Book of Mormon Evidence: Ancient Transliteration Patterns

The Book of Mormon contains many words that seem to have been left untranslated by Joseph Smith, such as senine, cureloms, and neas. These types of words—which use English letters to convey the approximate sound or spelling of foreign terms in their original language—are known as “transliterations.” Although some of the Book of Mormon’s transliterations are accompanied by an explanatory gloss, most don’t have any type of clear explanation or definition.

The use of transliterations is not merely a modern phenomenon. Many ancient texts feature them as well. Even in antiquity, Bible translators would occasionally choose to simply transliterate a given word. In some cases, this was done because the translator simply wasn’t familiar with the term, such as when encountering the name of an unfamiliar plant, animal, or cultural item. In other situations, there wasn’t a word in the target language to adequately convey it. This often occurred when a term was rare, technical, or unique to a specific culture or region of the world.

In a recent study, Spencer Kraus has analyzed the type and frequency of untranslated words in the Book of Mormon. He then compared the results with tendencies and patterns of transliteration found in a variety of other ancient texts. This evidence article summarizes his findings.

Frequency of Untranslated Words

As mentioned above, transliterated words often reflect rare or otherwise unusual words in a source text. These are especially common with what are known as hapax legomena or dis legomena (words that occur only once or twice in a given text, respectively).1 As Kraus notes, “Hapax legomena are by nature difficult to translate, and most biblical scholars will turn to other instances in texts of the same language and cognate words in other languages to better understand the intended meaning of the words in question.”2

Emmanuel Tov has noted that many of the transliterated words of the Septuagint (an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) typically fit into one of four categories: (1) proper nouns, (2) technical words, (3) common nouns mistaken as proper nouns, or (4) “words probably unknown to the translator, which thus remained untranslated. All these are either hapax legomena or very rare.”3

As in the Septuagint, quite a few of the transliterations in the Book of Mormon show up infrequently in the text, with a good number being either hapax legomena or dis legomena. The frequency of these words can be seen in the following chart:

To be sure, any assessment of the Book of Mormon’s language is limited by the fact that we don’t have access to its ancient source text. Thus, we can’t be fully certain whether a hapax legomena or a dis legomena in the modern English text was indeed so in the ancient version. Nevertheless, the rarity of these terms in the Book of Mormon, combined with the fact that they are transliterations (rather than translations), as well as the fact that they are often technical or culturally specific items, strongly suggests we are looking at rare terms in the original source texts as well.

Technical Terms

One typical category of transliterations in the Septuagint identified by Tov involves technical terms. They were often left untranslated “because no adequate renderings could be found by the translators.”4 Some of the words included in this category are various weights or measures found in the Old Testament, such as ēpāh, hîn, ḥōmer, kōr, and ʿōmer.5 Rather than always translating them into measurements that would be familiar to a Greek-speaking audience, Kraus notes that “the presence of these transliterations shows that there was often a reticence to provide one-to-one translations for technical terms. This is yet evident in later Bible translations, which typically (but not always) leave these words untranslated, including modern translations” such as the King James Version.6

Other technical terms hold nuances that are difficult to capture in translation. This can be seen in Greek words like logos or kosmos that are prevalent in the New Testament. Since they can’t be easily conveyed by a single term in English, some translators have opted to simply transliterate these terms. For a similar reason, the translator of a Buddhist text called the Lotus Sutra chose to leave the word dharma untranslated.7

Many of the transliterations in the Book of Mormon also appear to hold a technical or specialized meaning in their original cultural context. For example, much like the transliterated weights and measures that are found in the Bible, the Book of Mormon lists senine, seon, shum, limnah, senum, amnor, ezrom, onti, shiblon, shiblum, leah, and antion in a lengthy system of weights and measures in Alma 11:3–19.8 Each of these words is also rare, with senine being the only word to appear elsewhere in the Nephite record outside of this list.

It is also possible that some terms in the Book of Mormon are similar to those Tov identified as common nouns mistaken as proper nouns.9 Kraus notes that the word ziff “is only mentioned twice in the Book of Mormon and only in the context of King Noah’s taxes (see Mosiah 11:3, 8). It likely referred to a type of metal, perhaps an alloy, named for its lustrous properties that was unknown to Joseph Smith.”10 Similarly, the word Rameumptom is only found once in the text with a gloss provided by Mormon. Regarding the presence of this transliteration and its gloss, Kraus observes:

This word is recorded as the name of a place of worship only located once in the text (Alma 31:21). Furthermore, it is introduced specifically as a Zoramite word, and Mormon provides an interpretive gloss, something usually done to indicate it is a word foreign to the author (i.e. Mormon). Furthermore, we know that the Zoramites continued to exist following Alma₂’s mission, and their wars with the Nephites, and even spread from their city of Antionum to other Lamanite-controlled lands (see, for example, Alma 43:4–5, Alma 48:4–6, 3 Nephi 1:29). It is likely that, when they did so, they built other “holy stands” or Rameumptoms, just as the Amalekites had their synagogues built for their own worship services (see Alma 21:4). As readers of a Nephite history, however, we are only introduced to this word during the moment that Zoramite religious practices are pertinent to Mormon’s record as he contrasts true and false worship.11

Other technical terms in the Book of Mormon include names of specialized ritual objects, such as Liahona or Gazelem. Kraus observes, “These words are likely left untranslated because they are actually proper names of specific items, much like the name Urim and Thummim is generally left untranslated in modern Bibles.”12

Rare Animal and Plant Names

A third consideration involves rare animal and plant names in a given text. As the biblical scholar Sagit Butbul observes, “Hapax legomena in general, and the nomenclature of fauna and flora in particular, are notoriously hard to identify. This alone suffices to account for the difficulties encountered by translators with these words.”13 Butbul notes this problem is only worsened when the original language is lost and “referents of many nouns, such as the nomenclature of fauna, [are] forgotten.”14

Because of this challenge, the translators of the Old Testament into the Syriac Peshitta left a list of bird names in Leviticus 11 transliterated to prevent misidentifying unclean animals.15 Similarly, an animal simply referred to as a koy is mentioned in the Mishnah (a collection of ancient Jewish oral traditions) that is “impossible to translate because no clear identity can be given for this animal” based on its ambiguous description.16 Similarly, Gene Reeves left the name of a mythical creature, the asura, transliterated in his translation of the Lotus Sutra.17

In the Book of Mormon, words that fit this category include neas, sheum, cureloms, cumoms, and deseret. In the case of neas and sheum, they “are clearly types of plants and most likely types of grain, listed alongside corn, wheat, and barley (Mosiah 9:9).”18 Because convincing Akkadian etymologies exist for these plant names, some scholars have suggested they were “originally Jaredite words adopted by the Mulekites and then later by the Nephites. If this is the case, it is therefore possible that Mormon (separated by enough time and space from the Zeniffite usage of this term) was unfamiliar with these terms and opted to leave them as transliterated plant names.”19 Therefore, these words may reflect an ancient transliteration by a Nephite author that was then preserved again as a transliteration when Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon into English.

The word deseret provides another example. It only occurs once in the Book of Mormon, accompanied by a gloss explaining that it, “by interpretation, is a honey bee” (Ether 2:3). Scholars such as Hugh Nibley have noted this word bears a striking resemblance to the Egyptian dšr.t, “the name given to [Lower] Egypt, whose symbol was the bee.”20 As such, this word “would have likely been introduced by Moroni₂ or Mosiah₂ as they translated the Jaredite text … It would be possible that the closest approximation of Reformed Egyptian could be the sign for dšr.t, with a gloss provided as a contextual clue to help readers understand this choice.”21

Similarly, the words cureloms and cumoms are Jaredite animals that are only mentioned in Ether 9:19 as being “useful unto man.” While many have speculated what these animals may have been, Stephen Ricks, Paul Hoskisson, Robert F. Smith, and John Gee have noted that “no etymology may be proposed” for either due to the fact that we can’t be certain what language (or languages) the Jaredites spoke.22 This is especially true because “there are no convincing cognate words that we can confidently connect with these terms from a long-lost Jaredite language.”23 Rather, Kraus summarizes what appears to have occurred:

Joseph Smith came across an animal name that was unfamiliar to him and he did not have an English word to adequately capture the intended meanings of either. Instead of attempting to guess what the animal may have been, Joseph instead opted to transliterate the word, which is what one would expect regarding translated texts. Even if Moroni₂ or Mosiah₂ were the first to transliterate these unfamiliar Jaredite words, the principle is still the same, as he likewise dealt with a text originally written in a foreign language and would have potentially met the same challenges that Joseph Smith would face centuries later.24

Conclusion 

When looking at the entire list of transliterated terms identified by Kraus, it is notable that none occur more than eight times, and even the most frequent word, senine, occurs only in three different contexts. As such, they reflect rare words not unlike those left untranslated in other texts. They also correlate well with the various types of words that biblical scholars have identified as difficult to translate, including technical terms, common nouns mistaken as proper nouns, and rare animal and plant names. Concerning this collection of data, Kraus concludes,

The Book of Mormon reflects details typical of a translated text in which the translator did his best to share the original intent of the text in his native language but was left with some words that of necessity could not be adequately translated into English. … The Book of Mormon consistently provides the same types of transliterations expected of a translation of an ancient text. This conclusion is only strengthened when the words are themselves considered as remnants of a lost language, as most (with the Jaredite words being the exception) have clear links to Old World languages that would have been unknown to Joseph Smith. If Joseph Smith had left these untranslated words in as a red herring to make his claims to have translated an ancient record more believable, it would be inconceivable to get so many details consistently right.25

Furthermore, with the exception of cureloms and cumoms, there are plausible or convincing etymologies for each of these words in Old World languages that would have been known to the peoples of the Book of Mormon.26 As observed by John Tvedtnes, “If [the Book of Mormon] had been written by Joseph Smith, such untranslated words, especially ones that correlate closely with ancient Old World languages wholly unknown to Joseph Smith, would almost certainly have been absent.”27

All in all, when considering the types of untranslated words in the Book of Mormon, as well as their limited frequencies, the text comes across convincingly as a compilation of ancient documents that have gone through various stages of transmission and translation. The Book of Mormon’s many transliterated terms thus provide a unique window into its ancient origins.