Ancient Sumerian is a language that had been lost for over 4,000 years during the lifetime of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Only in 1857, over a decade and a half after the Prophet’s martyrdom, did historians figure out how to read Akkadian and Sumerian. Yet, there is Sumerian in the Book of Mormon, a language impossible for the Prophet Joseph Smith or anyone else in world to have known. One of the places this can be seen is in the language of the Jaredites, who originated in ancient Sumeria itself. An example of this can be seen in the word used by the Nephites to describe what we call the Nephite Interpreters, which were used by the Prophet Joseph Smith to translate the Book of Mormon. The Interpreters were often referred to as “the spectacles,” by people in the 1800s, as seen in this account of Lucy Mack Smith:
I trembled so from fear lest all might be lost on account of some failure in keeping the commandments of God, that I was under the necessity of leaving the room to conceal my fealings. Joseph saw this and said, “do not be uneasy, mother, all is right— see here, I have got a key.” I knew not what he meant but took the article into my hands; and, upon <for I> examination <examined it> found, that it consisted of two smoothe three-cornered diamonds set in glasses, and the glasses were set in silver bows, which were connected with each other in much the same way, as old-fashioned spectacles.
Rough Draft Copy of History of the Prophet Joseph, by His Mother
Consequently, I or my sources will sometimes use the phrases Interpreters, Nephite Interpreters, and spectacles interchangeably below. All these phrases refer to the same object.
The Origin of the Interpreters
Before we can argue that the word the Nephites used to describe the Interpreters was Jaredite (and therefore Sumerian) in origin, we have to prove that the Interpreters came from the Jaredites themselves. For this we turn to the work of historian Dr. Don Bradley. While researching for his book The Lost 116 Pages, about what was in and what happened to the lost first 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript, Bradley came across an article written by journalist Fayette Lapham. Apparently, seeking to know more about “the Gold Bible” Lapham went to the Smith homestead to interview Joseph Smith, Jr. Joseph, Jr. wasn’t home, but his father Joseph Smith, Sr. was and he gave Lapham an interview about the content of what his son had translated. (For a discussion of Lapham and his trustworthiness, see pgs.120-121, including the footnotes.) Lapham’s account tells us information found nowhere in the Book of Mormon and which Bradley therefore believes must have originated in the Lost 166 pages. Part of this account explains how the Nephites found the Interpreters:
After sailing a long time, they came to land, went on shore, and thence they traveled through boundless forests, until, at length, they came to a country where there were a great many lakes; which country had once been settled by a very large race of men, who were very rich, having a great deal of money. From some unknown cause, this nation had become extinct; “but that money,” said Smith, “is here, now, every dollar of it.” When they, the Jews, first beheld this country, they sent out spies to see what manner of country it was, who reported that the country appeared to have been settled by a very large race of men, and had been, to all appearances, a very rich agricultural and manufacturing nation. They also found something of which they did not know the use, but when they went into the tabernacle, a voice said, “What have you got in your hand, there?” They replied that they did not know, but had come to inquire; when the voice said, “Put it on your face, and put your face in a skin, and you will see what it is.” They did so, and could see everything of the past, present, and future; and it was the same spectacles that Joseph found with the gold plates.
Fayette Lapham article emphasis mine
The extinct nation that the Nephites encountered the ruins of were, according to the internal chronology, undoubtedly from the Jaredites. Apparently among the ruins of this Jaredite city the Nephites found the Interpreters. This origin for the Interpreters is important because in our current Book of Mormon text the Interpreters simply just appear in the story with no antecedents or explanations whatsoever. Yet they are so special that they are preserved by Mosiah, who used them for translating the written remains of the fallen Jaredite nation (Mosiah 8), all the way to Moroni, who sealed them up for Joseph to use.
The Sumerian Name For The Interpreters
Mosiah 28:20 gives us the important detail that the Interpreters were given by Mosiah II to the Prophet Alma II (henceforth, just “Alma.”) This matters because in Alma 37: 21-25, this same Alma explains the cause of the destruction of the Jaredites based on what he has learned from the twenty-four plates that had been found in, “a land which was covered with bones of men, and of beasts, and was also covered with ruins of buildings of every kind, having discovered a land which had been peopled with a people who were as numerous as the hosts of Israel.” (Mosiah 8:8-9)The twenty-four plates fond in this wreckage was later translated by the Prophet Moroni, abridged, and included in the Book of Mormon under the title of the Book of Ether. (Ether 1:2)
In Alma 37, the Prophet Alma is passing on the records and relics of his people to his son Helaman and warning him about the wickedness that destroyed the Jaredite people. During this explanation and warning, Alma says that the Lord looked down on the Jaredites and, seeing that they were becoming consumed by darkness and sin:
And the Lord said: I will prepare unto my servant Gazelem, a stone, which shall shine forth in darkness unto light, that I may discover unto my people who serve me, that I may discover unto them the works of their brethren, yea, their secret works, their works of darkness, and their wickedness and abominations.
And now, my son, these interpreters were prepared that the word of God might be fulfilled, which he spake, saying: I will bring forth out of darkness unto light all their secret works and their abominations; and except they repent I will destroy them from off the face of the earth; and I will bring to light all their secrets and abominations, unto every nation that shall hereafter possess the land.
Alma 37: 23-25, emphasis my own.
Traditionally, the word Gazelem here has been interpreted as a reference to a person with the assumption being that Jaredite words were unknown to the Nephites and therefore Gazelem is a Nephite word. But the work of Jerry D. Grover calls these assumptions into question in a significant manner. In his book, Sumerian Roots of Jaredite-Derived Names and Terminology in the Book of Mormon, Grover has shown that the Jaredite language derives from ancient Sumerian. This makes sense as the Jaredites originated at the Tower of Babel and the Tower of Babel itself was likely in or a reference to ancient Sumeria and Sumerian pagan temple worship.
In this work, Grover has shown that Gazelem is a compound word, constructed of Sumerian words that respectively mean wisdom/understanding, shining, and a stone/gem. (pgs.15-16) This means that the word Gazelem is a Jaredite word and its meaning is something like, “a shining stone or gem for gaining wisdom and understanding.” We see this etymology play out in other ancient sources as well. (See Note 8.) The Book of Daniel is the story of an Israelite prophet named Daniel and his captivity in Babylon, where the Tower of Babel had been built and where the ancient Sumerians had lived. In many ways, the Babylonians were the heirs of the Sumerians. (pg. 90) Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised to see the linguistic influences of the Sumerians in the text of Daniel which would’ve been written in Mesopotamia in the same area the Jaredites originated, ancient Sumeria.
In Daniel 2:27 and Daniel 5:11 the word translated into English as soothsayer, someone who foretells the future through mystical means, is gā·zə·rîn. An ancient Sumerian poem, not rediscovered until 1840, refers to “gazelle stones” which are described as “blazing holocausts” and as having “flared up against me in the rebel regions like a conflagration.” According to Grover’s book, “gazelle” here would be translated from the Sumerian as something like “stone of wisdom/understanding.” The full meaning the gazelle stones of the poem then, including their description as blazing and flaring, could be understood as “glowing/shining/blazing stones of understanding and wisdom.” (pgs.15-16) Not unlike the Gazelem itself. In fact, if you were to make a Sumerian compound word that meant “shining stone of wisdom/understanding” all you have to do is add to “Gazelle” what Grover transliterates as “lum” and which this Sumerian Lexicon translates as “lam” in order to get “Gazellam,” a.k.a. Gazelem.
Gazelem alone, and its match to ancient Sumerian texts which Joseph Smith and no Westerner had any knowledge of until decades after the Book of Mormon was published, is a powerful witness of its ancient origin and divine transmission. There is no way that anyone, least of all Joseph Smith, could have constructed one perfectly Sumerian word in 1829, much less the hundreds that Grover found in the Book of Mormon during his research. The work truly is an ancient text preserved by the hand of God and translated by the power of God through Joseph Smith for us today.
The Jaredite/Sumerian meaning of Gazelem becomes even clearer when we remember that John H. Gilbert, the non-member printer of the original Book of Mormon, added at least 30,000 punctuation marks to the text before printing it. This is because the original Book of Mormon manuscript had almost no puncuation whatsoever. This is significant because if you read Alma 37:23 without those punctuation marks it reads, “I will prepare unto my servant Gazelem a stone which shall shine forth in darkness unto light…” The word Gazelem is left untranslated, but the text following it provides us an appositive gloss, an in-text interpretation of the untranslated word used by Alma. The verse is not saying that the Lord will give a stone to his servant Gazelem, but that the Lord will give His unnamed servant a Gazelem, a stone which will “shine forth in darkness unto light,” and provide wisdom and understanding to His unnamed servant. The Gazelem enables the servant to “see everything of the past, present, and future” and therefore reveal the sins of the Jaredites, the consequences of those sins, and call them to repentance.
This makes me wonder if Alma himself used the Interpreters to read the Jaredite plates, which explains why he is using the Jaredite word for the Interpreters. The description of the Gazelem calls to mind the story of the Brother of Jared in Ether 3 obtaining shining stones touched by the finger of the Lord so that they will shine in the darkness of the Jaredite barges. That account records that the Lord Jehovah, the pre-mortal Jesus Christ, gave to the Brother of Jared, “two stones,” (Ether 3:23) and that after recieving these stones the Brother of Jared could see:
[A]ll the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth. For he [the Lord] had said unto him in times before, that if he would believe in him that he could show unto him all things—it should be shown unto him; therefore the Lord could not withhold anything from him, for he knew that the Lord could show him all things.
Ether 3:25-26
Here the Brother of Jared cannot have anything “witheld…from his sight,” while in Mosiah 8:17 we are told that “all things be revealed, or, rather, shall secret things be made manifest,” to Mosiah when using the Interpreters, and in Alma 37 the Prophet Alma says that through the Gazelem he could see “all their secret works,” (Alma 37:25) Of using the “glasses,” or Interpreters, the Prophet Joseph Smith said, “I can see anything. They are marvelous.” This all leads to an obvious conclusion. The Gazelem that Alma has are not like the Nephite Interpreters. The Gazelem is the Interpreters. The Prophet Alma even calls the Gazelem, “these interpreters,” in Alma 37:24.
The Gazelem was lost during the Jaredite Civil Wars, rediscovered by the Nephites as they explored the Jaredite ruins, searching for a safe haven from the Lamanites. The Nephites called the Gazelem by a new name, the Interpreters, because it allowed them to interpret the ancient Jaredite-Sumerian writings they found amongst the ruins. This included the twenty-four plates of Jaredite history eventually abridged by Moroni as the Book of Ether. These Interpreters were handed down through the Book of Mormon prophets until they came to the Prophet Moroni who buried them alongside the Book of Mormon plates until they were given to the Prophet Joseph Smith. He then used them to translate the text of the Book of Mormon plates into a form of English and published them to the world. Because of their appearance, those around Joseph often described them as spectacles. But they’re all the same thing.
Testimony of the Restoration
Now, how on the Earth was the Prophet Joseph Smith supposed to understand ancient Sumerian and seed it throughout the Book of Mormon’s text after the Nephite encounter with the Sumeria-in-origin Jaredites? No one on the planet understood the language anymore than you or I would understand Martian. Yet, here is a young man with, at most, two to three sporadic years of total education in the basics of read, writing, and arithmetic repeatedly transliterating and translating a language completely dead for most of human history. At not once, as my example here has it for the sake of space, but hundreds of times as revealed in Jerry Grover’s book on the subject.
How is he supposed to have done this mighty work? Where is he supposed to have gotten the wisdom, the education, even the practice at transliteration and translation?
The answer is that he couldn’t, and he didn’t. Because it was impossible. Yet, here it is, the impossible made real. It is proof of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the Prophet Joseph Smith and that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Christ and is lead by Him today through modern Prophets and Apostles.
The Book of Mormon is a miracle. Its translation from multiple ancient languages into English by the power of God through the Prophet Joseph Smith is an authentic miracle. The presence and and correct translation of ancient Sumerian into English is just one more powerful evidence of God’s work in the creation, preservation, translation, and production of that incredible work of scripture. But, this is not merely an intellectual exercise.
Like all true revelation, understanding the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon as a miracle of God is a rational, emotional, and spiritual experience. The Book of Mormon is a gift from God to us and everyone who accepts it and lives by its teachings will find their lives incredibly blessed as they draw nearer to God by doing so than they could in any other manner. I know that from personal experience. Living the truths taught in the Book of Mormon have made me a better father, a better, husband, a better man, have brought me greater hope, joy, and peace in my life, and given me a closer relationship to my family, my community, and my God than any other text.
It can and will do the same for you if you do the same. That’s why it exists – to bless every aspect of your life and to change you into a better person than you can even imagine.