Friday, June 23, 2017

Book of Mormon Names No Fiction Writer Would Choose


The following is an article I just encountered:

Sharon Black and Brad Wilcox, "188 Unexplainable Names: Book of Mormon Names No Fiction Writer Would Choose," in Religious Educator 12, no. 2 (2011): 119–133.

The following is the conclusion of this very interesting article:

The 337 names included by Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon (188 of which had never been heard or written before) seem to violate all the rules for choosing fictional names:
1. Joseph did not make conscious and deliberate choices. He dictated his manuscript to scribes without even pausing when he introduced extremely complex names.
2. Joseph did not choose names that would be easily accessible to readers. On the contrary, the names are almost all quite long and complex; his scribes reported that he could not pronounce most of them himself but had to spell them. Many of them are quite similar and easily confused: sounds are repeated with very little variation in surrounding sounds, and some names seem to be close variants of others.
3. Joseph did not choose names to fit characters. Some names are given to both heroes and villains, and no real correspondence has been noted between sound and personality. The Book of Mormon is set in times and cultures with languages about which Joseph Smith knew nothing. He knew little about its antecedent Hebrew and Egyptian languages or cultures at the time of translation, although he did study them during later periods of his life.
4. Joseph did not use different resources. Local artifacts of Joseph Smith’s lifetime and lifestyle had no connection to the civilization of the Book of Mormon or its culture or languages. Ancient and foreign name lists were not available.
5. Joseph did not choose names because of personal associations. The only Book of Mormon names with any connection to Joseph Smith’s family or associates are Joseph and Samuel—such common names in ancient Hebrew cultures and so prominent in the Bible that claims of personal connections seem unfounded.
Does Joseph Smith’s disregard for naming conventions indicate he was a careless craftsman, or does it indicate he was a careful translator of a record full of authentic names which were not his inventions? For Joseph Smith to have invented the 188 unique names found in the Book of Mormon seems highly unlikely. Coming up with that many names would have been overwhelming—especially considering Joseph’s limited formal education. Even if someone were to suggest that inventing that number of names in a severely limited time frame might have been possible, their consistency with language patterns yet to be discovered removes it far from the realm of probability.
If the Book of Mormon is a clever work of fiction, it is reasonable to expect that Joseph Smith chose character names in the way that clever fiction writers do. However, this study demonstrates that he did not.