Where'd He Get Those Names?

Growing up with the name Alma had its challenges. Unless you're LDS, you probably recognize that Alma is primarily a woman's name. Colin Powell's wife is named Alma as are lots of Hispanic females. But, since one of the the Book of Mormon's most prominent prophets is named Alma, so am I.

If you have more than a passing familiarity with anti-Mormon propaganda, you've undoubtedly seen criticism of Joseph Smith for giving a man such an obviously female name in his book of scripture. Even as late as 1987, Walter Martin wrote, "In Hebrew Alma means a betrothed virgin maiden-hardly a fitting name for a man."

In 1961, in the Judean desert, letters and deeds were found in a cave dated to 134 A.D. One of the parties to the deed was a man named Alma--identified as the son of Yehudah. A photograph of the deed appears in Yigael Yadin, Bar Kokhba (New York: Random House, 1971), page 176. From an exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls at San Diego's Museum of Natural History, this note appears with a description of the deed: "Latter-day Saints find this scroll of particular interest, because it specifies "Alma son of Judah" as one of the people involved in the agreement on the fourth line and at the bottom of the document. This text contains the oldest known occurrence of the name "Alma" outside of the Book of Mormon." Lucky guess?

It reminds me of a comment I read on the B-Hebrew listserve back in 2000. People were discussing "theophoric" names in the scriptures--that is, names containing an element of one of the names of God, such as "el" and "yah." One non-LDS scholar from the University of Michigan wrote this about the name Sarah from the book of Genesis:

"As for Sarah, I would guess that the theophoric is missing, as every name in the ANE had a theophoric. It is probably Sariah, YHWH, or Yah, rules."

It is interesting to find the name "Sariah" in the first paragraph of the Book of Mormon. Kind of makes you go, "hmmmmm."