoskisson and Terry Zink had done follow up work. Terry Zink looked specifically at attestations of Alma at ibla and then Paul wrote that he thought that the name Alma might mean lad. But I was looking at. And this actually persuaded several other people that I was really onto some things with this. When we go to Mosiah 17:2 and the first introduction of the name Alma into the Book of Mormon text where he's introduced as one of the priests of King Noah, there was one among them whose name was Alma and he was a descendant of Nephi and he was a young man. Well, why are you mentioning that he's a young man?
But that lines. And I realize that's lining up perfectly with kind of what we narrative introductions that we see elsewhere. The autobiographical introductions of Nephi and 1 Nephi 11 which we may talk about.
We should talk about Enos 1 and 2 and something similar going on with Abish too.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah, Abish. It happens again and again. This pattern where a character is introduced and then there's some kind of a thematic link with the meaning of their name, with how they're introduced. So in the case of Alma, it's great, not just because. And we'll shout out Neil's article that he came up with recently showing that okay, it's great that we have a plausible attestation for Alma as an ancient male Semitic name. In fact, more than plausible, like basically
[00:12:06] Speaker B: verified I mean, it's beyond question.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's beyond just question. So we have attested Alma, which in and of itself is pretty cool. Oh, little feather in our cap. We have Alma. But it goes beyond that because the Book of Mormon doesn't just say here is Alma, which is an ancient male Semitic name. It's that it provides a play, a pun on the name of Alma in a way that like the author knows what the name means in a way that he can then play off of it in the narrative. Right, so it happens with Alma. Yeah, he being in a sine fight. He was a young man. Right. Like, like why not do you introduce that unless if it's significant. Right.
[00:12:43] Speaker C: So yeah, like Matt mentioned, one of the etymologies or probably the etymology for Alma is lad or young man. It's probably a short form, a hypokaristicon.
We're giving you a lot of big words for this one, but it's probably a hypokaristicon for something like young man of the Lord or young man of God, of El.
I liked El just because it's a little more alliterative with Alma.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Alma, yeah. Uh huh.
[00:13:12] Speaker C: But obviously we don't know what the divine name was on the end of that because we got it in a shortened form. So yeah, the introduction that Alma and he was a young man and I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody else is ever introduced as a young man in.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: I can't remember anyone in the Book of Mormon being introduced that way, like
[00:13:32] Speaker C: at least at their very first mention or whatever. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.
There's also kind of a second layer to it with Alma though. Yeah, there is, if I'm not mistaken.
Why don't you tell us a little
[00:13:44] Speaker B: bit about that, the Hebrew root.
So you got a conflation of a couple of roots. Right. The name Alma would be related to the Semitic.
The root began with the gutural gain.
Right.
Something, I mean, that's attested in the Ugaritic literature.
But you have this Hebrew root that sounds similar. And this is where we're not just playing on actual scientific etymologies for the names, but also the sounds. And the Hebrew verb alam, ayin lamed mem is one of the terms that's used to describe hiddenness. Hiding.
And what do we get Alma doing
[00:14:37] Speaker C: after he's kicked out of court?
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Kicked out and they're seeking his life?
[00:14:40] Speaker A: He goes and hides in the wilderness of Mormon.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Right, yeah, he's hiding.
And this is really emphasized heavily that everything he's Doing is in secret or hidden.
He's concealed while he's doing it.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Even before Abinadi conceals himself, he comes in disguise to preach to the people. So there's another link there.
[00:15:04] Speaker C: Yeah. So Alma in like, oh, well there
[00:15:07] Speaker A: you go, that one's for free, Matt.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: Yeah, real original ideas happening live on the show in Mosiah 18. He went about privately, that's verse one, taught them privately. That's verse three. He did hide himself. That's verse five. Like that is pretty heavy handed right there.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: And then a generation later, his son, so Alma the elder sets up his church. Right.
And does it in secret. But then his son, a generation later, Mormon's emphasizing that he was going about in secret to destroy the work of his father. Which I think is. I mean, you know, you start to get these intimations of what a great literary narrator Mormon was.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what's great about these examples of paranomasia in the Book of Mormon is not only is it kind of cool evidence for the Book of Mormon, which is how many people maybe appreciate them. Like, oh, it's so cool that we have this, these attested Semitic names or plausibly reconstructed Semitic or Egyptian names or whatever.
But just like bringing out the literary artistry of the Book of Mormon, bringing out the richness and the depth of this text. That to me has been an added benefit to your research and the work of others on naming conventions and the literary artistry in the Book of Mormon. Absolutely.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: And that's one of the things that looking into this stuff has really helped me with. I'm just like, Mormon was really good and he was describing things that really happened and his way of narrating them and helping us see not just the historical event, but the spiritual significance that he saw in that event. He was really good at it and we really need to take his work seriously.
And there are going to be people that never get off of the.
Off the rock of, well, did Joseph Smith write this? Right. They're never gonna go beyond that and never really explore what the beauties of the Book of Mormon text.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: They stop there. Right.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: I'm so far beyond just wanting to play in that shallow pool. Yeah, I want, I'm just, I'm swimming in. I want to swim in the other end.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Yeah, swim in the deep end. Right. Or I guess. Cause we're in Hawaii, swim in the deep ocean and not stay in the shallows, go out.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a better analogy. Just rather stay in the shallows, go
[00:17:50] Speaker A: off into the deep and Catch a wave, right?
[00:17:52] Speaker B: And explore. Because the Book of Mormon text is marvelous. And every once in a while I'm pained that we don't have that part that we call this 160 pages lost manuscript.
What beautiful links would we see in that early part of the the text to what we still have now? And that's not discounting the small plates. We're going to have a conference. We are a pro just.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: We are pro small plates conference.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: We are pro small place.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: I mean, I don't know if this will come out before or after the conference, but maybe we should just plug for everyone.
May 29th and 30th, the Interpreter Conference. The small plates conference. Matt is one of the directors behind or organizers behind the conference.
They must have lowered their standards because they accepted Stephen and I as presenters.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: Not so.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: But yeah, we're really excited about that conference on the small plates. We are definitely fans of the small plates. But right now we are talking about Mormon's artisty with artistry. Artistry, that's the word I'm looking for. We're talking about that.
Why don't we. You mentioned earlier the name Abish.
Why don't we pivot over to that one and talk about what Mormon's doing there?
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So it's rare, you know, painfully rare that women are mentioned by name in the Book of Mormon. We only have six examples.
Nephi, for some reason he never names
[00:19:31] Speaker A: his sisters or his mother.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: No, he felt some reticence for some reason to name women. He does name his mother. He mentions quoting.
[00:19:39] Speaker C: And that by the way, is a name that we have attested as a woman named Saria.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Saria.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: You seem to have written on something of that, as I recall.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Neil, what can you tell us about that?
[00:19:47] Speaker C: In the Elephantine documents, it's actually tested twice, once in an incomplete form. It's broken. And so we don't have the full name.
And that actually caused like Paul Hoskisson would say, ah, it's nice that we have it reconstructed, but. But we'd like to have the actual attestation.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Then Neil started digging.
Neil, what did you find?
[00:20:14] Speaker C: I found that we do. We do have an attestation on an ostracon that was just found in a storage room. It was just like a list of supplies being meted out or I don't know exactly what it was being documented there, but it had Saria daughter.
And then it broke and it didn't tell us her father's name or her mother's name, whatever was there in that case. But it has both the full Soraya and the full daughter. So we know it is that name and we know it's a female.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: But going back to Abish.
Yeah. Tell us about Abish. Because she shows up in. What is Alma, 19? She's in Amoni's court.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: We don't get a lot of women named in the Book of Mormon, probably because they're following Nephi's.
We would say kind of convention or convention.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: But Abish is both a woman and a slave.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: And slaves don't get names. Rarely don't get names, but she's both and she gets named.
So then you look at how she's.
This is another one of these narrative introductions. This is the introduction of her name into the text where she had been converted unto the Lord for many years on account of a remarkable vision of her father.
And Abi, that part of the name Abi means my father, then Ish means. And Paul Hoskinson, I think was right about this, means man. So my father is man, a man.
And so you have her introduced into the text connected with the remarkable vision of her father.
Now, this raises the question, is this a subjective genitive? Is this an objective genitive? Or is this.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
Whose vision was the vision?
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Father's vision that she was converted by.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Or did her father have a vision?
Or rather, did she have a vision of her father? Yeah.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Which I think would be cool because then we would have an attestation of a.
We get a lot of theophanies of people seeing God in Scripture, but this would be an example if it were.
If that's the grammar we're to understand.
An example of someone appearing post.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: A post.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Mortal post humously to a family member, and that being motivation of the.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Of her conversion.
[00:23:07] Speaker C: I know we're very much talking about ancient Near Eastern stuff right now, but a person having a vision of their father, of one of their ancestors would be a very Mesoamerican kind of experience. That if it's a vision of her father, like they often.
The Mesoamerican kings and queens, women could have these kinds of experiences too. In fact, I'm pretty sure we have a carving, a lintel at Yashilan of a queen doing a bloodletting ceremony and then having the vision serpent, and one of her ancestors is appearing to her.
A vision of one's father would be a very Mesoamerican kind of experience, a very Mesoamerican way to interpret this text.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: The other possibility, I think, which may have interesting connotations or Implications for Latter Day Saint theology is the vision of her father, her father being her divine father.
[00:24:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Being God.
And that's kind of direction. You kind of taken it, I think. Right.
There's different internal possibilities here.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah. I have two articles on this, and one of them, the one I did for the religious educator, I went more fully into the potential.
What are we understanding by the grammar here? What are our possibilities? And then other people have, I think, picked up on that thread a little bit and have written.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: So we've talked a lot about Hebrew examples or names that have Hebrew or Semitic origin. Maybe we could touch on a couple Egyptian examples. Right. But yeah, so scholars have noticed that there are Egyptian names both attested and plausibly reconstructed Egyptian names. And Jasmine did a video on this one time on the three Pa names that heal him in chapter one. So we have Pahoran, the chief judge at the time of Alma. And then Pahoran has three sons, Pahoran Jr. Pahran II, Pa' Anki and Pakumeni. And they come into the scene when there's a power struggle, there's a power vacuum from Pahoran dying. Who's gonna inherit the judgeship? Right. Become the new chief judge. And that kind of unravels into secret combinations and all this unpleasantness. But those three names, Pahoran, Paanki, Pakumeni, maybe. Let's start with just the first two. Pahoran, very plausibly attested at the Amarna. Amarna letters as Pacharu, meaning. Or in Egyptian, Pahori, meaning the Syrian. Right. The Canaanite, basically.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: The guy from Syria in the Bible, Phinehas Panachesi.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah. The Nubian, in that case.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Yeah, the Nubian.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: So there's.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: Or during Lehi's time, there's Pashur.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Which is. I don't know the etymology, but it's an Egyptian name.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: The son of Horus. Right?
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: Pashuri.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: So we've got one attested name, Pahoran, we've got Pa', Anki, that's a dead ringer for an attested Egyptian name.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: That's the easiest one to show the meaning of the name.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
And you have an article on it. It's the one who is alive. The living one.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: The living.
But they also. This word ankh does a lot of work. Like another word we'll talk about in a minute. But the word ankh can not only mean life. And this is an Egyptian word that a lot of people actually know. They just don't know they know it. You've probably seen the symbol the symbol of the ankh. But it means living or life as a verb or as a noun, life. So living life.
But it's also when you swore an oath, you would swear an oath by your life.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: By your life.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: And so it becomes the verb for swearing an oath.
And one of the things that Mormon really wants to show us is how these oath bound secret combinations that ultimately destroy Nephite society as they did Jaredite society. He wants us to kind of see how they start. And so part of his way of setting that up for us is to show that there were these individuals who supported paanki who swore life oaths by their everlasting maker.
[00:27:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: So the idea of swearing, you're swearing a lot.
And I don't know what particular verb Mormon's using on the plates, whether that's a Hebrew form, saba, or whether it's Egyptian.
But the idea really is swearing an
[00:27:31] Speaker A: oath by your life. And Pa Anki's the one that the secret combinations kind of prop up to take over the judgeship. And then there's the third son, Pakumeni, a little less certain. I think there's some different possibilities. Hugh Nibley, connected to Pachomios, that's the Greek form of the name.
Others like, I think John Twentnes and Paul Hoskinson have said maybe Pachemen, the blind one is a possibility. So a little less certain, but there's plausible. So we go from like attested to like dead ringer to very plausible all in one chapter for Egyptian names.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: And that's actually a pretty good place to be in.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Yeah, not too bad, right? For again, this thing that Joseph Smith is just making up in 1830, allegedly. So that's fun. You know, we'll send some links in the show notes on your work on that. But let's also, everybody loves him and knows him. Let's talk about Nephi and Nephi's Egyptian names. You want to tell us a little about that?
[00:28:26] Speaker B: And Stephen, you'd be prepared to speak on this, but the name Nephi, John Gee pointed out that this is the far and away the most likely etymology for the name is from Egyptian nefer. And he explains the shift or, you know, the third week, radical, how that's being pronounced. Nephi, Nephi, Nufi.
[00:28:51] Speaker C: Most people have probably heard of Nefertiti.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Nefertiti, the beautiful one.
[00:28:55] Speaker C: The beautiful one. That's a form of this name. I do think what's interesting, and you mentioned how that final syllable, the radical, kind of drops out of pronunciation. We do actually have Attestations of some of these Egyptian names that have the nefer element in them in Northwest Semitic names. And that's what Hebrew is, is Northwest Semitic that actually render it not with an nfr but with an np and then a yod, a Y. Right. And so they're indicating that by the time this is getting transferred into that Semitic language, that R has dropped off and it's being pronounced something like Nephi or Naofi or something like that.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And why is that significant, Matt? Because going back to our character, so and so is introduced and he's introduced with this thing. What do we get in first Nephi,
[00:29:44] Speaker B: the most read verse probably in the Book of Mormon, because of starts and false starts. Right. First Nephi, 1, 1 I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents.
Well, when I was taking Egyptian, I was reading Faulkner's Concise Dictionary and looking under the entries for nefer and some of the main ones. It wasn't just good. That's the main reading, fine, but goodly. I mean, that's meaning of fine quality. Right. Goodly.
Ay. Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, talks about how his father taught him
[00:30:33] Speaker A: in his language of the Egyptians.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: In the language of the Egyptians, he talks about having received a knowledge of the goodness of God.
And that's where he circles back to at the end of 2 Nephi. So his works are bookended by him talking about good,
[00:30:52] Speaker A: goodness, goodness, equality, goodness, both in the sort of moral quality, but also in the aesthetic quality it could be. Right, exactly. So goodly, comely, beautiful.
So that sort of bookends. We call that a narrative inclusio. So we get that in Nephi's record from First Nephi to end of Second Nephi. So goodness, goodliness. Right.
And even if we want to jump over into Mormon or. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: What sold me on that something was really going on here was actually something that was in Helaman, when Helaman's speaking to his sons, Lehi and Nephi, and he's explaining to them why he gave them the names that he gave them.
And he talks about, when you remember your names, you'll remember them and you'll remember how it was said and have written of them that they were good.
And that was what I remember. Sitting in the front row, one of my good friends, Deborah Hatch, was bearing her testimony in a testimony meeting. And it clicked for me.
I was like, that's it.
When you remember their names, you'll remember them how it was said and written of them, that they were good. And then the instructions, I want you to now go and do what is good, that it may be said and written of you as it's been said and written of them.
And then later on, this was a few more years down the line, I'm reading Helaman 8 where Mormon, this is his editorial genius. He shows that it becomes said and written of Nephi Lehi that they're good. And you remember when they want some of the judges, corrupt judges, Gadianton, persuasion, want to take Nephi and do away with him.
They say, let him leave him alone, he's a good man.
Right. So now this is actually fulfilling the wish and blessing of Helaman on his son. Mormon was really interested in showing where this kind of thing, prophecy and otherwise is fulfilled. He was really.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: That was important to him the whole. And thus we see that Mormon. Yeah. The other interesting fun thing about this good or goodliness refrain is Nefer, an Egyptian can also of course, like I said, take on the quality of fair. Beautiful. So when Mormon is lamenting oh ye fair ones, how is it you could have departed talking about the Nephites? If we follow this etymology, they literally could be the fair people. Oh ye fair ones, how could ye have stopped being so fair? In other words?
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Right. I think, you know, this is going back to the farms days. I think some people there were pretty interested when I pointed out the first Nephi 1 and Helaman 5 stuff.
But I think more were persuaded once they looked at the. I think this was.
Matt Roper was really convinced about what I was doing the O ye fair ones lament.
That makes sense that if Nephi meant good, goodly, fair or fine, and the Nephites sort of saw themselves
[00:34:24] Speaker C: as the
[00:34:24] Speaker B: good ones, as the embodied, as somehow reflecting the qualities of this ancestor.
And then I followed up on that further later in that Nephi's good inclusio paper on. I mean this is something Mormon circles back to in that horrible letter that he writes to, you know, his son Moroni.
Things are really going sideways for the Nephites morally. Not just sideways, they're.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it's pretty bad. Yeah.
[00:35:03] Speaker B: He says that they, you know, now they delight in everything save that which is good.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: And so there are these places and there are a lot more of them where, you know, fair and good in relation to Nephi or the Nephites is an important element in the narratology or biographies.
[00:35:24] Speaker C: It's basically, I mean we've talked about in Nephi first and second Nephi and we've talked about in Helaman and then in Mormon. It's basically a thread that runs through the entire text.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: And I think we would see it more of it. Don Bradley is your person to go to on what the content of those 16 pages might be. And that's a, that's a seminal work that is worth your money.
But I think we would see more of that. I would see. I think we would see more of this.
Yeah, these direct tie ins with the names and they would be pretty evident.
[00:36:06] Speaker C: Well, and then, I mean, some of it, you know, characters like, I mean, and you have talked about Benjamin. There is some wordplay there in his speech, but we probably don't have Mormon's original introduction of Benjamin. We don't have his original introduction of the first Mosiah.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:23] Speaker C: And so we don't know, like, what kinds of things might he have done with those names on those initial introductions?
[00:36:29] Speaker A: You know, it'd be awesome if we found the 116 pages and it's like. And Benjamin, who was a son of a righteous man or something. Right. You know, like.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: And we ought to talk about just for a minute, you know, the climax of King Benjamin's speech at the temple in Zarahemla, where he's in the climax of it, beginning in about verse seven of chapter five, where he talks about.
Starts to talk about, you're the.
Because of the covenant, you're the sons and daughters of Christ, for this day he hath spiritually begotten you, wherefore you're born of him and you've become his sons and daughters. Well, that's quoting that verse. There is quoting the second Psalm and the coronation liturgy of the second Psalm, where I think it's verse seven. And he says, thou art my son, this day I have begotten.
[00:37:37] Speaker C: I have begotten you. Yeah.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: So that's one of those places where a biblical text actually gives us a control and a check, something that we can check to see that this is what we think it might be. Right. So he's quoting that and then you get him just a couple verses later, I think verse nine talking. And if you've taken this name on you, the name of Messiah, name of Christ, and you're retaining it, then you're found on the right hand of God. It's pretty clear that in a speech that is about royal enthronement, the enthronement of Mosiah ii, and he's bringing in, he's democratizing this. It's not just saying Mosiah, my son you're being enthroned this day I've begotten thee.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: It's that everybody is enthroned through the
[00:38:38] Speaker B: covenant is becoming his sons and daughters at the right hand.
And they've got the name on them,
[00:38:48] Speaker C: the name of the Christ.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: And we shall say anointed one.
And the whole thing's about names. Right. And so you would think, which is
[00:38:58] Speaker C: normally when you're being enthroned as king, you are receiving a new name.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Yes, right.
[00:39:03] Speaker C: Yeah, but he gives the name to the whole people.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: And it's Christological.
The idea of the Son at the right hand. I mean, this is Psalm 110. Right.
Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies my footstool. That was one of the par excellence enthronement
[00:39:25] Speaker A: we should mention. We kind of buried the lead here. But the reason why this is fun is the name Benjamin in Hebrew means
[00:39:30] Speaker B: Matt, son of the right hand, son
[00:39:31] Speaker A: of the right hand. Right, so we have that. So let's cover one more quick example of where the meaning of a name is introduced with the introduction of the character, where the convention, the meaning and the convention come together.
And that is with our friend Enos, because much like Alma, when he's introduced, you know, Enos, the son of Jacob, and it has this interesting convention. So tell us a little bit about Enos, what his name means and where we see this perunumasia on his name when we're introduced to him.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: This one is really cool because not only is Enos following the autobiographical conventions of his uncle Nephi, who says, having been born of goodly parents, which we talked about, but now enos, in Enos 11 he says, I, Enos, knowing my father, that he was a just man.
Well, you have a couple of. You have about three main words in Hebrew most of the time that you use for man. Two of them are more closely related than the other one is Adam. That's where we get the name Adam. But then you have Ish, which is the most common one, and then Enosh, which is the.
Really more of a poetic form of usage. Yeah, but Enos is the Hebrew word Enosh.
But so he introduces himself saying, I, Enos, knowing my father, that he's a just man. Right.
And you can see him following the.
The pattern of Nephi's self introduction. So that's a good hint that this is deliberate. But it becomes clearer when you see what he does in verse two.
And I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before God. Well, you go to the Biblical narrative. That's Genesis 30. And the wrestle Wayavec there wrestled Jacob. Yeah, that's Jacob. What's Enos father's name?
[00:41:37] Speaker C: Jacob.
[00:41:38] Speaker A: Yaakov. Jacob.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: But there wrestled a man with him. That's Ish. And so that would be a play on synonyms. But it becomes clearer later in that text when it talks about the naming of the place Peniel, the face of God, what he says. And that's probably what Enos is saying. The wrestle that he had before God.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: Before God. In the presence of God.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: To the face of. In the presence of.
[00:42:04] Speaker C: Well, I was gonna say the Hebrew expression for the face of God is often translated as just before God or. Yeah, in the presence of.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: And then it says he'd wrestled with God or gods. It's Elohim. And with Manashim, that's the plural build off of a nosh. That's the more common plural.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Yishim is rare.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: Is rare.
[00:42:30] Speaker A: Yep.
That's Hebrew 101. For people who've done Hebrew. Right. You learn these weird plural forms of these words. Yeah.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: But it's clear that he's using the Jacob at Peniel story to tell his own wrestle. And I've written some other things on this, and there's some other cool things with that.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: That's great.
There's so many layers to this, both the naming convention, the paranesia, the puns, and the literary allusions to biblical material. Right. When your dad's name is Jacob, of course you're going to play on one of the most famous stories of Jacob wrestling God. Right. Or a man. He encountered a man at the fort of double Ish. Yeah. Who's this serious dream?
[00:43:14] Speaker B: This is the thing with the name Abish as well.
[00:43:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: My father is a man.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's multiple layers of sort of literary artistry happening here.
[00:43:24] Speaker C: It's just so interesting because so many of these introductions, when you're growing up and you're reading the Book of Mormon, or maybe you're reading it for the first time as an adult or whatever your context may be, so many of these introductions, you're just kind of like, that's a weird way to introduce a person. I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents. Well, no one else is said to be born of goodly parents in the whole text. Right.
I Enos, knowing my father was a just man. Why are you mentioning that?
You know, we talked about Mormon introducing Alma and mentioning that he's a young man. Again, that's not how anyone else is introduced in the Text. Why? Why these specific introductions with these specific people and you dive into the names and suddenly there it is. Ah, now we understand why. And you understand Hebrew and ancient Near Eastern literary conventions and you understand there's so much more to mine out of this text, so much more meaning to extract from the text.
And dare I say there's more theology even.
Sometimes I feel like we set up this idea that you do this.
There's this ancient historicity, scholarship and then there's theology scholarship. And they're not really the same thing. But no, there is theology that's coming out of understanding what Mormon's doing with these names 100%.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: And so we should talk about before we end this, we've talked about personal
[00:44:48] Speaker C: names, but there's a couple places that are kind of interesting.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: One of them is most English speaking church members will say Jershon, but a better pronunciation would be Yershon, but that is very clearly derived. That's another one that's not attested
[00:45:10] Speaker A: in
[00:45:10] Speaker B: the biblical corpus, but it's pretty easy to analyze as a Hebrew name that fits standard Hebrew, not only naming conventions, but place naming.
Yer shown from Hebrew Yarash to inherit, to possess.
Well, that comes into the text at the end of those Lamanite conversion narratives in Alma 17 through 27, in chapter 27, right, where the Nephites are setting aside land to bring in and resettle the Lamanite converts.
And it's repeatedly emphasized in the chapter, this land Yer shown we're going to give to them as an inheritance.
And the on the ending of the Yarash element on is an appellative that's used in not just personal but place names that emphasizes the quality of the first part of the name, place of inheritance.
So I think this is the one that Jack Welch, he found that just.
And I think probably Bob Smith too, but they found it unavoidable. I mean this was so clearly.
[00:46:32] Speaker C: Yeah, this is one of those slam dunks.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: But it doesn't just happen in chapter 27, it happens again in chapter 35 when we have more resettlement.
We've got Zoramite reconverts that Alma and his compatriots are bringing and they're settling them with the Lamanites converted Lamanites in Yershon.
And then that wordplay occurs there too.
And then another one we could talk about.
Zarahemla is very. And not just Latter Day Saints scholars have looked at this, but other, I guess restoration adjacent scholars have looked at it.
Zerah is easily analyzed as referring to seed Meaning offspring. Yeah, seed or offspring and Hemla of compassion or mercy.
And there are a couple of places, again in the narratology, not just Alma 27, when they have compassion, the people in Zarahemla have compassion on the converted Lamanites.
But then there's later a reciprocal compassion that the converted Lamanites are able to show the Nephites that ultimately leads to their sending their sons into battle on their behalf. In Alma 53, again moved with compassion.
When you see. And those are the only two places you have that expression used in that way. And it's the same context or similar context that are kind of inverted.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: And he recognizes that like a good narrator, good editor would.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, this has been awesome, Matt. We really appreciate you sharing your insights with us. I mean, we could do a whole 2, 3, 4 part episode on this. Go through every single one.
[00:48:47] Speaker C: Keep talking.
[00:48:47] Speaker A: We keep doing. But you know, we have to wrap it up here. So let's just give one more quick shout out. So the names of your stuff to check out of your books, we'll throw them up here. Ancient. Well, we'll start with the first one name as keyword. So this was the first one that Matt did some years ago. And then the follow up, Ancient Names in the Book of Mormon. These two both are available from the Interpreter Foundation. And then if you want to get really into some fun stuff and spring a little bit more money for him, I suppose. Right. Because Routledge books tend to be pricey. But this one here, perspectives on Latter Day Saint Names and Naming.
[00:49:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not the.
I'm just one author here.
[00:49:25] Speaker A: Yeah, he's got a piece in there.
[00:49:27] Speaker C: I mean, we're here with Matt, but there is actually a lot of the other contributions in that volume are pretty interesting, I think, and worth talking about.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: And then if you want.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Moses.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: Yeah, Pearl, Great price. Genesis. Heavy stuff. We, Aaron and I, when we did this volume, we're very conscious of names and all that good stuff.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: Perfect. So there you have it. Thank you for joining us today on Informed Saints. And remember, you can study deeply and believe boldly. And we'll see you next time.
[00:50:06] Speaker B: Sam.
