New Light: Further Evidence of a Semitic Alma

Terrence L. Szink

Last issue's "What's in a name?" included a photograph of one of the Bar Kokhba letters in which the name ’lm’ (or ’lmh as it is also spelled) appears. Paul Hoskisson explained that this means that the Book of Mormon name Alma is in fact a good Hebrew name and not necessarily from a Latin source, as many critics of the Book of Mormon have maintained. Yet some may argue that since the Bar Kokhba materials are late (dating to around AD 130), they cannot be used to elucidate Nephite culture which was separated from Israel with Lehi's departure from Jerusalem in 600 BC However, to the evidence from the Bar Kokhba letters we may now add additional occurrences of the proper name Alma from another ancient Semitic source. This time, the texts precede Lehi's departure from Jerusalem.

In 1975 Paolo Mathiae, an Italian archaeologist, uncovered a huge archive of clay tablets at a site in northwestern Syria called Tell Mardikh. The tablets were written in cuneiform, a writing system that predates the alphabet. The archive is mostly administrative in nature and deals with the palace economy of a large city-state that has been identified as the ancient city of Ebla. Ebla flourished in the second half of the third millennium BC and had economic and cultural ties with Mesopotamia and Palestine.

The language recorded on the tablets is Semitic. It has many grammatical features that link it to the Semitic language Akkadian, forms of which were used throughout Mesopotamia. It also has a fair amount of vocabulary from Western Semitic, a branch of the Semitic language family tree which also includes Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

Among the texts of Ebla are six separate documents that contain the personal name al₆-ma written eight times (on two of the tablets the name occurs twice). Originally there was some uncertainty about the reading of the cuneiform sign al₆, but this has been resolved and al₆ is now an accepted reading at Ebla. It is not certain whether the transactions recorded at Ebla refer to just one person named Alma, or to several. In one document Alma is identified as a merchant from Mari, a city situated on the river Euphrates. Most likely the name al₆-ma at Ebla is used to identify a male, there being few female merchants at Ebla.

No etymological explanation of al₆-ma has yet been attempted; however in the transcriptions of the texts in which it occurs, the name is written in italics, indicating that the editors of the texts understand the name to be Semitic.

The occurrences of ’lm’ and ’lmh in the Bar Kokhba letters, which chronologically follow Lehi's departure, and al₆-ma at Ebla, which chronologically precede it, work together to provide fairly strong evidence that the personal name Alma could have been part of the cultural baggage that Lehi and his family took with them from Israel to the New World. Certainly the critics? claim that Joseph Smith borrowed Alma from a Latin-based source is no longer the only possible explanation.