A general note on Book of Mormon names

The Book of Mormon contains a large amount of names: More than 300 altogether, including both personal and geographical names. Many Book of Mormon readers would consider them largely irrelevant, because they are used to a culture where names have little meaning beyond an identifier and they make no difference to the message of the Book of Mormon. I only partially agree because we have seen several examples of names and their meaning being used in wordplays to enhance or add depth to a certain message. Beyond that, I am interested in the original culture and language of the Book of Mormon and think that the names can teach us a great deal. This is because most of the names seem to be transliterated rather than translated.

What conclusions can we draw from the names in general? Based on my somewhat limited knowledge, I will attempt to answer that question.

There is a lot of Hebrew influence

This is obvious since there are many Book of Mormon names that we find in the Bible: Jacob, Benjamin, Samuel, Noah, etc. but also more obscure ones that are found in the Old Testament but few know about, like Lemuel, Lehi and Sidon. This is all expected. We know that the brass plates that Lehi and his family brought with them to preserve their language contained much of the Old Testament that we have today, including the names. We also know that they contained writings that we don't have today in the Old Testament. Perhaps the Nephites got some authentic, Hebrew, yet non-Biblical names from those parts. In addition it can be expected that a people developing their own history and culture over a span of 1000 years will develop their own names.

All this is matching the observations. Names like Alma, Sariah, Mathoni, Abish and Mulek have clear Hebrew origin and meaning, even though they are not found in the Bible. In some cases they are even attested authentic, ancient Hebrew names in non-Biblical sources.

There is some Egyptian influence

Some Book of Mormon names sound more Egyptian than Hebrew. Pahoran and his sons, Paanchi and Pacumeni, for instance, all have Egyptian sounding names. Nephi might be derived from the Hebrew, "Nephil" (meaning large/giant) but many scholars relate it to the Egyptian root for "good" or "fair". Knowing that the brass plates were written in the "language of the Egyptians" (see Mosiah 1:4) and the Book of Mormon writers also used it, there was definitely some Egyptian influence giving a perfectly reasonable explanation for these observations.

Uncertain etymologies

We have defined three categories of names so far:

• Names found in the Old Testament
• Names with clear Hebrew origin but not found in the Old Testament
• Names with apparent/possible Egyptian origin

A final category would be names with unknown origin. It is not always straight-forward to separate the categories. For instance, some names can be similar to known Hebrew words, but since we only have the English spelling/transliteration, it is impossible to know exactly how they were pronounced and spelled in the Nephite language. This makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact underlying Hebrew root or know if there is underlying Hebrew at all. The Book of Mormon onomasticon has a lot of interesting suggestions but much of it remains speculative. 

Some may think this is a sign of weakness in the argument of ancient Hebrew origins of the Book of Mormon. But having many names with uncertain meaning or origin is expected, too. It would be strange had it not been the case. The Biblical names are usually known because we can see how they are spelled in Hebrew. Despite that, there are still names in the Bible, whose origin and meaning we are unsure about. Perhaps even more importantly, it is unknown how the spoken and written Nephite language developed over the years, so it cannot be used as basis to evaluate Book of Mormon names. But it should not come as a surprise if at least some of the names have little or no direct relation to Hebrew because of changes/differences in the Nephite language. Mormon is an example of such a name where there are few obvious etymological candidates. 

There is some KJV influence in the transliteration

I will explain what I mean by this subheading. Those who transliterate names from a completely different language with different sounds and alphabet, rarely have one obvious choice of how to do that. Let's take the name, Jacob, as an example. Yaakov is a more phonetic spelling, true to the original Hebrew, but it's not a very English one. So we spell it differently and end up pronouncing it slightly differently as well. This has often been the choice of Bible translators (I mention KJV in particular because I haven't checked all other versions, but my impression is that other standard English translations mostly use the same spelling). In the Book of Mormon, we also see the tendency to Anglicize the transliteration a bit. Jacob (Nephi's brother) is spelled just like Isaac's son in the English KJV. Given the general tendency to follow the KJV linguistics in the English translation of the Book of Mormon, this is hardly a surprise either.

A case for ancient origins

Still, there are some clear markers that these names are not coming from Joseph Smith's mind, in addition to all the categories I have already mentioned that make perfect sense when viewing the Book of Mormon as ancient scripture originating from Hebrew (and some Egyptian). One interesting fact is that among all the 300+ Book of Mormon names, none start with X, Q, Y, F, V or W. 

The fact that no names start with X does not raise any eyebrows. There is no such sound in Hebrew and this is also rare in English. No names starting with Q and Y has to do with the transliteration and anglicisation. The example I just used, Jacob, might as well have started with 'Y' considering how it is pronounced in Hebrew. But there is a tendency to use 'J' instead in the KJV and we see the same in the Book of Mormon. Jehovah instead of Yahweh is another example. As for the Q, this sound at the beginning of names is always represented by C or K in the English scriptures.

The last three letters, F, V, and W are interesting, though: These are all common letters in English, not only at the beginning of names, but common in the 1800s and several even in Joseph Smith's immediate circles. Fred, Frank, Frederick, Fannie, William, Will, Walter, Vilate, Victor, Victoria, etc. Statistically speaking, there should be names starting with any of these letters in the Book of Mormon if this came from Joseph Smith. But in Hebrew, it's different. V and W correspond to the Hebrew letter, 'waw' that can be used both as a vowel (with 'o' or 'u' sound) and a consonant ('w' sound in Biblical Hebrew). But this is found only very rarely at the beginning of a word. There are no Old Testament names starting with 'W'. There are a handful starting with 'V' but these are usually foreign names (Persian queen, Vashti, for instance).

The same goes for F. There are no Old Testament names starting with that letter. This is because it corresponds to the Hebrew letter, pey/fey. This sounds like a ph, but only after a vowel. So it can never be at the beginning of the word with that sound. This letter at the beginning of a word will always be pronounced as P.

All in all, based on Book of Mormon names, it seems that the Nephites kept much of their Hebrew heritage. It is also clear to me, both based on the thoughts shared in this post and previous discussions on specific names and Hebrew wordplays on this blog, that this could not have been made up by a young farmer in upstate New York in the 1800s.