In Mosiah 9:9, we read the following:
And we began to till the ground, yea, even with all manner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of barely, and with neas, and with sheum, and with seeds of all manner of fruits; and we did begin to multiply and prosper in the land.
One rather ignorant critic of the Book of Mormon wrote the following:
No one then or now has a clue what they ["neas" and "sheum"] actually mean. Apologists claim 'sheum' was an old Assyrian word relating to barely (which they [the Jaredites] didn't have), grain, or other things such as pine-nuts and it was hardly a word Smith would have 'known' in his day as the relevant language was not then interpreted. But, why would God translate 'reformed Egyptian' into ancient Assyrian for Smith to see in his haste and then have written down, when no one would ever understand it? It is utter apologetic nonsense, just as is Smith's use of the word which he just made up. (Jim Whitefield, The Mormon Delusion, volume 2: The Secret Truth Withheld from 13 Million Mormons [Lulu Books], 239)
Sadly, this poor reasoning is part-and-parcel of Whitefield’s 5-volume The Mormon Delusion.
Firstly, his incredulity about the transliteration of sheum and neas shows great ignorance about the nature of translation literature. It is rather common for words for which there is no English equivalent to be transliterated, so the appearance of neas and sheum is not an issue.
With respect to neas, John Tvedtnes (a scholar of Semitic languages and cultures) wrote the following:
[W]e may compare it with the Late Babylonian term nešu, the name of an unidentified plant. Or the ending may be related to the Sumerian word aš, again denoting either wheat or cereal grains in general. The initial element may be from Sumerian ni which is known in the word ni-gig, denoting something of grain. Sumerian and Akkadian were languages spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, where the tower of Babel was built. It may be that the words sheum and neas were used by the Jaredites, who came from the region, and that they were later borrowed by the Nephites. (John A. Tvedtnes, The Most Correct Book: Insights from a Book of Mormon Scholar [Salt Lake City: Cornerstone Books], 346)
With respect to sheum, it is a genuine Akkadian word, and serves as a “bulls-eye” for Book of Mormon authenticity. Matthew P. Roper wrote the following in a blog post addressing the etymology of “sheum”:
The Book of Mormon mentions sheum as one of several crops cultivated by the people of Zeniff during the second century B.C. (Mosiah 9:9). While this term is not found in the Bible, it is an attested Akkadian cereal name dating to the third millennium B.C. (Jean Bottero, Elena Cassin and Jean Vercoutter, eds., The Near East: The Early Civilizations. New York: Delacorte Press, 1967, 63; Robert F. Smith, "Some `Neologisms' from the Mormon Canon." In Conference on the Language of the Mormons. Provo: Brigham Young University Lanaguage Research Center, 1973, 66).
Use of this ancient Akkadian term in the Book of Mormon is significant, since the Jaredite colony may have come from Mesopotamia at approximately the same time (Ether 1:33). The term would have been unknown to the translator of the Book of Mormon, however, since Akkadian could not be read until decades after the Book of Mormon was published (Ernst Doblhofer, Voices in Stone: The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings. New York: Collier Books, 1971, 121-148; Cyrus H. Gordon, Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Decipherment. New York: Dorset Press, 1987, 55-85).
The reference to sheum in an agricultural context in the Book of Mormon constitutes a significant piece of evidence supporting the antiquity of the Book of Mormon. "It is a well known fact," writes Professor Hildegard Lewy, a specialist in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian [Akkadian] languages, "that the name of plants and particularly of [grains] are applied in various languages and dialects to different species." Lewy notes that this often poses a challenge in interpreting references to Assyrian cereals in ancient near Eastern documents. When doing so, "the meaning of these Old Assyrian terms must be inferred from the Old Assyrian texts alone without regard to their signification in sources from Babylonia and other regions adjacent to Assyria" (Hildegard Lewy, "Some old Assyrian cereal names," Journal of the American Oriental Society 76/4 October--December 1956: 201).
Other Assyriologists have observed that the ancient Assyrian term sheum was used at various times to refer to barley, grains generally, and even pine nuts (The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Edited by John A. Brinkman, et. al. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1992, 17, part 2: 345-55). Since sheum in the Book of Mormon account is mentioned in addition to barley and wheat, the term was likely used by Book of Mormon peoples to refer to some other new world crop of which there are a variety of possible candidates.
Christopher Smith, an informed critic of the LDS Church, offered the following critique of sheum being evidence for Book of Mormon historicity:
[T]he Akkadian word for barley is techinically she. The -um ending is a nominative case marker. In the accusative case the noun would be sheam and in the genitive sheim. (The final m in all three cases, called "mimation," was dropped from the language by the time of Lehi. This is what Sorenson [the LDS scholar Smith is responding to] means when he says "Later, it would have been pronounced and spelled differently.") Although I am no expert in Akkadian, I have read that when an Akkadian noun is the object of a preposition (assheum is in Mosiah 9:9) it takes the genitive case (see here). What we find in the Book of Mormon is the nominative case. Of course, when a word is borrowed from another language, its case endings will often conform to the borrowing language rather than following the rules of the parent language. It is certainly possible that "Reformed Egyptian" rarified the nominative ending and treated it as part of the noun stem. But at the very least, this issue of case endings complicates matters; we are not dealing with a simple one-to-one correspondence as Sorenson's text might suggest. (source)
The critic is assuming the word has to be transliterated in the way it is being used in the sentence, but the nominative case is also the lexical form, so he is making a huge assumption here, and one that is not necessary. Consider the following translation of John 1:1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Theos . . .
The Greek underlying "theos" is actually τον θεον, the accusative form of θεος. But in transliterations in translation literature (which the Book of Mormon purports to be), it would be more usual to use the lexical/nominative form of a word.
Discussing Sheum, John L. Sorenson wrote:
One plant that is named among the foods of the Zeniffites (Mosiah 9:9, second century BC) is “sheum.” The text gives no clue as to what the botanical identification of this plant might be; however, a precise match for the name is found in Akkadian (i.e., ancient Babylonian). There, she’u or she’um signifies “barley” or “grain” (compare Sumerian she, “barley”; in Old Assyrian the word meant “wheat”), “the most popular ancient Mesopotamian cereal name” . . . The area where [the Jaredites] most likely obtained their seeds was northern Mesopotamia, which is where the name she’um was at home in languages of the third millennium BC. In the Jaredites’ American land the name might, of course, have been transferred to some other species during the more than two millennia until the Nephite historian mentioned the word. Mention of a crop by the patently Mesopotamian name sheum thus could be explained in the book’s own terms by reference to the Jaredites. In Mesoamerica the name might be linked to ixim (pronounced eeseem), the most common term for maize in Mayan languages. (John L. Sorenson, Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient American Book [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2013], 304-5, clarification in square bracket added)
Recently, Arthur Chris Eccel has tried to refute Sorenson and other Latter-day Saint scholars when he wrote the following:
Sorenson’s presentation is misleading . . . his reference to an Akkadian word for ‘barley’ or ‘grain’, še’u, which he relates to a name of a food in the BOM, sheum (Mosiah 9:9). Although he gives great elaboration, he neglects to mention that in the BOM sheum occurs in a list that also includes barley, and so is clearly not barley. (Arthur Chris Eccel, Mormon Genesis [Hilo, Hawaii: GP Touchstone, 2018], 529)
If anyone is guilty of being misleading, it is Eccel, not Sorenson, especially as the former holds a M.A. in Semitic languages. Had he bothered to read Sorenson carefully, he would have read Sorenson stating that the Book of Mormon differentiates between “barley” and “sheum” and “land the name might, of course, have been transferred to some other species during the more than two millennia until the Nephite historian mentioned the word.” Instead of interacting with the fact that the Book of Mormon’s reference to Sheum as a name for a grain is a “hit” for its authenticity, Eccel engages in disingenuous “arguments” and dodges.
The following comes from p. 345 of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. 17: Š, part II, eds. John A. Brinkman, Miguel Civil, Ignace J. Geleb, A. Leo Oppenheim, and Erica Reiner (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1992), listing še’u as a grain in Akkadian:
As it stands, as with neas, sheum is strong evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon. As Tvedtnes (ibid., 347) concludes with respect to these words:
[W]e have precedents in the languages spoken in the homelands of the Book of Mormon peoples that confirm their identification.
Their very existence is strong evidence that the Book of Mormon is a translation. If it had been written by Joseph Smith, such untranslated words, especially ones that correlate closely with ancient Old Wold languages wholly unknown to Joseph Smith, would almost certainly have been absent.
For another “bulls-eye,” see my post, “Zelph on the Shelf vs. Jershon.”