{"id":74739,"date":"2019-06-05T13:42:22","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T19:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=74739"},"modified":"2019-06-05T13:42:22","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T19:42:22","slug":"wordplay-in-book-of-mormon-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/06\/wordplay-in-book-of-mormon-names.html","title":{"rendered":"Wordplay in Book of Mormon Names"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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\"Bowen<\/a>
The newest book from the Interpreter Foundation
(from the Interpreter Foundation website)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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I published the column below in the Deseret News<\/em> on 23 August 2018:<\/p>\n

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Understanding the meaning of important biblical names is often essential to fully grasping the Bible\u2019s intended message. That is, such names can serve as pivotal \u201ckey-words.\u201d Understanding them is surely not necessary for salvation, but perceiving the wordplays that frequently occur in the Old Testament (and sometimes in the New) can considerably enhance our appreciation of what\u2019s going on.<\/span><\/p>\n

With regard to\u00a01 Samuel 25<\/a>, for example, it\u2019s interesting to know that the name of the rich but surly and ungracious Nabal \u2014 \u201cchurlish and evil,\u201d the King James translation calls him \u2014 means something like \u201cfool.\u201d Even his wife Abigail disapproves of him, telling David (in\u00a0verse 25<\/a>) that, \u201cas his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him.\u201d By the chapter\u2019s end, the Lord has smitten Nabal dead, and Abigail has become David\u2019s wife.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Based on the assumption that the\u00a0Book of Mormon<\/a>\u00a0is an ancient record rooted in the same cultural tradition out of which the Hebrew Bible emerged, Matthew Bowen, who holds a doctorate in biblical studies from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., has devoted the skills that he developed in his graduate studies to searching for similar wordplays in its pages. (A few of the chapters in the book primarily relate to the Bible.) And, as reported now in the latest book from the Interpreter Foundation \u2014\u00a0Matthew L. Bowen, \u201cName as Key-Word: Collected Essays on Onomastic Wordplay and the Temple in Mormon Scripture\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 he has found them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cName as Key-Word\u201d is a potentially very important book. (Full disclosure: I am the chairman and president of the Interpreter Foundation.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMatthew Bowen nourishes both our intellects and our souls,\u201d writes Jeffrey M. Bradshaw in his substantial foreword to the book, referring to Bowen\u2019s \u201cimpressive mastery of the languages of biblical sources\u201d and \u201chis gift for reading Hebrew and Egyptian idioms back into the Book of Mormon through the dark and sometimes refractory mirror of its English translation.\u201d \u201cName as Key-Word,\u201d Bradshaw says, is \u201cboth a tour de force and a delight.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Parry, a Hebrew professor at the Brigham Young University campus in Provo, describes Bowen as \u201ca world-class scholar\u201d who, in this book, has given us \u201c16 chapters of pure gold.\u201d \u201cMatt Bowen,\u201d declares BYU Egyptologist John Gee, \u201cis currently producing some of the most innovative, exciting, and best scholarship on the Book of Mormon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What, exactly, is he doing?<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Nabal\u2019s, names in ancient Israel and its environs typically carried meanings. (Most of our own names \u2014 e.g., surnames like \u201cCarpenter,\u201d \u201cFarmer,\u201d \u201cSmith,\u201d \u201cAnderson,\u201d \u201cCooper\u201d and \u201cFord\u201d \u2014 do as well, although we\u2019re seldom conscious of them anymore.) Bowen, who is an associate professor in religious education at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, looks at important Book of Mormon names and, teasing out their likely Hebrew or Egyptian root meanings, illustrates how those meanings show up in the stories or messages associated with the named persons. In a number of cases, a careful reading of the English translation suggests that the relevant portions of the original-language text likely contained puns or wordplays on the specific names in question.<\/span><\/p>\n

To briefly summarize just one example, Bowen considers the name \u201cNephi,\u201d for which various etymologies have been suggested over the years. Gee has argued that \u201cNephi\u201d derives from the ancient Egyptian \u201cnfr,\u201d meaning \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbeautiful\u201d \u2014 think of the famously beautiful Queen Nefertiti \u2014 and Bowen\u2019s analysis strongly supports that argument, pointing to, among other things, Nephi\u2019s declaration that he was \u201cborn of goodly parents\u201d and to the repeated variations on the theme of \u201cgoodness\u201d that recur throughout Nephi\u2019s writings in the Book of Mormon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben McGuire is surely correct in remarking that Bowen\u2019s work \u201cis not so much about proving things about the text as it is about coming to understand it.\u201d But to demonstrate the Book of Mormon\u2019s richness, depth and complexity is, itself, an implicit apologetic argument: If Bowen is correct, he has substantially raised the bar for anybody wanting to argue that the Book of Mormon was composed in English, and by an unthinking, uneducated, frontier yokel farmboy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bowen\u2019s own conclusion about what he has found, in his own words, is that it demonstrates the Book of Mormon to be \u201ca highly literate work and a skillfully woven narrative filled with literary devices and intertextual allusion. This bespeaks the work of skilled ancient authors and Mormon\u2019s deft editorial work rather than a 19th century author with limited literary attainments.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This hard-cover book is available directly from\u00a0Eborn Books<\/a>\u00a0for $22.99. It is also available on\u00a0Amazon\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0AmazonSmile\u00a0<\/a>for $24.95. (Prices may vary depending on vendor.)<\/p>\n

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Posted from Jerusalem, Israel<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0 I published the column below in the Deseret News on 23 August 2018: \u00a0 Understanding the meaning of important biblical names is often essential to fully grasping the Bible\u2019s intended message. That is, such names can serve as pivotal \u201ckey-words.\u201d Understanding them is surely not necessary for salvation, but perceiving the wordplays that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWordplay in Book of Mormon Names<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    I published the column below in the Deseret News on 23 August 2018:   Understanding the meaning of important biblical names is often\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/06\/wordplay-in-book-of-mormon-names.html\" \/>\n<meta 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