I don’t like doing these types of articles. It’s never comfortable, and it doesn’t give me any satisfaction to tell someone their methodologies are wrong, but in the case of the FIRM foundation, I feel as though I cannot let this one slide. Scholarship matters to me and matters even more in a religious context. When people base their faith(even in part) on bad scholarship, it can have disastrous effects not only on people inside the church but also on people looking for truth who view this bad scholarship and judge the spiritual reasoning of the church by it.
The Firm Foundation has published an argument about the name Mahonri Moriancumer that is presented as evidence for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The argument is interesting because it attempts to use linguistics to explain why Joseph Smith’s name for the Brother of Jared corresponds so closely with the character’s actions. Linguistics just happens to be my area of expertise, and so their argument caught my attention. After reading it, I found that there is a fundamental problem with the argument. It isn’t actually demonstrating the linguistic claims that it needs to demonstrate.
Instead, it begins with an English spelling of an otherwise unattested name, breaks that spelling into pieces that resemble Hebrew words, assigns meanings to those pieces, combines those meanings into a descriptive phrase, and then points out that the resulting phrase describes the Brother of Jared. That may produce an interesting interpretation. It does not produce a valid historical-linguistic derivation.
The Firm Foundation article does not present this merely as an interesting possibility. It describes the correspondence as powerful evidence for the authenticity of the name and ultimately for the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims. That is an extraordinary evidentiary claim. And extraordinary claims require more than an interesting word association.
So what do we actually have?
The first thing we need to establish is the linguistic evidence. We do not have the original manuscript of the Jaredite record. We do not have the original spelling of the Brother of Jared’s name in the language in which it was supposedly written. We don’t know what language the Jaredites spoke, much less what script their record was written in. What we have is the form Mahonri Moriancumer, reported through Joseph Smith’s interaction with William F. Cahoon.
The article itself acknowledges the problem. It states that there is no original Hebrew spelling available and that the analysis depends on Joseph Smith’s English spelling being sufficiently accurate to allow the name to be transliterated. That creates an obvious methodological constraint. If the original language and form are unknown, we cannot simply assume a Hebrew etymological origin. We have to reconstruct it. And reconstruction has rules.
This is where the argument goes wrong
The Firm Foundation argument proposes that Mahonri is Hebrew in origin and can be broken into components such as mah + on + ri. The proposed meanings are then something along the lines of:
- mah → who/what/how/which
- on → light
- ri → water
These are then assembled into:
“Who [provides or leads to] light [on the] water.”
The article then connects this interpretation with the Brother of Jared’s role in providing illuminated stones and leading the Jaredites across the water. This is where we need to slow down. There are actually several different linguistic claims being made here, and each one requires independent justification.
- The name is Hebrew.
- The name can be segmented into these particular pieces.
- Those pieces have the proposed meanings.
- Those pieces can be grammatically combined in the proposed manner.
- That the resulting expression is something that a Hebrew speaker would actually construct as a personal name.
- That the resulting meaning was intended to describe the Brother of Jared.
The Firm Foundation argument largely treats these as though establishing one establishes all of them. It doesn’t.
A word is not automatically made of the words it resembles
This is basic morphology. Suppose I encounter an unfamiliar English word and discover that I can divide it into several smaller English words. That does not mean those smaller words are historically the components of the word. The classic example is understand. A person could divide it into under + stand and interpret it as something involving physically standing underneath something. But that is not the historical morphology of the word. The fact that a word can be segmented does not mean that it was formed through that segmentation. The same principle applies to Mahonri.
Finding something that looks like mah, something that looks like on, and something that looks like ri does not establish that the ancient word contained those Hebrew morphemes. We need evidence that these elements actually function together as a morphological construction. That evidence is missing.
The English spelling is doing too much work
There is another problem. The argument begins with an English representation: Mahonri. From that representation, it attempts to reconstruct Hebrew components. But English orthography is not a transparent representation of an ancient Hebrew(or any other language) phonological system. Even when a historical name has been transliterated accurately, transliteration involves choices about consonants, vowels, syllable boundaries, and morphology. And here we don’t even have the original form. That means there are multiple levels of uncertainty:
Unknown original form → Joseph Smith’s reported form → English spelling → proposed Hebrew segmentation → proposed Hebrew meanings.
Every step introduces another assumption. The further we move from the original evidence, the more important independent constraints become. The Firm Foundation argument instead treats the English form as though it were sufficiently transparent to reveal its underlying Hebrew morphology. That is not a safe assumption.
The “on = Zion” argument illustrates the problem
There are several problems in their linguistic analysis, and I won’t get into all of them at this time. Let’s look at this at a higher level. The treatment of “on” is really indicative of the problem. The article states that “on” means light and then connects this to the Savior, Zion, and the concept of holy people. Notice what happens here. A lexical meaning becomes a symbolic association. A symbolic association then becomes part of an etymological argument. Those are different things. If a Hebrew word means “light,” that does not mean that every occurrence of a similar sound carries all of the theological concepts that later readers associate with light.
This is the difference between lexical semantics and religious symbolism. A dictionary meaning is not a theological thesaurus. And an etymology is not established because the proposed meaning has theological significance. The linguistic question is much narrower: Is this actually the historical Hebrew morpheme present in this name? That question remains unanswered.
The argument commits confirmation bias
There is another problem that becomes obvious once we consider the direction of the reasoning. We already know the story of the Brother of Jared. We know that he is associated with light. We know about the stones, the barges, and crossing the water. Then someone examines an unfamiliar name and searches for linguistic pieces that can be interpreted in a way that corresponds to those known events. That creates a powerful confirmation bias. The researcher already knows what the answer is supposed to describe. So the narrative becomes a filter through which possible meanings are selected. This is backwards from how a strong historical-linguistic argument should operate. A proper procedure would be:
linguistic evidence → reconstruction → independently derived meaning → comparison with historical information.
The Firm Foundation argument instead operates more like:
historical story → desired semantic concepts → search for linguistic pieces → interpretation that fits the story.
Those procedures may produce the same result. But they do not have the same evidentiary value.
This is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy
I hate to keep pushing this analogy, but unfortunately, this logical fallacy is far too common in amateur religious scholarship. Imagine firing thousands of bullets randomly at a wall and then drawing a target around the cluster that happens to form. You can then point to the target and demonstrate that the bullets are remarkably accurate. But the target was created after seeing the data.
The same problem occurs when an interpreter has a large collection of possible lexical meanings and possible segmentations and then selects the combination that produces a meaningful description of an already known story. The apparent correspondence can be real. But it is not necessarily evidence of intentional linguistic encoding. This is essentially the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The correspondence is being selected after the relevant information is already known.
There is also a circular argument
The article argues that the meaning of the name supports its authenticity because the meaning describes the Brother of Jared so well. But how was the meaning obtained? Through a proposed Hebrew interpretation of an English spelling whose original form is unknown. And why is Hebrew being used? Because the name is presumed to come from the ancient Near Eastern linguistic environment associated with the Book of Mormon. This creates a circular dependency. The reasoning is essentially: The name is authentic; therefore, the Hebrew interpretation is relevant. Then, the Hebrew interpretation demonstrates that the name is authentic. But the second conclusion cannot independently establish the first when the first was already necessary to select the linguistic framework. That is a form of begging the question.
“It fits” is not the same as “it derives”
This is probably the single most important distinction in the entire discussion. There is a difference between semantic compatibility and historical derivation. Suppose I find an interpretation of an ancient name that means “one who crosses the sea.” If the person associated with the name crossed a sea, the interpretation is compatible with the story. But that does not establish that the name historically meant “one who crosses the sea.” For that, I need to demonstrate the linguistic pathway. The same issue applies to Moriancumer.
The article proposes components involving performing wonders, purpose, raising up, and saving. These are then combined into a description of the Brother of Jared. Again, the resulting description may be compatible with the narrative. But compatibility is not derivation.
The proposed morphology is never demonstrated
If mor, ian, cum, and -er are genuinely the components of the name, we need to know why.
- What language contains this morphological structure?
- What are the attested forms?
- Where else do these morphemes occur?
- What grammatical function does each one have?
- What historical period are they attested in?
- Can the proposed combination actually produce a personal name?
- Are there parallel names constructed in the same manner?
- What sound changes are required to get from the proposed original form to Moriancumer?
These are not minor technicalities. They are the actual evidence required to establish the claim. Instead, the article essentially treats the discovery of individually interpretable pieces as sufficient. Unfortunately, they are FAR from sufficient.
The suffix problem
The article proposes that “-er” indicates instrumentality, while acknowledging that this is effectively an English rendering, although a similar suffix is said to exist in Hebrew. This should immediately raise a methodological question.
- Which suffix?
- In which language?
- In which historical period?
- With what phonological form?
- Attached to what kinds of stems?
- With what semantic function?
- Can we demonstrate that the proposed form actually occurs in names of this type?
A statement that a suffix has a similar function somewhere in a language is not sufficient to establish that it is the suffix operating in an unattested ancient name. Morphology is a system. You cannot simply select grammatical pieces because their meanings happen to produce the desired interpretation.
Do names describe their bearers?
The argument repeatedly relies upon the fact that the proposed translation describes what the Brother of Jared did. But this depends upon another assumption: that the name was intended as a descriptive title. The article explicitly suggests that the name may have been a descriptive title rather than the individual’s original given name. That is possible. But possibility is not evidence. The fact that some ancient names are semantically transparent does not establish that this particular name was constructed as a description of the individual’s later accomplishments. Otherwise, the reasoning becomes: If the name describes the person, the interpretation is correct. But the interpretation describes the person. Therefore, the name must have been intended to describe the person. That inference does not follow logically. This is another form of affirming the consequent.
The Moriancumer place-name doesn’t rescue the argument
The article also makes an argument based on the place name Moriancumer. The Jaredites supposedly named the place where they stopped Moriancumer, and the article argues that this supports the proposed interpretation because the events associated with “Mahonri” had not yet occurred. This is an interesting textual observation. But it does not solve the linguistic problem. The existence of the place-name establishes that the Book of Ether uses the form Moriancumer as a place-name. It does not establish the etymology of the place name. To use it as independent evidence, we would first have to demonstrate the linguistic derivation. Otherwise, the argument becomes self-reinforcing: the word means X because it fits the story. The place-name confirms X because it fits the story. But both interpretations ultimately depend upon the same proposed linguistic decomposition. The evidence is therefore not independent.
Recognizing presuppositions is important
A presupposition is an assumption that has to be accepted before the argument can operate. The Firm Foundation article contains several. Among them are:
- The name is genuinely ancient.
- The name is derived from Hebrew.
- Joseph Smith’s English spelling preserves enough information to reconstruct the original morphology.
- The name is morphologically divisible in the proposed manner.
- The individual components retain the meanings being assigned to them.
- Those components can grammatically combine in the proposed manner.
- The name is descriptive of the Brother of Jared.
- The correspondence between the proposed meaning and the narrative is unlikely to occur by chance.
- The Book of Mormon’s Jaredite narrative provides the appropriate historical context for interpreting the name.
The problem is not that every one of these assumptions is necessarily false. The problem is that several of them are presupposed rather than demonstrated. Once we recognize that, the argument becomes much easier to evaluate.
A hypothesis should make predictions
This is one of the most useful principles in historical linguistics. A good hypothesis constrains what we should observe. If the name really contains a particular Hebrew morpheme, we should be able to identify that morpheme elsewhere. If a particular suffix indicates a particular grammatical relationship, we should find comparable formations. If a sound correspondence is being proposed, we should observe the same correspondence in other words. If a word was borrowed from another language, we should be able to establish a plausible contact environment. If a particular semantic development occurred, we should be able to place that development historically. These constraints make a hypothesis testable.
The problem with the Firm Foundation approach is that its interpretive freedom is so broad that almost any sufficiently imaginative segmentation can potentially be made to fit. That is precisely what we do not want in a historical-linguistic analysis.
Why historical periods matters
There is another issue that cannot be ignored: which Hebrew? Hebrew has changed over time. The vocabulary of one historical period cannot simply be projected backward or forward without justification. Morphology changes. Pronunciation changes. Semantic fields change. Word-formation patterns change. Therefore, saying that a component “means X in Hebrew” is insufficient. We must ask in what time period is this reconstruction plausible, if at all.
This is problematic for their argument. We would have to assume that it is Hebrew from Moroni’s time on the American continent. Hebrew didn’t exist as a language at the time of the events of the Brother of Jared. For their argument to work, we would need to assume that Moroni transliterated the name from its original form into the Hebrew of his time. There is a problem with this. Moroni admits in Mormon 9:33 that “the Hebrew hath been altered by us also”. If that is the case, how was it altered, and how does this proposed name reconstruction fit within the changes of Hebrew in the time of Moroni?
This gets even more complicated from a linguistic perspective. Ether is writing during and after the downfall of the Jaredite civilization. We don’t know what language he spoke or wrote in. He was likely reading an ancient record himself that was not in his own language and then transliterating names from that language and writing them in his own language. Then, centuries later, Moroni does the same thing while translating and compiling the record of Ether. Then, Joseph Smith is recording these names and conveying them to an English-speaking audience. Was Moroni simply transliterating the name or was he translating the essence of the name into Hebrew? That is an important question. If he was transliterating, then the name is not of Hebrew origin. If he was translating the essence of the name, then we would need to understand the Hebrew of his day and the changes that occurred to know if the proposed meaning of the name is correct.
The Firm Foundation does not address this problem. And it cannot simply be dismissed as a technicality. It goes directly to the question of what linguistic evidence we are actually looking at and evaluating. The point I am making is that the claims made by the Firm Foundation MUST be substantiated by more than superficial observations. They have not shown any linguistic evidence of the plausibility of their claims. Moreover, their methodology has serious flaws. In the end, proposing these types of connections as fact does far more harm than good.
