In the Book of Mormon, two unique words are also interpreted, “Rabbanah” and “Rameumptom”:
And
one of the king's servants said unto him, Rabbanah, which is, being
interpreted, powerful or great king, considering their kings to be
powerful; and thus he said unto him: Rabbanah, the king desireth thee to stay.
(Alma 18:13)
Now
the place was called by them Rameumptom, which, being interpreted, is the
holy stand. (Alma 31:21)
In the recent publication, Dictionary
of Proper Names and Foreign Words in the Book of Mormon, we find the
following proposed etymologies of these words:
RABBANAH derives from the Semitic verb root √rbb,
meaning “to be great, mighty, powerful.” High Nibley, basing his observation on
a comment by Marcus Jastrow in Jastrow’s dictionary of the Talmud, Midrash, and
Targumim, notes that the word is Aramaic (Nibley, Teachings of the Book of
Mormon, 2:387, citing Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, 1444).
The presence of the second a in RABBANAH, rather than an o
would have been the case if the word had been Hebrew and had undergone the
so-called “Canaanite shift” (cf. the Hebrew rabbônî, interpreted as “which
is to say, master” in John 20:16) (Rabbônî and RABBANAH are from
the same Semitic root, but rabbôn means “my master” and RABBANAH
has an emphatic ending that could allow for it to be vocative, “O Great One”),
suggests an Aramaicizing tendency at least in the name-giving patterns, or an
Aramaic borrowing, in the Nephite-Lamanite dialects. The ah at the end
of RABBANAH may be a terminal ‘aleph making the word an emphatic
form that could also be used as an Aramaic-Aramaicizing vocative in forms of
address.
In
addition to the Aramaic and Hebrew origins of RABBANAH, East Semitic,
and particularly Babylonian, also contains examples of the root rbb in
analogical constructions. The word rab-banûtu, “position of rab banî,”
is the abstract form of rab banî, “meaning an administrator of temple
property,” and its less frequently attested variant rabbānû, means “mayor,
headman.” (“Rabbanah,” in Dictionary of Proper Names and Foreign Words in
the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks, Paul Y. Hoskisson, Robert F.
Smith, and John Gee [Orem, Utah: Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn
Books, 2022], 279-80)
Alternatively,
if the word is Hebrew in derivation, one may note the common Semitic ending -ān
used as an abstract marker, and compare Hebrew words such as šulḥān, “table,”
and, with the Canaanite shift, pittārôn, “interpretation (of a dream).”
Again, if the word is Hebrew in origin, the final ah of RABBANAH
may be from the Semitic feminine ending used as an abstract. Kautzsch and
Cowley, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, 393, §122q. (Ibid., 280 n. 5)
The
Book of Mormon noun RAMEUMPTOM is most likely related to the Hebrew verb
rām, “to be high, to be exalted” and rāmāh, “eminence, high
place,” the same root that appears in the biblical geographic name Ramah,
“hill” (cf. the Book of Mormon place-name Ramah). RAMEUMPTOM could be a
noun chain with ramê as a masculine construct plural, meaning “the
heights, elevations of.” The element -UMPTOM would then be the second
element in the construct, possibly from the Hebrew noun ‘ōmed, “place,
position, location,” most likely with a pronominal suffix, analogous to the
third person m.pl. pronominal suffix -ām, having the meaning “their.”
The latter ending s probably to be preferred because of the parallel form in
Arabic, ‘umdān, “standing.” Giving these two Hebrew words, rām
and ‘ōmed, thus rāme ‘omdām/’umdān (The original sound of
the Hebrew ‘ōmed, based on a proto-Sinaitic qutl form, with the
third m.pl. would likely have been ‘umdām; see Lipiński, Semitic
Languages, 210-15, cf. 294-95), the meaning of RAMEUPTOM would then
be “the heights/elevations of (their) position, place of standing,” a
definition that accords well with the interpretation that the Book of Mormon
writers provides.
A
question arises concerning the consonant cluster mpt, which would likely
not have occurred in the Semitic languages but may be explained as an
inner-English development. The m sound followed by the d sound
frequently results in the devoicing of the d to the t sound;
thus, -umdam becomes -umtam. Further, the m sound followed
by a consonant with no intervening vowel (in this case, mt) will
frequently generated a p sound—in this case, umt would become umpt
(by way of comparison, the English noun “redemption” comes from the noun
elements “redeem-“ and “-tion,” thus “redemption,” with a p sound
generated between the mt cluster). (“Rameumptom,” in Dictionary of
Proper Names and Foreign Words in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks,
Paul Y. Hoskisson, Robert F. Smith, and John Gee [Orem, Utah: Interpreter
Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2022], 284-85)
