Hebrew Names in the Book of Mormon
The people of the Book of Mormon carry Hebrew names — the names of an Israelite family and their descendants, many built on roots familiar from the Hebrew Bible. Seeing these names in Hebrew, beside their meanings, is one of the clearest windows into the record’s origins. This page collects some of the most recognizable.
Note: several of these etymologies are widely cited but debated among scholars — see the caveats in the note below each is discussed.
Names with Hebrew Roots
The founding family of the record — Lehi, his wife, and their sons — bear names that sit comfortably within Hebrew. Several are recognizably biblical; others share roots with common Hebrew words for God, light, and blessing.
לֶחִי — Lehi
The prophet who leads his family out of Jerusalem. The name is also a place-name in the Hebrew Bible (Judges 15), tied to a word meaning “jaw” or “cheek.”
שָׂרִיָּה — Sariah
Lehi’s wife. The name is a theophoric name — one built from a divine-name element, a very common pattern in ancient Israelite naming — joined with the same root as Sarah (“prince” or “princess”), and is best read as “my prince is the LORD.” Sariah does not appear as a woman's name in the Bible, but Book of Mormon scholars have documented it in ancient Hebrew inscriptions from the same general era as Lehi, making it another name the record gets right that Joseph Smith had no obvious way to have invented.
נֶפִי — Nephi
The record’s first narrator. The name’s origin is discussed in several ways; one proposal links it to an Egyptian root meaning “good” or “fair,” fitting the record’s own note that the family’s learning mixed Jewish and Egyptian elements.
סָם — Sam
One of Nephi’s brothers, and directly attested — not just a name that happens to sound Hebrew. Scholars have identified Sam on ancient West Semitic seals from the pre-exilic period, the centuries before Lehi's family left Jerusalem: one of several Book of Mormon names that turn up unaltered in genuine ancient inscriptions unearthed long after 1830.
יַעֲקֹב — Jacob
Nephi’s younger brother, later a prophet and record-keeper. This is simply the Hebrew name Ya’aqov — Jacob, the patriarch of Israel himself.
אֱנוֹשׁ — Enos
Jacob’s son. Enosh is a Hebrew word meaning “man” or “mankind,” and is also the name of a grandson of Adam in Genesis.
יָרוֹם — Jarom
Enos’s son. Built on a root meaning “to be high” or “exalted” — related to names like Joram / Jehoram.
עַלְמָא — Alma
A major prophet later in the record. Alma has been documented as an authentic ancient Hebrew male name — a point often raised because the name reads as feminine to English and Latin ears (it happens to be a woman's name in Latin) but is at home as a man's name in Hebrew. Israeli scholar Yigael Yadin found the name among the Bar Kokhba-era legal documents discovered in the Judean desert, borne by a man. Mormon scholars trace its root to a Hebrew word meaning “young man” or “lad” — and notably, when Alma is first introduced in the Book of Mormon text, he is described in the very same verse as “a young man” (Mosiah 17:2), a detail that reads like a deliberate wordplay in the original language, the kind an author familiar with Hebrew naming conventions would build in deliberately.
Names Attested Outside the Bible
Some of the most interesting cases are names that never appear in the Bible at all, and so could not have been lifted from a King James Bible sitting on Joseph Smith's shelf — yet they turn up in ancient Near Eastern inscriptions discovered only in the twentieth century.
אֲבִישׁ — Abish
A Lamanite woman, a servant who plays a pivotal role in Alma 19. The name corresponds to a Hebrew name found on a seal predating the Babylonian exile, held today in a museum collection in Haifa — from roughly the same period Lehi's family left Jerusalem.
Hagoth
A Nephite shipbuilder mentioned in Alma 63. His name appears on an ancient Ammonite seal that predates the Israelite exile — a genuine ancient Near Eastern name, though not one that had any presence in the Bible for Joseph Smith to draw from.
Scholars caution that not every proposed Book of Mormon name etymology holds up equally well — some are well-attested and widely accepted among specialists, others are speculative and rest on thinner evidence. The names above are among the better-documented cases; readers should hold others more loosely.
What the Names Reveal
Names are among the hardest things to fake in a text, because they encode assumptions about language that a writer may not even be aware of. The Book of Mormon’s names cluster around Hebrew roots — divine-name elements, words for light, height, blessing, and renown — exactly the pattern one would expect from an Israelite family naming its children.
Some of these etymologies are straightforward and widely accepted; others are proposals that scholars weigh and debate, individually shaky. Taken as a whole, though, the set behaves like a real family of Hebrew names ought to. Read together, in Hebrew, they reinforce what the record says about itself: that these were children of Israel.
See Them in the Hebrew Text
The best place to meet these names is in the text itself, in Hebrew, where they appear in their natural setting rather than in a list.
The Book of Mormon in Hebrew — ספר מורמון בעברית.