In Mosiah 9:9, we read:
And we began to till the ground, yea, even with all manner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of barley, 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.
The terms "sheum" and "neas" are authentic ancient words. For a discussion, see:
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:
There is no question that Sheum is evidence for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon as a translation of an ancient document.
The onomasticon of the Book of Mormon is one of the strongest evidences for its authenticity and Sheum is merely a tip of a very large iceberg. For a recent book on such, see:
Matthew L. Bowen, Name as Key-Word: Collected Essays on Onomastic Wordplay and the Temple in Mormon Scripture (Salt Lake City: The Interpreter Foundation and Eborn Books, 2018)
