Abstract: Beginning with Hugh Nibley, several Latter-day Saint scholars have highlighted a deed found among the Bar Kokhba documents as evidence of the name Alma as a Jewish male name in antiquity. Here we highlight a second attestation of the same name used for a Jewish male from a slightly earlier period, as well as other evidence from Hebrew toponymy that helps corroborate not only that Alma is a Hebrew name, but also supports the etymology proposed by Latter-day Saint scholars and is suggestive of wordplays previously identified in the Book of Mormon text. Past critics have mocked the name Alma as a feminine name, but since this criticism has now been answered, some have pivoted to claiming that Alma was, in fact, a man’s name in Joseph Smith’s time and place. We investigate this claim and demonstrate that the evidence for Alma as a male name in the United States—and specifically upstate New York—during the early 1800s has been vastly overstated. Overall, this combination of data suggests that Alma in the Book of Mormon is better accounted for by the ancient rather than modern evidence.
In a recently released episode of the documentary series A Marvelous Work, Dr. Donald W. Parry, professor of the Hebrew Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls at BYU, mentioned the attestation of the name Alma in an ancient legal deed as evidence supporting the appearance of the name in the Book of Mormon.
Parry was referring to the [Page 416]attestation of one ʾlmʾ bn yhwdh (אלמא בן יהודה) in the Bar Kokhba documents (ca. 135 AD), which Yigael Yadin initially rendered “Alma son of Judah.” This document was first brought to the attention of Latter-day Saints in 1973 by Hugh Nibley, in a review of Yadin’s work on the Bar Kokhba documents, and has been noted by several other Latter-day Saint scholars since then. A Semitic name transliterated as Alma has also been found in documents from the third millennium BC at Ebla,
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