DiscussMormonism.com

First, the prolegomena.

The investigations of Zeezrom into Jaredite migration routes and a possible link with Mycenaean Greece has reminded me that the old problem of the etymology of a known Jaredite word is as yet (but not for much longer, if the LORD will be so kind) unsolved: deseret. I believe the Greek connection might provide the key.

Before using that key to unlock the mystery, though, we must understand why the prevailing theories are so profoundly unsatisfying. There are, to my knowledge, two basic theories, equally misguided, equally violating constraints of place and time, and above all equally inelegant.

The one with the widest currency today is that popularized by Professor Nibley, although he was not its originator. According to this etymology, deseret is from the Egyptian dšrt. This is the word for the red crown worn by the kings of Lower Egypt, but, as Nibley noticed that another scholar pointed out (Alan Gardiner), the ideogram dšrt is occasionally used in place of the ideogram for honeybee, thus, there is a connection between the honeybee (in Egyptian, bit) and Jareditish deseret. As they say in the dialect of Staten Island: bada bing, bada boom.

In the words of a more recent commentator, Nibley's articulation of this etymology was, "not only very subtle but, quite frankly, brilliant." I would say that it is not only utterly convoluted and forced, but, quite frankly, nonsense. I am puzzled why this commentator sees it as brilliant, since it solves nothing and leads only to a series of absurdities. Since when did absurdity become a marker of brilliance?

This etymology compels us to imagine a scenario in which steppe dwellers (as Nibley elsewhere argued) and nomads in exile (as the text of Ether confirms) somehow did not have a word for honeybee. Given the fact that the text tells us that early Jaredites were such devoted beekeepers that they not only traveled with their bees but that they even packed their apiaries into barges, we can assume that beekeeping had cultural and economic importance. The culture that travels in proto-submarines with bees is not a culture that takes their beekeeping lightly. Nor had that culture encountered any Egyptians yet (in fact, nowhere in the text are they said to have encountered any Egyptians at all); they were already beekeepers before their out-migration post Babel. Yet, for the Nibley theory to work, the early beekeeping Jaredites must have needed to borrow the word for honeybee. Cross-linguistically, it is extremely unusual for language groups to borrow words for things and concepts they already have, unless they are in extremely close and prolonged contact with other speakers of other language groups. If so, we should expect some record of that either in the text of Ether or in Egyptian records. Since there is no such evidence anywhere, we must assume this word was borrowed, in which case we are faced with an absurd scenario in which Jaredite beekeepers had no word for the insect they so devotedly tended, despite its centrality to early Jaredite culture and economy.

Another absurdity, pointed out by a recent commentator as a preface to his own etymology (discussed below), is that the Nibley etymology is contradictory: whenever the Egyptian ideogram for the red crown does replace that of honeybee, it would no longer be pronounced as dšrt but instead as bit. So, we have to imagine further that these Jaredite beekeepers, in addition to having no word for "bee" until living in close proximity with Egyptians, were (unlike the mass of Egyptians) so learned in hieroglyphic word play that, instead of borrowing the word for bee (bit), they borrowed a word for "red crown of Lower Egypt" because its ideogram is on rare occasions used in place of the ideogram for bee. So, these Jaredite beekeepers had no word for the bees they kept until they lived among Egyptians and learned hieroglyphic, but they for some reason did not borrow the word for bee; instead they borrowed the word represented by an ideogram (dšrt) that sometimes represents the bee, although when it does so it is pronounced bit, which pronunciation means "bee." They were not beekeepers, therefore, but red-crown-of-lower-Egypt-keepers. In the parlance of our times: WTF?

Nibley's commentator, as I mentioned, proposed his own etymology in attempt to overcome some of this absurdity, but he really runs into similar problems. His solution is to look at the Hebrew word for bee (dəḇôrāh), whose underlying consonantal skeleton (DBRT) is very close to that presumed in deseret (DSRT), if both are Semitic. There are two problems. First, as the author of this etymology himself honestly admits, it is extremely difficult to account for the phonological disparity between B and S (the old BS problem, a perennial obstacle for apologists). He proposes some speculative solutions, and he deserves credit for his honesty, but we can't take this etymology on vague possibility, picking from a menu of linguistic entrées simply on gut feeling. One cannot be a cafeteria historical linguist.

The other problem is the same one facing the Nibley solution: why would beekeepers need to borrow the word for bee? It's absurd. It is also absurd to suggest that they would borrow it from Hebrew, the first attestation of which is at least a millennium or more after the early Jaredite migrations, when the Jaredite Res Gestae say that, before their barge-caravan across the hollow back of the glistening sea, "they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees" (Ether 2:30). Surely, they had a word for bee at that point, and surely they did not get that word from a language which did not yet exist. It's one thing to turn stones into light bulbs in vacuum-sealed barges; it's another thing to travel through time to borrow a word for those swarmy things that are so central to your culture and economy in the present, so central that you're willing to live for months on end with those stinging swarmy things (for which you have no word) in a vacuum-sealed, stone-lit barge.

One solution, implicit in the assumption that Jaredite was Semitic, is that both DSRT and DBRT are reflexes of the same proto-Semitic root. If that is so, however, we run into another absurdity. For the most phonologically conservative of all Semitic languages, Arabic, confirms that the B is the earlier consonant (Arabic dibr, "swarm"). It is significant that this consonant is also in Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew, Phoenecian (dobrot), and Aramaic (in all dialects where this word is found, and across the entire history of that language and its various dialects), for it is unlikely that all of these innovated from an original S in common with each other. No other Semitic language—or in fact any language that I can discover—has such a drastic phonological shift. It's not impossible; but it is unparalleled. Thus, Jareditish was the likely phonological innovator. If so, we not only face the BS problem, but now we have an added problem: if Jareditish also stems from proto-Semitic stock, it is now one of the earliest attested such languages (perhaps the earliest) and the closest chronologically to proto-Semitic, and at the same time it would be the most distant phonologically from proto-Semitic! That is absurd.

Chronology and culture are the stumbling blocks to both theories, and both theories address these problems by ignoring them. In that void we find only absurdities. These absurdities arise because of an unquestioned assumption that the language of the Jaredites must have been Afro-asiatic, either Egyptian or Semitic. What indication is there in the text? None whatsoever. The only basis for this assumption is a misreading of the relationship between Genesis and Ether 1:3-6, a misreading that goes back to Sjodhal's commentary.

Genesis 10 gives the genealogies of Noah's sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The Semites, obviously, descend from Shem. In genealogizing Shem, the Bible lists several descendants, among whom are Peleg and Joktan, the sons of Eber (whence the word "Hebrew"). It was in the days of Peleg and Joktan that the earth was divided, i.e. the events of Babel resulted in one group remaining in the Old World and the other going to the New—the Jaredites. Moreover, one of Joktan's sons was named Jerah, and that last consonant in Hebrew (ḥ) could easily be a mistake for "d"; the difference is a single stroke in the Hebrew script (ח vs. ד), so Jerah might actually be Jared. All of this is within the genealogy of Shem, and thus the Jaredites are assumed to be Semites and to have spoken a language related to Hebrew.

At Ether 1:3-6, however, Moroni is explicit that he is picking up right at the point where the biblical account finishes the Babel story. The key to understanding this, therefore, is not Genesis 10 but Genesis 11. Genesis 11:1-9 recounts the fall of Babel, then at v. 10 begins a doublet of the genealogy of Shem, the son of Noah. What of the other sons? We never hear of them again in the Bible. But remember that Moroni is intentionally going to recount what is not given in the Bible. That is why, in Ether 1, he picks up right at the end of the Babel story, e.g. he picks up right after Genesis 11:9. That means that what he has must be different from Genesis 11:10 ff.—different from the genealogy of Shem, in other words. The Semitic line is not his concern, so Jaredites were not Semitic. And since it is unlikely that any descendants of Ham, who were forbidden the priesthood, would have been allowed to experience the pre-mortal Christ's presence, we can assume he is not writing about the Hamitic line. We are left with only one option: Moroni's redaction of the Jaredite Res Gestae is concerned with the descendants of Japheth.

Now, Japeth (Heb. Yapet) is the equivalent of the Greek Iapetos, an equivalence made as early as Josephus. His genealogy is given at Genesis 10:2-5, where among his sons are listed Tarshish and Javan. Tarshish is the eponymous ancestor of Tartessos, a harbor city in western Spain known to Herodotus (1.163 and 4.152) and Isaiah (2:16; incidentally, a verse that poses problems for the Book of Mormon, as we have elsewhere hashed out on this board). Like the Jaredites, the origins of the Tartessians are a mystery, as is the affiliation of their language, which survives in a few inscriptions from Spain, but the point here is that Japeth's line is firmly north and western in its geography. That is not the geography of Semitic speakers but rather of Indo-European language groups.

Japeth's son Javan is more significant, for "Javan" (Heb. Yāwān) is simply the standard Hebrew word for "Ionian," e.g. the Greeks of the Western part of Anatolia in particular but for Semitic speakers it was the term for Greeks in general (cf. Arabic yunān) and even Sanskrit (Yuvan). The Ionians (Homeric Grosskreutz. Iaones, Linear B i-ja-wo-ne) were thus descendants of Japeth, and since the Jaredites were also likely descendants of Japeth, as I have argued here, then a genealogical and linguistic connection between the Ionian Greeks and the Jaredites seems most likely.

Zeezrom's archaeological arguments only reinforce that probability. If we want to understand the etymology of the Jareditish word deseret, the best data for a historical linguistic analysis is not with Semitic or Egyptian data but with Greek and the language group most closely related to Greek, Indo-Iranian. In my next post on this topic, I will offer such an approach, adducing Greek, Avestan, and other Indo-European languages to propose an etymology of deseret that will be as elegant as it is coherent. It won't face the BS problem that plagues other apologetic etymologies, and it will be totally not absurd at all.

Magnificent, consul! This is highly significant work. To add a little extra grist for the mill--if the Jaredites are Indo-Europeans, then the transition from Jaredites to Mulekites/Lehites might foreshadow the prophesied transition from the time of the Gentiles to the flowering of the Lamanites. The Gospel seems to be oscillating between these two groups, according to Smith's schema.

Symmachus,

I was proud of myself because I followed you about to the Japeth part, and then the wheels just wouldn't turn anymore. I'm going to try to read that last part again tomorrow morning after I drink a Monster. I'm sure the apologists are kicking themselves over not being able to rope you into their gang, you'd be a fantastic apologist just on account that people would have such a hard time keeping up. I mean, you should seriously consider coming up with a sock puppet and submitting to the Interpreter. Well, I hope Kishkumen reads this as I know he is an authority on Jaredites.

OMG this is amazing.

The Harvard School of Indo-Europeanists, chiefly Calvert Watkins, has made a strong case that the various poetic and mythic traditions of the different Indo-European languages can be used in tandem both to understand each other and to reconstruct an Indo-European proto-poetics. The greatest Hellenist of our time, Martin West, has drawn from their research to offer fascinating, if not always persuasive arguments about early Greek poetry. That is my method here. I start with the Indo-European etymology of deseret by looking at Homer, an Ionian himself and thus, like the Jaredites, a descendant of Japheth. The Jaredites and Ionians, if not identical, certainly possessed shared linguistic and thus cultural traits. Reading Homer can tell us something about the Jaredites, as Hugh Nibley long ago suspected, and I hope here to show how Homer can solve the mystery of deseret, not by reading him sloppily, as Nibley does, but by reading him closely, as any good philologist must.

In Book 2 of the Iliad, a false dream leads to a ruse and eventually a melee in which Greek soldiers gather on the plain before Troy under the impression that they are about to go home after years of war; only we and the Greek leaders know that more war awaits. As the soldiers gather, Homer compares them to a swarm of bees (2.87-93):

The Poet wrote:Like the swarms of clustering bees that issue forever
in fresh bursts from the hollow in the stone, and hang like
bunched grapes as they hover beneath the flowers in springtime
fluttering in swarms together this way and that way,
so the many nations of men from the ships and the shelters
along the front of the deep sea beach marched in order

(trans. Lattimore)

ἠΰτε ἔθνεα εἶσι μελισσάων ἁδινάων
πέτρης ἐκ γλαφυρῆς αἰεὶ [4νέον ἐρχομενάων,
βοτρυδὸν δὲ πέτονται ἐπ' ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσιν:
αἳ μέν τ' ἔνθα ἅλις πεποτήαται, αἳ δέ τε ἔνθα:
ὣς τῶν ἔθνεα πολλὰ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων
ἠϊόνος προπάροιθε βαθείης ἐστιχόωντο

The essential simile hinges on coming out from the home: as bees go for forth from their homes, so the Greek soldiers go forth here from theirs. The Homeric word for shelter in this passage (klisia) is basically a tent. It's the place where you lie down and is a noun connected to the verb klinein, which means "to lie down" a word that survives in English via Latin (inline, recline, etc.). Keeping in mind then that the early Jaredites, Indo-European descendants of Japheth, were nomadic and likely dwelt in tents until they reached sea—especially if they were steppe people, as Nibley argued—we should expect to see these sorts of similes in their cultural stock of artistic and religious expression. And since they were avid beekeepers , as Moroni's redaction of Ether tells us quite clearly, we should expect to find the imagery of both tents and bees in their cultural expression. We should expect it all the more because, like Aeneas carrying his gods from the smouldering cinders of Troy to the bosom of Italy, the Jaredites brought their bees with them wherever they went. It was, in short, an act of apiary piety and practically a religious obligation.

This is the key to deseret, which is not only the single Jareditish word we have, but also an obviously significant one. Why would Moroni mention it if it were not significant, if it had somehow struck him as relevant enough to be included in a clipped redaction of the Jaredite epic of migration? Its full significance may have escaped him, but he clearly sensed the weight of this culturally-loaded term, and armed with Homer, its significance will not escape us. We shall return to Homer shortly.

Semiticist approaches to this word have treated it as a single lexeme, DSRT, and that single Protean lexeme is forced, as we saw in the last post, into contradictory and absurd semantic contortions. Mormon apologists who favor the Semticist approach assume that vowels are not important. This is a theory they always hold for ancient Semitic languages (e.g. NHM inscription), but of course I know from personal experience that this is not true for fluent speakers of modern Semitic languages (yours truly has learned that the hard way). Vowels do matter, even in Semitic languages—the entire passive system in Arabic depends simply on a vowel change—and all the more so in Indo-European. I therefore will argue that we should, first of all, avoid a reductive consonantal skeleton; the word we need to deal with is not DSRT but deseret.

Keeping the vowels forces us to question the assumption held by apologists of the Semticist school that this is a single lexeme. In fact, it is two: des- and -eret. We are dealing, in some, not with one lexical unit but two: it's a compound word.

From an Indo-European perspective, especially in terms of the Greek and Indo-Iranian branches, des- is a very obvious lexeme, familar in Greek from despotes, "Lord of the House," which has an exact cognate in Old Avestan dəŋpaiti and Vedic Sanskrit dampati. In each of these, -potes/paiti/pati derive from an Indo-European word for "lord" or "master", and the first elements (des-/dəŋ-/dam-) all derive from the root *dem-/dom- (the vowel was variable in Indo-European), which means "house" or "shelter" and survives in English (via Latin) in such words as "domicile," "domestic," and even "dominate." It has a Germanic cognatic in the word "timber," which is the material one uses to build a house. The connection between these was noticed by the great linguist Émile Benveniste nearly 50 years ago, and it is a pity that he never put his brilliance to Jaredite studies.

Notice, however, how the Greek differs from the Indo-Iranian reflexes (Avestan and Vedic): des- in Greek vs. Vedic dam- and Avestan dəŋ-. The Indo-European form can easily be reconstructed, since Avestan -əŋ- comes from an earlier -ms-, and the -a- in the Vedic dam- reflects an earlier Democrat- for reasons too tangential to go into here, but reasons that are nevertheless well-known to Indo-Europeanists. Thus the earliest form of this word was *dms-, and from comparative morphological analysis, as Benveniste and later Jochi Schindler demonstrated, we know that the -s was a morphological ending attached to the root—to be precise, it is the genitive singular, which still survives in the English possessive "s" and in words like "his" and "whose"—and when that ending was attached, the vowel in the root disappeared in certain classes of Indo-European nouns, so *dm- was the form of the root to which the -s was attached.

tl;dr: the earliest form is *dms-, which means "of the house" and can mean "out of the house" ("of" and variations are a basic translation of the genitive case in most Indo-European languages, but it sometimes the translation is much more elaborate, especially in early Greek and Indo-Iranian languages).

The Greek reflex of that original Indo-European form is where the connection to Jareditish comes in. For one of the significant phonological rules that differentiates Greek from other Indo-European languages is that certain consonants (n and m) disappeared when no vowel followed or preceded them. That is why Indo-European *dms- becomes in Greek the form des- that we see in despotes, "Lord (-potes) of the house (des-)," whence the English word "despot."

I emphasize again: this rule about consonants is a phonological rule in Greek, and, given what we have said about the origins of the Jaredites and their connections to the Greek Ionians, it is exactly what we would expect to see in Jareditish, and here we have it in des-eret, "the eret of/from the house."

Now, for the second part of the compound, -eret. Mycenaean, the earliest stage of Greek and one of the most phonologically conservative of any Indo-European languages (as Andrew Garrett showed in an important article), provides the evidence. Mycenaean Greek was written in a syllabic script called Linear B that was imperfectly adapted to the sound-structure of the Greek language. For one thing, it is very imprecise in its vowels; for another, it doesn't distinguish between different kinds of consonants. The most common example of the latter is the distinction between voiced and aspirated consonants and voiceless consonants (thus Linear B "b" might also represent "p" or even "ph"). The most significant for our purposes here is the fact that Linear B does not distinguish between "r" and "l." Thus a word like basileus ("king"), familiar from Classical and Homeric Greek, will show up in the Linear B as pa-si-re-u. The only way to extract meaningful linguistic information from a given Linear B text is to use later Greek as a guide.

Zeezrom has already demonstrated a likely archaeological link between the Jaredites and Mycenaean Greece, so we can apply the process of reading Linear B to Jareditish -eret, which I would first reconstruct as *-elet. This strongly resembles the Greek verbal root ala-, which is the essential part of Greek verbs like alasthai ("to wander"), and nouns like aletes ("wanderer"). This last is what I think we have here: -eret is in fact aletes. The r/l alternation poses no problem, nor does the slight vowel alternation between a/e (-eret vs. alet-), because in compound words, the "a" in Greek becomes a long "e" (usually spelled with an eta). Postulating -elet for -eret is unproblematic in terms of Greek sound laws and Linear B. No absurdities here. And behind the last "t" in -elet there is probably the very common Greek suffix -tes (cf. poietes, "poet" and polites "citizen," as well as despotes, which we've already referenced).

If the -eret indeed reflects an underlying -eletes, it would have been expressed in Linear B as *e-re-ta most likely. We must remember, however, that Jareditish, such as we have it, has been filtered through Moroni, with his Hebrew-Egyptian language and script, removed from either of those two languages by a thousand years. Neither Hebrew nor Egyptian (nor, most likely, the Nephitish hybrid) are related to Greek, so it is understandable if that single "a" should not survive in Moroni's transliteration into the Nephite script, centuries after the composition of the original Jareditish Res Gestae. If the Linear B was originally *de-se-re-ta, we should not be too troubled by the loss of a single "a" through under the pressures of time and linguistic difference. And to reiterate, that *de-se-re-ta would have been the written reflection of spoken *deseletes, "wanderer of/from the house."

To sum up, my reconstruction of deseret posits that, in Jareditish, this was probably *deseletes, a compound of des- ("of the house") and aletes ("wanderer"). The structure of this compound is paralleled in the perfectly good Greek word despotes ("lord of the house"), which, as we have noted, also has direct parallels in other Indo-European languages closely related to Greek, Vedic Sanskrit and Old Avestan. However, does the semantic information contained in my reconstructed *deseletes—"wanderer of/from the house"—support this reconstruction or complicate it?

Here's where we return to Homer, for *deseletes, depending on how extensive the use of prepositions was in Jareditish, could also be translated as "wanderer out of the house" or better, "that which wanders from the house." What better description of the activity of bees, which wander each day out of their shelter? Wandering from their shelter is their very existence. Now, from the perspective of a culture where beekeeping is economically central and loaded with an ideological weight that is practically religious, we can see how that simile could be extended to that culture's members and become a metaphor for how that culture conceived of itself (as bee similes universally do), in the same way that Homer extends it to the Greek soldiers on the plane of Troy: they go out of their shelters in a swarm. We can express the parallel semantic relationship between Homer's simile and deseret,

In Homer, the formula is: FROM SHELTER (ἄπο...κλισιάων) + MOTION WORD (εἶσι)

In deseret, the formula is: FROM SHELTER (des)+ MOTION WORD (-eletes)

There is a shared simile here, possibly inherited from a common source, but clearly connected. And there is meaning here, as well. Like the bees they tend in their wanderings from a fallen Babel, so too do the Jaredites. The bee was a central image to Jaredite culture because it was a mirror in the animal world of what the Jaredites themselves were doing in the world of men: each Jaredite was a deseletes—a wanderer from his home—and all the early Jaredites a swarm of wanderers from home in search of a new one. The bee was not simply a source of economic value or food but indeed a symbol of their status as homeless wanderers. It was through the word deseletes, garbled by time and ignorance into deseret, that a living connection with that symbol was made. The bee was a vehicle for early Jaredite self-perception, and deseletes/deseret was the linguistic expression of that self-perception. Indeed, it is entirely possible, though not provable, that this is the Jareditish ethnonym: the word for "Jaredite" in Jareditish. In any case, it must have been a recurring simile in the original Jaredite epic, at least to such an extent that it struck the epic's redactor, Moroni, to include in the very opening lines of his redaction.

In my next and last post on Jaredite etymologies, I will show, again using evidence from Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and Old Avestan, how the ideology of the bee was reflected in the name of the brother of Jared (revealed not in scripture but by the Prophet Joseph in one of his more revealing moments), and how that symbolic name contains within it the story of the epic barge-journey of the wandering Jaredites.

The best part is its all derived from a story that begins with a guy praying that he and his family not have their language confounded.

Through the lack of proper building permits, the Tower of Babel faced the holy wrecking ball and the language of the various tradesmen was scrambled. Can't the apologist take cover under this language scrambling once the people of Shinar were scattered from Mycenae to the New Jersey shores?

This is an amazing piece of satire, almost Swiftian in parts.

I know it's pretty dense reading, but all connoisseurs of apologetic scholarship should at least skim it, if only to have the pleasure of coming across little delights such as this, in a discussion of Semitic phonology:

(the old BS problem, a perennial obstacle for apologists)

It took careful preparation to lay the ground for that, but it was worth it!

But I am afraid that this work may represent a huge missed opportunity. On this board, it will amuse the people who are aware of the dual background of this piece in Mopologetic scholarship, and real scholarship. It ought however, in my view, to have been submitted for publication to (say) Mormon Interpreter under an assumed name. If it had been accepted, we might have been able to enjoy our very own miniature 'Sokal Affair' once it had been out for a while.

Symmachus wrote:Zeezrom has already demonstrated a likely archaeological link between the Jaredites and Mycenaean Greece, so we can apply the process of reading Linear B to Jareditish -eret, which I would first reconstruct as *-elet. This strongly resembles the Greek verbal root ala-, which is the essential part of Greek verbs like alasthai ("to wander"), and nouns like aletes ("wanderer"). This last is what I think we have here: -eret is in fact aletes. The r/l alternation poses no problem, nor does the slight vowel alternation between a/e (-eret vs. alet-), because in compound words, the "a" in Greek becomes a long "e" (usually spelled with an eta). Postulating -elet for -eret is unproblematic in terms of Greek sound laws and Linear B. No absurdities here. And behind the last "t" in -elet there is probably the very common Greek suffix -tes (cf. poietes, "poet" and polites "citizen," as well as despotes, which we've already referenced).

If the -eret indeed reflects an underlying -eletes, it would have been expressed in Linear B as *e-re-ta most likely. We must remember, however, that Jareditish, such as we have it, has been filtered through Moroni, with his Hebrew-Egyptian language and script, removed from either of those two languages by a thousand years. Neither Hebrew nor Egyptian (nor, most likely, the Nephitish hybrid) are related to Greek, so it is understandable if that single "a" should not survive in Moroni's transliteration into the Nephite script, centuries after the composition of the original Jareditish Res Gestae. If the Linear B was originally *de-se-re-ta, we should not be too troubled by the loss of a single "a" through under the pressures of time and linguistic difference. And to reiterate, that *de-se-re-ta would have been the written reflection of spoken *deseletes, "wanderer of/from the house."

To sum up, my reconstruction of deseret posits that, in Jareditish, this was probably *deseletes, a compound of des- ("of the house") and aletes ("wanderer"). The structure of this compound is paralleled in the perfectly good Greek word despotes ("lord of the house"), which, as we have noted, also has direct parallels in other Indo-European languages closely related to Greek, Vedic Sanskrit and Old Avestan. However, does the semantic information contained in my reconstructed *deseletes—"wanderer of/from the house"—support this reconstruction or complicate it?

Here's where we return to Homer, for *deseletes, depending on how extensive the use of prepositions was in Jareditish, could also be translated as "wanderer out of the house" or better, "that which wanders from the house." What better description of the activity of bees, which wander each day out of their shelter? Wandering from their shelter is their very existence. Now, from the perspective of a culture where beekeeping is economically central and loaded with an ideological weight that is practically religious, we can see how that simile could be extended to that culture's members and become a metaphor for how that culture conceived of itself (as bee similes universally do), in the same way that Homer extends it to the Greek soldiers on the plane of Troy: they go out of their shelters in a swarm. We can express the parallel semantic relationship between Homer's simile and deseret,

In Homer, the formula is: FROM SHELTER (ἄπο...κλισιάων) + MOTION WORD (εἶσι)

In deseret, the formula is: FROM SHELTER (des)+ MOTION WORD (-eletes)

There is a shared simile here, possibly inherited from a common source, but clearly connected. And there is meaning here, as well. Like the bees they tend in their wanderings from a fallen Babel, so too do the Jaredites. The bee was a central image to Jaredite culture because it was a mirror in the animal world of what the Jaredites themselves were doing in the world of men: each Jaredite was a deseletes—a wanderer from his home—and all the early Jaredites a swarm of wanderers from home in search of a new one. The bee was not simply a source of economic value or food but indeed a symbol of their status as homeless wanderers. It was through the word deseletes, garbled by time and ignorance into deseret, that a living connection with that symbol was made. The bee was a vehicle for early Jaredite self-perception, and deseletes/deseret was the linguistic expression of that self-perception. Indeed, it is entirely possible, though not provable, that this is the Jareditish ethnonym: the word for "Jaredite" in Jareditish. In any case, it must have been a recurring simile in the original Jaredite epic, at least to such an extent that it struck the epic's redactor, Moroni, to include in the very opening lines of his redaction.

In my next and last post on Jaredite etymologies, I will show, again using evidence from Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and Old Avestan, how the ideology of the bee was reflected in the name of the brother of Jared (revealed not in scripture but by the Prophet Joseph in one of his more revealing moments), and how that symbolic name contains within it the story of the epic barge-journey of the wandering Jaredites.

Sweet fancy Moses! That is the most brilliant thing I have ever read on this board.

I do hope that you and Zeezrom will consent to me including your articles in the Electronic Journal of Jaredite Studies.

Now that I have praised your work, which is suitable for publication in the finest LDS scholarly venues, allow me, dulcissime amice, to raise a few issues.

On linguistic grounds, I think this is fantastic. The primary issue that I have is the assumption that the word deseret is at all related to the historical Jaredites' actual language. No, this is Moroni showing off his esoteric knowledge of the Egyptian, which is the hieratic scribal language of the descendants of the Nephite dynasty, descendants of Joseph of Egypt. By using it, Moroni is signaling that he has entered into an esoteric temple narrative. In such a narrative, all is not as it seems on the surface.

The interpretation of dšrt as honeybee is deliberately misleading, and this is another wonderful hint of the esoteric intent of Moroni's use of Egyptian at this point. Dšrt also means simply desert, as opposed to Kmt, which refers to Egypt. The "red land" versus the "black land." Al-Maqrizi, in his influential discussion of the origins of the Arabic word for Egypt, Misr, opines that the original name for Egypt before the Flood was Jisra/Jizla, meaning "Holy Land." Modern scholars have theorized that the linguistic origin of Jisra/Jizla is none other than our dsrt, except here it is dsrt, meaning "sacred area."

In magical literature, dšrt, or "red things," are associated with good things (sun, fire), bad things (pain, illness), and that which partakes of both (childbirth). The bad and ambiguous can be ameliorated or remedied by the proper ritual words and actions. Moroni is playing on this ambivalence in order to show that the hardship of the wilderness can, with the correct religious observances, be transformed into blessed life in a new holy land. Of course, the contrary is true as well: failure to observe the religion leads to disaster. If that does not sum up the Book of Mormon narrative in one word, I don't know what else does.

If one considers what is happening in the narrative, namely, that the Jaredites are going into the wilderness to find a new Holy Land, then the appearance of dšrt/dsrt makes all the sense in the world. God has sent the Jaredites out into the wilderness to be tried in order to see whether they will observe the precepts and commandments of God and thus be blessed accordingly.

What of the bee? Why does the bee enter into any of this? Because, as one sees in Horapollo's dictionary of hieroglyphics, the bee signifies obedience to the king. In Moroni's case, the bee is the follower of both God and his representative on earth, the righteous priest-king (king bee). It is only through obedience to the priest-king that the people will obtain their blessing in the wilderness.

What we have here in Ether is, it seems to me, a highly learned piece of Masonic allegory and humor that is dependent upon a view of Egypt and the Jews that could only exist on the cusp between the worlds of Athanasius Kircher and Champollion. None of it has anything to do with the Jaredites themselves. Even if one prefers to talk of a historical Moroni, Moroni has clearly appropriated the original Jaredite narrative in order to make his own point for his people and his latter-day readers. It is this: As went the Jaredite dynasty and its kingdom for the people's failure to obey, so goes the Nephite dynasty and its kingdom in Moroni's day, and, in the latter day, Joseph Smith's followers for failing to obey the Messiah ben Joseph culled from the masses of the Gentiles.

Now, granted, what I have just written was thrown together to offer some kind of response to a piece of linguistic sleuthing that I found highly persuasive and impressive.