The Book of Mormon Site

Sherem

שרם

(^ allegedly)

According to the the Book of Mormon Onomasticon (the academic resource on Book of Mormon names) at BYU.edu, the unique-to-the-Book-of-Mormon name Sherem, found in Jacob 7, and its corresponding root *šrm or the above, does not exist in northwest Semitic languages, including Biblical Hebrew.

Some real roots that are a real stretch

There may be several suggetsed ancient roots, but none really hold up under examination (again, see above-linked Onomasticon page):

• The root exists in other Semitic languages: In East Semitic (Babylonian and Assyrian), the word šarāmu means “to cut out, to hack out,” and in Arabic, sarrama means “to cut in pieces.” But these are not Biblical Hebrew.

• The closest Biblical Hebrew connection: The root might possibly exist as a hapax legomenon (word appearing only once) in Jeremiah 31:40, where it could mean “the cut up/hacked up” referring to the dead, but even there the preferred reading is different.

1. חרם
2. חֵרֶם
3. חָרַם

• The most likely alleged Hebrew etymology: The Hebrew word ḥerem (above, 1, Strong’s H2763/H2764) means “ban, taboo, consecrated for destruction” and could theoretically connect to Sherem as a dysphemism meaning “He-who-was-smitten; devoted-to-destruction” This would be Strong’s H2763 (the verb charam, above, 2) and H2764 (the noun, cherem, above 3).

(Note, my text editor has weird support for right-to-left text editing and left-to-right text editing on the same line, so I cannot figure out how to put the Hebrew inline.)

Blue Letter Bible / Strong’s H2763-2764:

Strong’s H2763 (charam) is translated as “destroy, utterly, devote, accursed, consecrate” and means “to seclude; specifically to devote to religious uses (especially destruction)”

Mutally exclusive interpretations

1. If the name “Sherem” was simply coined by JS Jr. with no reference to Hebrew, then there is nothing to discover by investigating the name because it would be meaningless or coined, just empty mouth sounds.

2. If JS Jr. learned some Hebrew roots in a Bible commentary (perhaps Adam Clarke’s?) and deliberately put that here, to be clever, using stricly naturalistic means, there is no way to prove or disprove that. (However if he did so, to deliberately make it be a dysphemism, it suffers the same problem as 3 below.)

3. However if we grant that this was really a human who existed, and that the name was transmitted by Jacob / Mormon / JS Jr. correctly, the idea that this is a dysphemism is its own kind of barrier to believing that this actually happened. We are left wondering if Jacob changed it when he wrote it down. (See note in 4 below about no parent naming a kid a clear dysphemism and no one walking around telling other people to call himself by such a deliberate epithet.)

4. There is no way a Hebrew-rooted Sherem (if he actually existed—which is a point where the burden of proof is still on the believers) was named that by himself or his parents. That makes no sense. For example, my name, Jared, comes from the root JRD / H3381, which has a related Hebrew root JRDN / H3383 as the word Jordan, or the Jordan River in the Middle East, which descends from the Sea of Galilee, south, down to the Dead Sea. The root relates to those meaning “to descend,” “one who descends,” or “descender” and that’s why we see the name Jared/Jered four times in the Bible in genealogies. But there is no negative connotation to the name Jordan or Jared or JRDN or JRD, so my parents were free to pick the name for me, a name with history, and not a negative one. With a name like CHRM or HRM rooted in something awful (assuming it might have been), Sherem’s parents would be monsters to name a baby that, and unless his enemies named him that and he adopted it (like “Mormon” was an epithet in early Latter-day Saint history, and then was adopted by them for about 180 years), he did not call himself that name.

Also, going out and looking for Semitic roots to proper names in the Book of Mormon is the very definition of parallelomania and quite a direct way of admitting one is restating the premise, without offering up an actual ancient text for other scholars to investigate (compare the Hebrew Masoretic text or the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls, the thousands of Greek New Testament manuscripts, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, etc.). If one goes looking through nearly 8,674 Biblical Hebrew words one is bound to find something, even if one has to fudge things a little.

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