ABSTRACT

Although forms of the name Sariah show up repeatedly as a male’s name in the Bible, it was only attested as an authentic Hebrew feminine name long after the publication of the Book of Mormon.

EVIDENCE SUMMARY

Sariah in the Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon introduces Sariah, Lehi’s wife and Nephi’s mother, in the header found at the beginning of 1 Nephi 1: “An account of Lehi and his wife Sariah.” Her name is mentioned four more times throughout Nephi’s account (1 Nephi 2:5; 5:1, 6; 8:14). As one of the few named women in the Book of Mormon, Sariah’s character and role in the narrative has garnered considerable attention by readers. Her name, perhaps meaning “Yahweh is prince,” would be spelled in Hebrew as śryh and would have been pronounced anciently as either sar-yah or sar-yahu.

Two Attestations of Sariah as a Women’s Name

“Although śyrh is not found as a female name in the Bible,” writes Latter-day Saint archaeologist, Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “it is well documented as a male name in ancient Israel, appearing nineteen times in the Hebrew Old Testament, representing eleven different men.” The name is often transliterated as Seraiah, as seen in the King James Bible, but some evidence suggests that Sariah is the more correct rendering of the name.vLong after the Book of Mormon was published, evidence surfaced for Sariah being an authentic Hebrew feminine name as well.

In the early 1990s, Chadwick pointed out that Seraiah/Sariah appears “in a reconstructed form as the name of a Jewish woman living at Elephantine in Upper Egypt during the fifth century B.C.” The document is written in Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, but the translators of the papyri “specify that the names are Hebrew.” In its reconstructed form, the relevant portion of the document reads “Sariah daughter of Hoshea.” Although the final h in “Sariah” and most of the spelling for “daughter of” is missing in the underlying Hebrew, the leading scholars of the Elephantine documents consider the reconstruction “nearly certain.”

In 2019, Neal Rappleye drew attention to yet another attestation of Seraiah/Sariah from Elephantine, this one from an ostracon reading “Seraiah daughter of […].” In this case, the parentage information is missing, but “Seraiah/Sariah” (śryh) and “daughter of” (brt) are both clearly legible. This document provides definitive evidence that Sariah was indeed a Hebrew feminine name close to the time of Lehi.

A Northern Israelite Connection

The presence of a Hebrew name at this time period (5th century BC) in an Egyptian document should not come as a surprise, as Jews from Israel migrated into Egypt before and after the time of Lehi, bringing their culture (including names and religious traditions) to that part of the world. Biblical scholar Karel van der Toorn has argued that “the entire picture of the religious life at Elephantine … strongly suggest that the historical core” of that community “came from Northern Israel.” This point is relevant to the discussion because Lehi and his family were also from northern Israel, specifically from the tribe of Manassah (Alma 10:3). According to Rappleye,

These details add to the significance of these two references to women named ŚRYH (Seraiah/Sariah) at Elephantine. In both the Hebrew Bible and the epigraphic evidence from Judah, ŚRYH(W) is only attested as a male’s name. While this could simply be due to the limitations of our available data set, it is also possible the attestation of ŚRYH as a woman’s name both in the Book of Mormon and at Elephantine and only in these sources, reflects a specifically northern Israelite practice.

Conclusion

If the Book of Mormon were mere fiction and Joseph Smith had simply borrowed the name Sariah from the Bible, he may have been more inclined to spell it as Seraiah and to give it to a male character in his story. Yet the name is spelled as Sariah in the Book of Mormon and given to a female, both details that subsequent research has validated.

According to Chadwick, “The Elephantine Papyri were discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century (prior to 1903), far too late for Joseph Smith to have known of the female name Sariah” in its texts. Being unlikely to have been derived from the Bible and virtually impossible to have been known from scholarly sources, the presence of this authentic Hebrew name in the Book of Mormon, given to a female character of northern Israelite heritage living in the early 6th century BC, adds credibility to the text’s claimed ancient origins.