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.¹ 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.”² 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.³ A Semitic name transliterated as Alma has also been found in documents from the third millennium BC at Ebla,⁴ and the Nabataean form Almu (ʿlmw) occurs as a male name in Hawran in a fourth century BC context.⁵ But the Bar Kokhba[Page 417] deed from the second century AD was long thought to be the only example of the name in Hebrew.

Examining New Evidence

New evidence now provides additional support for the name Alma as a Hebrew male name in antiquity. An ossuary recovered from the Batn el-Hawa neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1942, and dated to sometime between the first century BC and the first century AD, bears an inscription which reads, yhwdh bn ʾlmʾ (יהודה בן אלמא), “Judah son of Alma.”⁶ These are the same two names as found in the Bar Kokhba deed, but in the opposite relationship—Judah is the son, and Alma the father in this instance. Since Alma occurs as a patronym, once again there can be no question that the individual is male. Furthermore, since this ossuary is dated to before 70 AD, and Alma is the name of the father, it indicates that the name Alma likely goes back to the first century BC.⁷

Both L. Y. Rahmani and Tal Ilan consider it a variant of the name Elam (ʾlm; אלם), which is the patronym of a priest from the days of Herod mentioned by Josephus (Joseph b. Elam) and attested frequently (with [Page 418]variant spellings) in the Talmud.⁸ Ilan accounts for the final aleph (א) as an Aramaic suffix added as an “extension of a biblical name,” but also notes that sometimes “the א suffix is the abbreviation of theophoric names with יה into ה or א,” a form “already documented in the First Temple Hebrew seals.”⁹ The shortened theophoric form has been favored by Latter-day Saint scholars for the Book of Mormon Alma.¹⁰ Since shortened theophoric names could be written with either a ה or an א at the end, the variant spelling that occurs in the signature line of the Bar Kokhba deed, where the name is spelled ʾlmh (“Almah”) with a final ה, instead of a terminal א, may support this explanation.

The meaning of ʾlm (אלם) in Hebrew is “mute,”¹¹ but Hoskisson and others have noted, “In the final centuries B.C. and the first centuries A.D., in the spoken language among the Jews the consonants aleph and ayin began to run together. As a result the letters representing those sounds tended to become interchangeable as well.”¹² This raises the possibility that the root for the name Alma was not “mute,” but ʿlm (עלם), “lad” or “youth.” Alma would thus be the hypocoristic of ʿlmʾl (“lad of God”) or ʿlmyhw (“youth of YHWH”).¹³ Significantly, Alma is first introduced as a “young man” in Mosiah 17:2. As Matthew L. Bowen, an expert in Semitic languages and literature, explains, “The [Page 419]introduction of Alma as a figure and name into the Book of Mormon text is immediately juxtaposed with a description of Alma the Elder as a ‘young man’—i.e., as an ʿelem—in Mosiah 17:2. Thus, this narrative biographical introduction exactly matches the proposed (and far-and-away most likely) meaning of the name.”¹⁴ Bowen also notes echoes in the narrative of another homographic Hebrew root which means “to hide” or “to conceal”: “Following Alma’s biographical introduction, Mormon places tremendous emphasis on Alma’s ‘hidden’ activities, raising the possibility of a paronomastic treatment of Alma’s name in terms of the Hebrew root ʿ-l-m (‘conceal’) and its synonyms (see e.g., Mosiah 17:4; 18:1, 3, 5).”¹⁵

Spelling Alma with an initial ayin (ע), rather than an aleph (א), also receives support from Hebrew toponymy.¹⁶ A village in modern Israel, in the northern Galilee area only a few kilometers south of the border with Lebanon, is called Alma (עלמה)—spelled with an initial ע rather than an א. The name goes back to at least the period of the Crusades (twelfth to thirteenth century), when it is mentioned in the writings [Page 420]of Benjamin of Tudela.¹⁷ One manuscript variant renders the name as ʿAlem or ʿElem.¹⁸ Leopold Zunz’s conjectural form, ʾUlma, can be rejected.¹⁹ There was a Jewish village at the site of Alma at least as far back as the third century AD based on the finding of an inscribed synagogue lintel.²⁰ In general, there was a continuity in the Jewish settlements and place names of the Upper Galilee that could lend support to Alma being the original name of the village.²¹ Another synagogue lintel from the fourth to fifth centuries AD contains an inscription that Joseph Naveh reconstructed as “May the Ruler of the world (ʿalmah) bless this effort (ʿamlah).” While it is tempting to view this wordplay as evidence for the place name Alma, this was a common Aramaic phrase that appears in synagogues at Hammath Gadera, next to the biblical Gadara, and at Susiya.²² The Jewish community of Alma is attested as late as the sixteenth century but appears to have ended by the seventeenth century. Many of the families left for the village of Peki’in where they bore the surname ʿAlmani.²³

[Page 421]The village appears as ʿAlma el-Khait on a list of toponyms in Israel gathered by Edward Robinson from local informants during his travels in the Holy Land in the 1830s.²⁴ Edward H. Palmer indicated that the toponym Alma was a common personal name as well and thought it was etymologically related to Almaniyah or Alman, the Hebrew form being עלמון (ʿlmwn), which appears in Joshua 21:18 (Almon).²⁵ This biblical Almon could plausibly be the name Alma with the -on suffix common to place names affixed at the end.²⁶ A variant tradition in 1 Chronicles 6:60 records the name as Alemeth (ʿlmt; עלמת), which also appears as a personal name in 1 Chronicles 7:8; 8:36; and 9:42.²⁷ Scott C. Layton argues that the etymology of the biblical Almon/Alemeth derives from the Semitic root *ǵlm—the same root from which Hebrew ʿlm, “young man, lad” is derived—and Ran Zadok indicates that the toponym ʿAlma also comes from either this root or the root for “concealed, hidden” (ʿlm) discussed above.²⁸ Thus, [Page 422]the evidence related to this Hebrew toponym further strengthens the case that Alma is an acceptable English rendering of a Hebrew name connected to Semitic roots that are echoed in the Book of Mormon narrative about Alma the Elder.

The Name Alma in Joseph Smith’s Day

For many years, detractors of the Book of Mormon have ridiculed the Book of Mormon’s use of the name Alma for male prophets in antiquity. Infamous Evangelical counter-cultist Walter Martin wrote, “Alma is supposed to be a prophet of God and of Jewish ancestry in The Book of Mormon. In Hebrew Alma means a betrothed virgin maiden—hardly a fitting name for a man.”²⁹ In 1973, Hugh Nibley observed that “the name in the Book of Mormon that has brought the most derision on that book, and caused the greatest embarrassment to the Latter-day Saints . . . is the simple and unpretentious Alma. Roman [Catholic] priests have found in this obviously Latin and obviously feminine name (who does not know that Alma Mater means fostering mother?) gratifying evidence of the ignorance and naivete of the youthful Joseph Smith.”³⁰ Such criticisms have continued well into the twenty-first century. For instance, in 2002, a critic suggested that “modern potential sources for the name Alma could be, among others, the phrase alma mater or even the transliterated Hebrew word for ‘virgin’ or ‘young woman.’”³¹

[Page 423]In the face of clear and compelling evidence that Alma was a Semitic, masculine name in antiquity, however, some critics have now resorted to searching genealogical records found online through Ancestry.com for examples of men named Alma in the early 1800s.³² Latter-day Saint apologist Kevin L. Barney actually noted this data more than 20 years ago but wisely cautioned “that the male gender of these individuals has not yet been independently verified,” and thus “more research needs to be undertaken to verify that the database correctly reflects the gender of these individuals.”³³ Indeed, we have found that Barney’s caution is more than warranted. Out of forty-two male Almas listed on an Ancestry.com search for people born between 1780 and 1820 and connected in some way to Wayne County, New York, or the surrounding region, only four were males when the search results were compared with the available records (see chart in the appendix). This means that roughly nine times out of ten, a “male” Alma was actually a misgendered woman.

These false positives seem mostly due to issues with the search engine, but there were a few genuine oddities. The 1870, United States Federal Census listed Alma Cram as male.³⁴ However, the 1850 census listed her (correctly) as a female, alongside her husband, Ebenezer Cram, with the same children and the right ages for all listed.³⁵ The 1870 entry would thus appear to be a clerical error. One Alma Johnson was male but when the census record is read carefully, you can see he was actually an Alva, not an Alma.³⁶ Similarly, Alma [Page 424]Parkhurst was male, but appears to actually be named Ahira—the two names actually look remarkably similar when written in cursive, save for the dot over the i, which is apparent on the lone 1875 New York state census record for this supposed Alma.³⁷ Alma Pratt was another male, but we do not know whether he was even in the United States prior to 1830, as he was born on the Isle of Man around 1817, and we were unable to find immigration records.³⁸ In fact, no records besides one in the 1870 census could be found to corroborate any information about this Alma.³⁹ Alma Frary was male, though typically listed as Almon or Almond. It is unclear whether Alma was a nickname or whether it reflects how the census clerk might have misheard the name Almon pronounced.⁴⁰ Because of the parameters of the Ancestry.com search, most of these individuals may not have resided in Wayne County at all, let alone where the Smiths may have encountered them.

It is clear that the search results of Ancestry.com cannot be taken at face value, and when the data is combed more closely, it indicates that as a male name, Alma was exceptionally rare in Joseph Smith’s [Page 425]time and place. Furthermore, the fact remains that it was not known to be a Hebrew name until after the Book of Mormon was published.⁴¹ Thus, if we are to hypothesize that the name Alma was randomly chosen by Joseph Smith from his environment, then it must be admitted that (1) it is much more likely he would have thought of it as a feminine name, and (2) it is quite the remarkable coincidence that it is not only a legitimate rendering of a Hebrew masculine name, but also interplays with narrative contexts relevant to its likely Hebrew etymology. While some might be inclined to consider this a lucky guess, that is much harder to do when considered within the broader context of Book of Mormon onomastics, wherein numerous non-biblical names have either been attested in Hebrew or Egyptian inscriptions discovered long after the Book of Mormon was published, or to have credible ancient Near Eastern etymologies and to be employed in the narrative in ways that interplay with those meanings precisely as is commonly done in biblical and ancient Near Eastern literature.⁴²

Appendix

Table 1 lists persons named Alma and listed as “male” on Ancestry.com born between 1780 and 1820 and having some connection to Wayne County, New York, (or neighboring counties) during their lifetimes. The “correct sex” was determined by examining the records attached to their names on Ancestry.com. Out of forty-two total, only four were actually male. Of these four, three—Alma (actually Alva) Johnson, Alma (actually Almon) Frary, and Alma (actually Ahira) Parkhurst appear to be misrecordings of more traditionally masculine names, and that may very well be the case with the final one as well (though this could not be verified). In any case, actual men named Alma appear to be relatively rare in the early nineteenth century.

[Page 426]Table 1. Incidents of Alma found in census records.