Why Did the Nephites Call their Divine Compass “Liahona”?

The Know

Many readers of the Book of Mormon are fascinated by the description of a mysterious “round ball of curious workmanship” made of “fine brass” with two spindles (1 Nephi 16:10). Lehi discovered this curious object outside his tent, and his family soon learned that it would lead them in the direction the Lord wanted them to go, “according to the faith and diligence and heed which [they] did give unto” it (1 Nephi 16:28). Nephi refers to this object only as a ball or compass.1 Later, however, Alma explained that “our fathers [Lehi and Nephi] called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it” (Alma 37:38).

The nature of this device and the meaning of the name Liahona have been the subjects of considerable study, and many different theories have been proposed.2 Scholars generally agree that the initial l- in the name is either a Hebrew or Egyptian preposition meaning “to” or “of” and that the -iah(o) is the shortened form of the divine name Jehovah (Yahweh) that commonly appears in Hebrew names such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, Zedekiah, Jehoahaz, and Jehoiakim.3 Thus, liah(o) appears to most literally mean “to/of Jehovah” but might also be translated as “to/of the Lord” or “to/of God.”

Scholars have accounted for the final -(o)na in a variety of ways. Early on, George Reynolds and Janne M. Sjodahl proposed “to/of God is light,” based on On or Annu being the Egyptian name of the city Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. Then, Hugh Nibley suggested “to God is our commanding” or “God is our guide” based on the Egyptian root ḥon, meaning “lead, guide, take command.”4

More recently, scholars have interpreted the name Liahona by looking closely at how it is described and defined in the Book of Mormon itself. Jonathan Curci noted that in ancient Hebrew writings, “the words surrounding the name often reveal the elements of which it is formed.”5 In this light, Curci explained, “The Book of Mormon writers used the three words compass, ball, and director to refer to the same object,” thus reasoning that scholars should “analyze the basic elements of the name Liahona by drawing on the interpretations that the Book of Mormon provides.”6

Curci then suggested that the final element is “the [Hebrew] adverb ʿona [which] means direction or motion to a certain place.”7 It is often translated as “whither” in the sense of which direction to travel, such as in the question “Whither wilt thou go?” (Genesis 16:8). He thus proposed that the name Liahona means either “the direction (or director) of the Lord” or “to the Lord is the whither.”8

Matthew Bowen supplemented Curci’s proposal by suggesting that the final -na in Liahona could also be interpreted as an Egyptian expression that, when paired with an Egyptian preposition rendered as either an r or an l, means “to see” or “to look.” Thus, Bowen reasons that for writers such as Lehi and Nephi and their descendants who were bilingual in both Hebrew and Egyptian, “it is possible to both hear and see an inquiry, ‘To Yahweh, whither?’ but perhaps more particularly an imperative, ‘To Yahweh, look!’—that is, ‘Look to the Lord!’ or ‘Look to God!’ The latter imperative phrase actually works as a response to the former question.”9

Remarkably, elements from both “to the Lord is the whither” and “Look to the Lord” are found in the surrounding contexts in which the Liahona is mentioned in both 1 Nephi and Alma 37. Shortly before the Liahona was discovered, Nephi chided his brothers because “they did not look unto the Lord as they ought” (1 Nephi 15:3). Then when it first appeared, Lehi “beheld upon the ground a round ball” that “pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness” (1 Nephi 16:10).

And again, after his bow of fine steel broke and Nephi made a bow and arrow from wood, he asked Lehi, “Whither shall I go to obtain food?” Lehi “did inquire of the Lord,” and in response “the voice of the Lord said unto him: Look upon the ball” (1 Nephi 16:23–26). When the compass stopped working on their sea voyage, his brothers “knew not whither they should steer the ship,” but Nephi “did look unto my God” (1 Nephi 18:13, 16). Once Nephi was set free, he “took the compass, and it did work whither [he] desired it” (1 Nephi 18:21). Thanks to these impactful accounts about the Lord’s deliverance through the ball or compass, it is no surprise that generations later Nephite writers remembered and found meaning in the unusual name Liahona.

As Alma bequeathed the Liahona into the care of his son Helaman, he explicitly used the sacred relic as a type for looking to and following Christ:

And now I say, is there not a type in this thing? For just as surely as this director did bring our fathers, by following its course, to the promised land, shall the words of Christ, if we follow their course, carry us beyond this vale of sorrow into a far better land of promise. … [For] so was it with our fathers … that if they would look they might live; even so it is with us. The way is prepared, and if we will look we may live forever. And now, my son, … see that ye look to God and live. (Alma 37:45–47)

Alma then turns to give his son Shiblon a father’s blessing and commands him “to look to the Lord your God” (Alma 38:2). Thus, to the very end, “Alma invokes the lesson of the Liahona without obscuring the entire typology.”10

To the interpretations of Curci and Bowen, Loren Spendlove has recently added that the Hebrew particle na is often used like an exclamation point to add emphasis or exhortation to an expression. Spendlove thus suggests that l-iaho-na could be interpreted as simply as “to Jehovah!” or “toward Jehovah!”—giving a sense of emphasis and urgency to the imperative to look to and follow the Lord.11

The Why

Knowing all these possible meanings of the name Liahona serves to point readers clearly in the direction they should go to find the way to true the eternal destination that they seek—namely, returning to the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and of God the Father. As the ancient meanings of the syllables in the name Liahona evoke, Jehovah is the light of the world to which one should look and to whom one can go for help and comfort. As Jonathan Curci has put it, the Liahona “indicated the direction of the Lord. When the Lehites wondered whither they should go, they turned to YHWH, the Lord, through the Liahona. … In this way, the Liahona not only indicated the geographical direction whither they should go in the wilderness but also directed the Lehites to the Lord.”12

Moreover, Elder David A. Bednar has explained, “The director was a physical instrument that served as an outward indicator of their inner spiritual standing before God. It worked according to the principles of faith and diligence.”13 The requirement for faith and diligence in order for the Liahona to function properly indicates that, as Matthew Bowen explained, “to truly look to God and live must ultimately mean continually having faith, repenting, receiving all the saving ordinances, [and] living one’s life in such a way as to eventually be worthy to see God.” As such, “the Liahona—the device and its name—could constitute a symbol of the whole doctrine of Christ.”14

The Liahona, therefore, was a type and shadow of Christ six hundred years before His eventual coming. Thus, Bowen concludes, “Lehi and his family … were not to merely to look or gaze at the Liahona any more than the Israelites were to merely gaze at the brazen serpent: both the Liahona and the serpent represented the Lord, the Savior Jesus Christ himself. It was to him the Lehites were to look. It is to Jehovah that we are still to look today.”15 The Lord Himself eventually taught the people at Bountiful after His resurrection, “Look unto me, and endure to the end, and ye shall live; for unto him that endureth to the end will I give eternal life” (3 Nephi 15:9).

• 1. 1 Nephi 16:10, 16, 26–30; 1 Nephi 18:12, 21; 2 Nephi 5:12.
• 2. For theories on the nature of the Liahona, see Robert L. Bunker, “The Design of the Liahona and the Purpose of the Second Spindle,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3, no. 2 (1994): 1–11; Alan Miner, The Liahona: Miracles by Small Means (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2013); Timothy Gervais and John L. Joyce, “‘By Small Means’: Rethinking the Liahona,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 30 (2018): 207–232; Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2019), 148–149; Loren Spendlove, “And the One Pointed the Way: Issues of Interpretation and Translation Involving the Liahona,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 45 (2021): 1–36.
• 3. See George Reynolds and Janne M. Sjodahl, Commentary on the Book of Mormon, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1959), 4:178–179; Hugh W. Nibley, “The Liahona’s Cousins,” Improvement Era, February 1961, 110; Hugh Nibley, Since Cumorah, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies [FARMS], 1988), 479–480n80; Jonathan Curci, “Liahona: ‘The Direction of the Lord’: An Etymological Explanation,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 16, no. 2 (2007): 63–64; Matthew L. Bowen, “‘Look to the Lord!’ The Meaning of Liahona and the Doctrine of Christ in Alma 37–38,” in Give Ear to My Words: Text and Context of Alma 36–42, ed. Kerry M. Hull, Nicholas J. Frederick, and Hank R. Smith (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019), 277–279; Spendlove, “One Pointed the Way,” 25–27.
• 4. Reynolds and Sjodahl, Commentary on the Book of Mormon, 4:178–179; Nibley, “Liahona’s Cousins,” 110; Nibley, Since Cumorah, 479–480n80.
• 5. Curci, “Liahona,” 65.
• 6. Curci, “Liahona,” 62. Alma defines Liahona as “compass,” but it is unclear exactly what that signifies or whether that is a literal definition of the term or an interpretive gloss on Alma’s part. Certainly, the Liahona does in some way assist travelers in determining the proper direction to follow and thus was sometimes called a director (in Mosiah 1:16; Alma 37:38, 45), but it was not necessarily a magnetic compass—nothing in the text indicates that either of the two pointers was fixed on magnetic north. Perhaps, as some scholars suggest, “the plates might have used a word for some sort of pathfinder, in which case, the Prophet Joseph Smith could have rendered the world loosely as ‘compass’ in the sense of instrument to help find the way.” See Stephen D. Ricks, Paul Y. Hoskisson, Robert F. Smith, and John Gee, Dictionary of Proper Names and Foreign Words in the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Eborn Books; Orem, UT: Interpreter Foundation, 2022), 205n26. There is some evidence that the Olmec had a kind of magnetic compass, in which case there might have been a word for “compass” in indigenous American languages known to Alma, which he could have glossed as a way of defining the name Liahona. See Robert F. Smith, “Lodestone and the Liahona,” in Reexploring the Book of Mormon: A Decade of New Research, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1992), 44–46. On the other hand, the meaning of the word compass used to be broader, including meanings such “skillful or crafty device” and “anything circular in shape,” both of which could apply to this “round ball of curious workmanship.” 1 Nephi 16:10; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “compass (n.1), https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3609707611. Therefore, the term compass could be potentially related to one (or both) of the other descriptors used for the Liahona: ball or director. Note that after the story of the broken bow—in which the Liahona stops properly pointing the way, has mysterious writings appear on it, but then works properly for Nephi when he is ready to go hunt—Laman and Lemuel accuse Nephi of “cunning arts,” something that could be related to the compass as a “crafty device.” 1 Nephi 16:38.
• 7. Curci, “Liahona,” 65.
• 8. Curci, “Liahona,” 60–61.
• 9. Bowen, “Look to the Lord,” 277–279.
• 10. Bowen, “Look to the Lord,” 288.
• 11. Spendlove, “One Pointed the Way,” 25–28.
• 12. Curci, “Liahona,” 65–66; parenthetical references to Hebrew words silently omitted.
• 13. David A. Bednar, “That We May Always Have His Spirit to Be with Us,” April 2006 general conference, online at churchofjesuschrist.org.
• 14. Bowen, “Look to the Lord,” 276, 288. Throughout his paper, Bowen illustrates that the accounts about the Liahona manifest the full doctrine of Christ pattern described in 2 Nephi 31.
• 15. Bowen, “Look to the Lord,” 291; parenthetical reference to Hebrew words silently omitted.