A Closer Look at Transliterations in Divine Translations

The Book of Mormon contains many words left untranslated by Joseph Smith, such as cureloms, cumoms, senine, and ziff. While some might wonder why these words are left untranslated, a closer examination of the kinds of words that are simply transliterated as well as the frequency at which these phenomena occur provide evidence that Joseph Smith actually had an ancient record that he was translating into English. In this paper, I examine why some words have been transliterated in historical translations of the Bible or other ancient texts and compare these explanations to the Book of Mormon. In the end, I show that the Book of Mormon consistently transliterates the same types of words typically left untranslated in other works in ways that would have been unknown to Joseph Smith.