Allima ben Yehuda and the Prophet Galma
Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2018 7:54 pm
My fellow Mormondiscussants, I have long been intending to post some thoughts on the putative etymology of the name "Alma" found the Book of Mormon and allegedly corroborated in the Bar Kochba archive. A recent thread touching on this issue suggests to me that this is a good time.
Short version: in no way should FARMSian apologists feel that the Bar Kochba documents establish the existence of a name "Alma." Neither papyrology or linguistics establishes this.
The apologetic case for a connection with the Book of Mormon name Alma works only if 1) Alma is the best reading of the papyrus, and 2) if that reading fits historically—i.e. etymologically—within the development of the Hebrew language. These legs work together to make the argument walk, and without both, it falls. If Alma is not the best reading, then the name does not fit historically; likewise, if the name Alma does not fit historically, then it cannot be the best reading of the papyrus.
Unfortunately for the apologists, Alma is neither the best reading of the papyrus nor does it work etymologically. Consequently, as a piece of evidence for Book of Mormon historicity, the name Alma falls flat on its face.
I now offer a long version below to support my contentions. I do this in part because I don't feel the excellent posts of RT at Faith Promoting Rumor (see here and here) fully explored the linguistic and textual problems with this old apologetic bull's-eye, and also because I think it should be established somewhere out there just how shaky and wrong the apologetic case is—at this point, it is bordering on deception or at least willful ignorance (but in the case of a scholar, that is functionally the same as deception). It is unfortunate that it must be a humble nobody from Parowan to do it, but nevertheless, like John Gee, I have done my homework.
The name in question occurs in a papyrus found among the so-called "Cave of Letters" (PYadin 44) and concerns a land contract involving two men, Teḥinna son of Simeon, and Allima son of Judah. This was during the second Jewish revolt (or third, depending on interpretation) in the 130s, when the regime of Simeon Bar Kosiba/Kochba was in control of large parts of Judea/Palestine. As a marker of either its legitimacy or its pretense to legitimacy, the regime of Bar Kochba was involved in the execution and occasionally enforcement of contracts and disputes: it set the rule of law. That is why this land contract is here.
It was originally published by Yigael Yadin in 1961, very soon after its discovery, in a scholarly periodical (Israel Exploration Journal). This is an archaeological journal that publishes reports on finds and surveys of sites and so on, but it should be emphasized that a text published here is not a definitive edition that has been meticulously edited by papyrologists and epigraphers and so on—it is not a scholarly edition but rather an ad hoc transcription. That is what Yigael Yadin (an archaeologist, not a papyrologist) initially published and what Mormon apologists have depended on. But in fact, if you read almost any scholarly articles that reference this text prior to 2002, you will see it referenced as an "unpublished" text. What is meant here is not that it had never been transcribed and offered to the public—it had in 1961—but that it hadn't been scientifically edited.
The first scholarly edition, though based on Yadin's work, was published only in 2002 as part of a two-volume collection of all the materials in the "Cave of Letters," which includes documents in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabatean. The linguistic context is significant here: this was a multi-lingual environment, and while most Jews spoke Aramaic, the regime of Bar Kochba had a strong nativist bent and used Hebrew, which few would have spoken, and the regime even used an archaic form of the Hebrew alphabet on its coins that even fewer could have read: like the use of Chinese characters on the tattoos of European skins, it was as much a symbol of cultural capital as it was a script. Alongside spoken Aramaic (a western dialect), Greek had a commanding cultural and administrative presence in cities and towns throughout Roman Judea (and even some of the administrative documents of the Bar Kochba regime are in Greek), and Nabatean, though an Aramaic language, increasingly felt the pressure of Arabic. This multilingual context will be important for understanding the name Allima ben Yehuda.
The document, in Hebrew, first establishes the parties involved in the contract, and Yadin's transcription of the relevant part of the document is as follows: tḥnh bn šm3wn w’lm’ bn yhwdh šnyhm mhlwḥit šbmḥwz 3gltyn ywšbym b3yn gdy ("Tehinnah son of Simeon and Allima son of Judah, both of them from the Luhit which is in Mahoz Eglatain, who reside in En Gedi...").
As you can see from this transcription, there are no short vowels, although there are markers of long vowels (called "matres lectiones" for the curious) . This isn't usually a problem because anyone who knows Hebrew or Aramaic can deduce the vowels if they have a solid understanding of the grammar of these languages (thus I can tell you that šnyhm was likely pronounced shneyhem; I would be happy to explain how to the skeptical). I can tell you reading this that certain grammatical features also mark it as Late/Mishnaic Hebrew (the first element in šbmḥwz, probably to be vocalized as shebbemachoz). With comparative evidence from other, related languages, there is a lot, in short, that we can say about the vowelling of this unvocalized text.
Personal names are another matter. Two of these we know from Biblical texts are to vocalized as (Shim'on and Yehuda), but Teḥinnah could be Tahna (as I have seen one scholar transcribe it). It is only through comparative evidence in light what we do know of the grammatical structure of the language that scholars have reconstructed this as Tehinnah. In that case, it is because the root is ḥ-n-n, and so we know that 1) there must be a doubled -n-, and we also know from the grammar 1) that last letter that indicates that last syllable must be -ah. From these two facts, and what we know of word formation, we can deduce its form.
But Yadin was not operating at this level, nor was he expected to in making his transcription fresh from the the discovery and the fieldwork in the heady days when there was much competition for publication of material from the Dead Sea because there was much public consumption of it. In that context, Yadin took the name 'lm' and simply put added the vowel "a" for the Hebrew aleph (transcribed as an inverted single comma, '). That is the origin of Alma in the bar Kochba letters.
Other scholars (Roman historians like Werner Eck among them) ran with this transcription in their work, and of course Hugh Nibley jumped on it. As I mentioned, however, references in non-Mormon publications to Yadin's initial publication of the text referred to it as unpublished, which is a significant caveat that highlights the tentative nature of Yadin's text. No Mormon apologist ever did that. Instead of informing their readers, they name-dropped: "None other than Yigael Yadin has read this as the name Alma, thus proving that even a non-Mormon recognizes that the name was authentically Hebrew and implicitly validating this as a piece of evidence in favor of the historicity of the Book of Mormon!" That paraphrase is the general argument that is over and over trotted out.
In fact, the scholarly edition of the text published in 2002 transcribes this name as Allima. Let's return to the transcription of the name: 'lm'. The first thing to notice about it is that it ends in an aleph (transcribed as '), which is different from the Tehinnah. This aleph has been interpreted by some apologists as a Hebrew "hypocoristic" (i.e. indicating a shortened form of the name often used for children, like the -y/ie in Johnny or Charlie or Bobby or Billy or Tommy or Timmy rather than their longer forms). But let that sink in: rather than relying on the most up-to-date scholarly edition of the text, the apologists prefer to rely on the rushed and tentative transcription from nearly sixty years ago. For a scholar to ignore the best evidence in order to maintain a predetermined belief is down-right dishonest. At the very least, operating as if "Alma" were the standard reading of this text is not fair to their readers.
We'll have more on that later because the root they propose that this comes from (3-l-m) could not possibly show up as Alma in Hebrew of the time of Lehi. The main point is that the aleph at the end of a word indicates that this word is an Aramaic word, not a Hebrew one. We can see from this very sentence how the scribe who wrote this document indicates that -ah sound in Hebrew names (Teḥinnah and Yehudah): an -h. He doesn't use an aleph, but aleph is the common form in this period and others for an ending in Aramaic that indicates a certain grammatical state of the noun. In fact, more and more in this period, it is just becoming the normal ending on masculine nouns (feminines have -t before the aleph).
To summarize, this shows that name is Aramaic, not Hebrew. There is, as it turns out, a perfectly good Aramaic word (allima) which means "the strong one," and which is occasionally spelled as 'lm' (see the entry on 'lym/'lm' in Jastrow's dictionary, for references) which is exactly what we find in the document from the Bar Kochba archive. An Aramaic first name for the son of man with a traditional Jewish name (Yehuda) fits the multilingual context of second-century Palestine/Judea perfectly.
At this point, we have to ask why an Aramaic name would show up among a group of exiles from seventh century Judah. Aramaic later became the mother tongue of most of the Jews in Palestine, but that was something that happened after the Babylonian conquest—the Babylon to which most of the deportees were taken was heavily Aramaic-speaking, and the language probably had more currency in the non-elite of the area than Babylonian did—and in the Persian period, when Aramaic was an official language of the region. We know from the Bible itself that as recently as the time as Hezekiah (about a 100 years before Lehi), Judeans couldn't understand Aramaic, since they still spoke Hebrew. If the apologists are correct, we have to believe yet another absurdity: not only did the Lehi and his family speak Aramaic, but they kept the language up sufficiently to have it influence their naming practices...as well as Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek! The kind of multilingualism the apologetic arguments imply simply did not occur with that sort of intensity at the time of Lehi.
There is a problem further with their etymology. If you visit the Book of Mormon onomasticon, you will see an etymology for this name that is purely ridiculous. Even though the Bar Kochba document has an aleph first, it is argued there that it is really an ayin (which I transcribe for convenience here as 3). This is not impossible, since the sound 3 was gradually merged with aleph in some Hebrew and Aramaic dialects (e.g. Babylonian) and that is reflected in the orthography. However, if this is an ayin/3, then the etymology proposed is flatly ridiculous.
The Onomasticon itself provides the evidence. Throughout that entry, you will notice references to Ugaritic (a language that had been extinct for 600 years by the time of Lehi) and to Arabic (which is not attested for a 1,000 years after Lehi), both of which contain a root gh-l-m, which means "young man." In later Hebrew, that gh- became 3, and it is written as an ayin in Biblical Hebrew. The apologetic etymology is that Alma reflects the form 3alm- with the hypocoristic -a. If you have to choose between an out-of-place hypocoristic for a Hebrew name spelled wrongly on the one hand, and a perfectly good Aramaic word in a place were people spoke Aramaic, which do you think is more likely? Me too. Hence, the hypocoristic claim, while cute, is silly.
But the root cannot work. For ayin/3 in Biblical Hebrew actually reflects two sounds, not one: ayin and ghayin. For Arabic and Ugaritic, these sounds are kept distinct in the writing, but not so in Biblical Hebrew, where they are both written as ayin. In Lehi's day, these sounds were still distinct in Hebrew as well (later they merged together as just ayin). We know this because the Greek translation of the Bible transliterates some names spelled with ayin with a gamma (a "g" sound) and others with an alpha (an "a" sound). Greek didn't have a ghayin or an ayin, obviously, so to Greek speakers, words begin with ghayin sounded like gamma, and words with ayin sounded like alpha. That is why, in Biblical Hebrew, the twin city of Sodom is spelled 3amorah with an ayin, but it shows up as Gomorrah in Greek (and eventually English). In Lehi's day, it was probably pronounced as Ghemorah. All of this is to say: 3alma should be, if anything Galma or Ghalma. Of course, perhaps the Nephite language (apparently a mish-mash of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Egyptian, and some Uto-Aztecan) had a similar phonological development of gh: it became ayin and then aleph. Perhaps. But that kind of argument is purely circular because its evidence is the thing for which it is intended to be evidence.
In sum: the orthography (spelling) and phonology (sound inventory and sound patterns) of Aramaic perfectly account for the word 'lm' vocalized as Allima. In order to make Alma work, apologists must engage in special pleading. Likewise, the proposed etymology for the name Alma contains within it the seeds of its own ridiculousness.
There is no evidence here for "Alma" as a genuine Hebrew name.
Short version: in no way should FARMSian apologists feel that the Bar Kochba documents establish the existence of a name "Alma." Neither papyrology or linguistics establishes this.
The apologetic case for a connection with the Book of Mormon name Alma works only if 1) Alma is the best reading of the papyrus, and 2) if that reading fits historically—i.e. etymologically—within the development of the Hebrew language. These legs work together to make the argument walk, and without both, it falls. If Alma is not the best reading, then the name does not fit historically; likewise, if the name Alma does not fit historically, then it cannot be the best reading of the papyrus.
Unfortunately for the apologists, Alma is neither the best reading of the papyrus nor does it work etymologically. Consequently, as a piece of evidence for Book of Mormon historicity, the name Alma falls flat on its face.
I now offer a long version below to support my contentions. I do this in part because I don't feel the excellent posts of RT at Faith Promoting Rumor (see here and here) fully explored the linguistic and textual problems with this old apologetic bull's-eye, and also because I think it should be established somewhere out there just how shaky and wrong the apologetic case is—at this point, it is bordering on deception or at least willful ignorance (but in the case of a scholar, that is functionally the same as deception). It is unfortunate that it must be a humble nobody from Parowan to do it, but nevertheless, like John Gee, I have done my homework.
The name in question occurs in a papyrus found among the so-called "Cave of Letters" (PYadin 44) and concerns a land contract involving two men, Teḥinna son of Simeon, and Allima son of Judah. This was during the second Jewish revolt (or third, depending on interpretation) in the 130s, when the regime of Simeon Bar Kosiba/Kochba was in control of large parts of Judea/Palestine. As a marker of either its legitimacy or its pretense to legitimacy, the regime of Bar Kochba was involved in the execution and occasionally enforcement of contracts and disputes: it set the rule of law. That is why this land contract is here.
It was originally published by Yigael Yadin in 1961, very soon after its discovery, in a scholarly periodical (Israel Exploration Journal). This is an archaeological journal that publishes reports on finds and surveys of sites and so on, but it should be emphasized that a text published here is not a definitive edition that has been meticulously edited by papyrologists and epigraphers and so on—it is not a scholarly edition but rather an ad hoc transcription. That is what Yigael Yadin (an archaeologist, not a papyrologist) initially published and what Mormon apologists have depended on. But in fact, if you read almost any scholarly articles that reference this text prior to 2002, you will see it referenced as an "unpublished" text. What is meant here is not that it had never been transcribed and offered to the public—it had in 1961—but that it hadn't been scientifically edited.
The first scholarly edition, though based on Yadin's work, was published only in 2002 as part of a two-volume collection of all the materials in the "Cave of Letters," which includes documents in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabatean. The linguistic context is significant here: this was a multi-lingual environment, and while most Jews spoke Aramaic, the regime of Bar Kochba had a strong nativist bent and used Hebrew, which few would have spoken, and the regime even used an archaic form of the Hebrew alphabet on its coins that even fewer could have read: like the use of Chinese characters on the tattoos of European skins, it was as much a symbol of cultural capital as it was a script. Alongside spoken Aramaic (a western dialect), Greek had a commanding cultural and administrative presence in cities and towns throughout Roman Judea (and even some of the administrative documents of the Bar Kochba regime are in Greek), and Nabatean, though an Aramaic language, increasingly felt the pressure of Arabic. This multilingual context will be important for understanding the name Allima ben Yehuda.
The document, in Hebrew, first establishes the parties involved in the contract, and Yadin's transcription of the relevant part of the document is as follows: tḥnh bn šm3wn w’lm’ bn yhwdh šnyhm mhlwḥit šbmḥwz 3gltyn ywšbym b3yn gdy ("Tehinnah son of Simeon and Allima son of Judah, both of them from the Luhit which is in Mahoz Eglatain, who reside in En Gedi...").
As you can see from this transcription, there are no short vowels, although there are markers of long vowels (called "matres lectiones" for the curious) . This isn't usually a problem because anyone who knows Hebrew or Aramaic can deduce the vowels if they have a solid understanding of the grammar of these languages (thus I can tell you that šnyhm was likely pronounced shneyhem; I would be happy to explain how to the skeptical). I can tell you reading this that certain grammatical features also mark it as Late/Mishnaic Hebrew (the first element in šbmḥwz, probably to be vocalized as shebbemachoz). With comparative evidence from other, related languages, there is a lot, in short, that we can say about the vowelling of this unvocalized text.
Personal names are another matter. Two of these we know from Biblical texts are to vocalized as (Shim'on and Yehuda), but Teḥinnah could be Tahna (as I have seen one scholar transcribe it). It is only through comparative evidence in light what we do know of the grammatical structure of the language that scholars have reconstructed this as Tehinnah. In that case, it is because the root is ḥ-n-n, and so we know that 1) there must be a doubled -n-, and we also know from the grammar 1) that last letter that indicates that last syllable must be -ah. From these two facts, and what we know of word formation, we can deduce its form.
But Yadin was not operating at this level, nor was he expected to in making his transcription fresh from the the discovery and the fieldwork in the heady days when there was much competition for publication of material from the Dead Sea because there was much public consumption of it. In that context, Yadin took the name 'lm' and simply put added the vowel "a" for the Hebrew aleph (transcribed as an inverted single comma, '). That is the origin of Alma in the bar Kochba letters.
Other scholars (Roman historians like Werner Eck among them) ran with this transcription in their work, and of course Hugh Nibley jumped on it. As I mentioned, however, references in non-Mormon publications to Yadin's initial publication of the text referred to it as unpublished, which is a significant caveat that highlights the tentative nature of Yadin's text. No Mormon apologist ever did that. Instead of informing their readers, they name-dropped: "None other than Yigael Yadin has read this as the name Alma, thus proving that even a non-Mormon recognizes that the name was authentically Hebrew and implicitly validating this as a piece of evidence in favor of the historicity of the Book of Mormon!" That paraphrase is the general argument that is over and over trotted out.
In fact, the scholarly edition of the text published in 2002 transcribes this name as Allima. Let's return to the transcription of the name: 'lm'. The first thing to notice about it is that it ends in an aleph (transcribed as '), which is different from the Tehinnah. This aleph has been interpreted by some apologists as a Hebrew "hypocoristic" (i.e. indicating a shortened form of the name often used for children, like the -y/ie in Johnny or Charlie or Bobby or Billy or Tommy or Timmy rather than their longer forms). But let that sink in: rather than relying on the most up-to-date scholarly edition of the text, the apologists prefer to rely on the rushed and tentative transcription from nearly sixty years ago. For a scholar to ignore the best evidence in order to maintain a predetermined belief is down-right dishonest. At the very least, operating as if "Alma" were the standard reading of this text is not fair to their readers.
We'll have more on that later because the root they propose that this comes from (3-l-m) could not possibly show up as Alma in Hebrew of the time of Lehi. The main point is that the aleph at the end of a word indicates that this word is an Aramaic word, not a Hebrew one. We can see from this very sentence how the scribe who wrote this document indicates that -ah sound in Hebrew names (Teḥinnah and Yehudah): an -h. He doesn't use an aleph, but aleph is the common form in this period and others for an ending in Aramaic that indicates a certain grammatical state of the noun. In fact, more and more in this period, it is just becoming the normal ending on masculine nouns (feminines have -t before the aleph).
To summarize, this shows that name is Aramaic, not Hebrew. There is, as it turns out, a perfectly good Aramaic word (allima) which means "the strong one," and which is occasionally spelled as 'lm' (see the entry on 'lym/'lm' in Jastrow's dictionary, for references) which is exactly what we find in the document from the Bar Kochba archive. An Aramaic first name for the son of man with a traditional Jewish name (Yehuda) fits the multilingual context of second-century Palestine/Judea perfectly.
At this point, we have to ask why an Aramaic name would show up among a group of exiles from seventh century Judah. Aramaic later became the mother tongue of most of the Jews in Palestine, but that was something that happened after the Babylonian conquest—the Babylon to which most of the deportees were taken was heavily Aramaic-speaking, and the language probably had more currency in the non-elite of the area than Babylonian did—and in the Persian period, when Aramaic was an official language of the region. We know from the Bible itself that as recently as the time as Hezekiah (about a 100 years before Lehi), Judeans couldn't understand Aramaic, since they still spoke Hebrew. If the apologists are correct, we have to believe yet another absurdity: not only did the Lehi and his family speak Aramaic, but they kept the language up sufficiently to have it influence their naming practices...as well as Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek! The kind of multilingualism the apologetic arguments imply simply did not occur with that sort of intensity at the time of Lehi.
There is a problem further with their etymology. If you visit the Book of Mormon onomasticon, you will see an etymology for this name that is purely ridiculous. Even though the Bar Kochba document has an aleph first, it is argued there that it is really an ayin (which I transcribe for convenience here as 3). This is not impossible, since the sound 3 was gradually merged with aleph in some Hebrew and Aramaic dialects (e.g. Babylonian) and that is reflected in the orthography. However, if this is an ayin/3, then the etymology proposed is flatly ridiculous.
The Onomasticon itself provides the evidence. Throughout that entry, you will notice references to Ugaritic (a language that had been extinct for 600 years by the time of Lehi) and to Arabic (which is not attested for a 1,000 years after Lehi), both of which contain a root gh-l-m, which means "young man." In later Hebrew, that gh- became 3, and it is written as an ayin in Biblical Hebrew. The apologetic etymology is that Alma reflects the form 3alm- with the hypocoristic -a. If you have to choose between an out-of-place hypocoristic for a Hebrew name spelled wrongly on the one hand, and a perfectly good Aramaic word in a place were people spoke Aramaic, which do you think is more likely? Me too. Hence, the hypocoristic claim, while cute, is silly.
But the root cannot work. For ayin/3 in Biblical Hebrew actually reflects two sounds, not one: ayin and ghayin. For Arabic and Ugaritic, these sounds are kept distinct in the writing, but not so in Biblical Hebrew, where they are both written as ayin. In Lehi's day, these sounds were still distinct in Hebrew as well (later they merged together as just ayin). We know this because the Greek translation of the Bible transliterates some names spelled with ayin with a gamma (a "g" sound) and others with an alpha (an "a" sound). Greek didn't have a ghayin or an ayin, obviously, so to Greek speakers, words begin with ghayin sounded like gamma, and words with ayin sounded like alpha. That is why, in Biblical Hebrew, the twin city of Sodom is spelled 3amorah with an ayin, but it shows up as Gomorrah in Greek (and eventually English). In Lehi's day, it was probably pronounced as Ghemorah. All of this is to say: 3alma should be, if anything Galma or Ghalma. Of course, perhaps the Nephite language (apparently a mish-mash of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Egyptian, and some Uto-Aztecan) had a similar phonological development of gh: it became ayin and then aleph. Perhaps. But that kind of argument is purely circular because its evidence is the thing for which it is intended to be evidence.
In sum: the orthography (spelling) and phonology (sound inventory and sound patterns) of Aramaic perfectly account for the word 'lm' vocalized as Allima. In order to make Alma work, apologists must engage in special pleading. Likewise, the proposed etymology for the name Alma contains within it the seeds of its own ridiculousness.
There is no evidence here for "Alma" as a genuine Hebrew name.