excerpted from the preface to the reprint of Andrew Sexias' Hebrew Grammer by Louis. C. Zucker
In Joseph's use of Hebrew outside of the Mormon Scriptures, we find a tiny, little sentences, like those in Seixas's Manual (1834, pp.87 ff.) but simple - Ahtau ail rauey, 'Thou O God seest me' - and the name 'Nauvoo'. Now, in April, 1839, Joseph Smith, surveying from a hill the wild prospect around Commerce, imagining what he could do with it, thought, "It is a beautiful site, and it shall be called Nauvoo, which means in Hebrew a beautiful plantation." B. H. Roberts comments: "The word Nauvoo comes from the Hebrew, and signified beautiful location: 'carrying with it also,' says Joseph Smith, 'the idea of rest.'" Many have scoffed at the assertion that the name is Hebrew, but it is. In Seixas's Manual (1834, p.111), in a List of Peculiar and Anomalous Forms Found in the Hebrew Bible, the first words under the letter Nun are na-auauh and nouvoo - verb forms whose anomalous "voice" is designated, without translation. The first word the Authorized Version renders "becometh" (Psalms 93:5), and the word nauvoo is rendered "are beautiful" (Isaiah 52:7), "are comely" (Song of Solomon 1:10). This verb may be used of person, thing, or place. The idea of rest may have stolen in from idyllic verse two of the Twenty-Third Psalm, where a homonymous root is used meaning "pastures" (ne-ot or ne-oth).
We come now to our main subject: the use made of Hebrew - Hebrew from the Bible, of course - within the Mormon Scriptures and in authoritative statements by Joseph Smith and Orson Pratt. I say "Hebrew of the Bible"; Joseph had no idea of post-biblical Hebrew literature: so far as he was aware, the Hebrew of the Jewish Scriptures was all the Hebrew there was. The Book of Moses, in existence five years before the Elders turned to Hebrew, does not show any knowledge of the sacred tongue. The true biblical names it employs, and the off-biblical names like Mahujah and Mahijab (which resemble "Mehujael" in Genesis 4:18), were available to Joseph in his English Bible. The personal names Kainan (from Cainan), Hananiah, and Shem become the names of lands, as, in the Book of Mormon, the place name Lehi (le-kbee) was made a personal name. How does "Adam" come to mean "many" (Moses 1:34)? This is an interpretation which may be a subconscious reflection of Moses 4:26: "for thus have I, the Lord God, called the first of all women, which are many".
The Doctrine and Covenants, first edition (1835), carried some new off-biblical names, like Shalemanasseh (section 82), Shederlaomach (112 and 104), and Tahhanhes (104) - names which have a familiar ring, sounding like Shalmaneser and Manasseh, Chedorlaomer and Tahpanhes. "Ahman," part of the name Adam-ondi-Ahman, closely resembles in sound and idea the name Amen in Revelation 3:14 ("These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God"). Other invented names found in 82 and 104, such as Shinehah and Laneshine and Olihah, Pelagoram, and Gazelam, are hardly biblical in sound. When Joseph had reason to use pseudonyms, he could have borrowed from the Bible names like Hananeel, Hadoram, Ahiman, Aholiab, Argob, Tirzah. He uses the biblical "Mahalaleel" both as a real name and as an oblique name. "Cainhannoch" for "New York" is a linkage of Cain and Hanoch (the "Hanoch" of Genesis 4, not the good Jaredite Enoch of Genesis 5) which is both closely biblical and strangely different. All this assorted invention might spring from the exercise of the restored gift of tongues and a related taste for the tonality of the "pure Adamic language." A note (1914 ed.) on "Ahman" in 78:20, "your Redeemer, even the Son Ahman," says the name signified God "in the pure language." Also a taste for florid romance could have entered in. At all events, dependent on a knowledge of Hebrew this invention is not.
But, in the 1844 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, two revelations (1914: 103 and 105) appeared for the first time, containing invented names which did require a knowledge of Hebrew. And thi