Alma and the onomastic argument
Critics said Alma was a woman's Latin name; it has turned up as a Jewish man's name, the cleanest correction in the whole debate.
What the Church claims
Book of Mormon names are authentic ancient Near Eastern names Joseph Smith could not have known.
Once the evidence is in, this claim: Holds up. Alma is attested as a man's name in the Bar Kokhba documents from Nahal Hever, so the old ridicule of it was wrong and the claim holds on that point. It holds no further. A list of dozens of names will produce hits against a large Semitic corpus by chance, and no name in the book has been shown to be one only an ancient author could have supplied.
The record
- 'Alma son of Judah' appears in a Bar Kokhba-period document (c. AD 130); the name also appears on a 1st-century ossuary and at Ebla (3rd millennium BC).
- The criticism was made by Charles Shook (1910) and Walter Martin (1978).
- Scripture Central concedes the Book of Mormon name need not derive from a Semitic source.
- Roper scores 19 of 34 name items confirmed; several 'confirmations' are proposed etymologies (Zarahemla, Mosiah, Liahona, Onidah), and Timothy, Jonas, Com, Kim and Ether are unconfirmed.
The moving target
The Church has never taken a position on Book of Mormon onomastics. The Alma attestation has been reported in Church magazines as a point of interest, but no official publication claims it as evidence, and the Book of Mormon Onomasticon that catalogs these names is a BYU project rather than a Church one. Nothing official rises or falls with the argument.
The exchange
Hugh Nibley; Paul Hoskisson; Book of Mormon Onomasticon; Scripture Central
Alma, Sam, Nephi, Paanchi, Pahoran, Sheum and others match names or words unknown in 1830.
The answer: Alma answers the critics but proves little: the attestations are seven centuries after or seventeen before Lehi, the word was familiar in English (alma mater) and as a name, and the book coins a very large number of names, so some will match something. The method counts hits and proposed etymologies but never counts misses against the book, and Greek names remain unexplained.
What they get right: Critics were flatly wrong about Alma: it is attested as an ancient man's name, and no critic predicted that.
Book of Mormon Onomasticon (BYU); Book of Mormon Central
The Book of Mormon Onomasticon documents dozens of names with plausible Semitic or Egyptian etymologies, far more than an invented text should supply by chance.
The answer: An etymology proposed after the fact is not a prediction. The Onomasticon works backward from each name to any Semitic or Egyptian root that could have produced it, and across two consonantal languages with enormous vocabularies almost any short name admits a candidate; run the same method on invented names and the hit rate is comparable. Alma is the real exception, and that is why it carries the whole category in every retelling. One confirmed name is a data point. The chart scores it as a pattern.
What they get right: Alma turning up as a Jewish man's name in the Bar Kokhba documents is a genuine vindication on a point skeptics mocked for a century, and this site says so on its own page.
Both cases at full strength
The skeptics' case
The onomastic case is a collection of post hoc matches drawn from many languages across three millennia with no stated miss rate. It refutes a few careless criticisms and establishes nothing about origin. For BYU's own Onomasticon caveats on Alma, Mulek and sheum, see the 'positive evidences' entry.
The apologetic case
A forger inventing names in 1829 should produce biblical knock-offs and nonsense. Instead several non-biblical names have later surfaced in the right language families, and none is demonstrably modern.
What would change this
A control study showing invented-name corpora do not yield comparable match rates.
Closely related
Sources
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