Article Title

What’s in a Name? Sebus

Authors

Paul Y. Hoskisson

Keywords

Book of Mormon, Sebus, language, consonants

Abstract

When I first began studying Book of Mormon proper names more than 30 years ago, the name Sebus appeared to present a Gordian knot. Hebrew words, like other Semitic words in gen- eral, are most often built on a structure of three different consonants. This language feature emphasizes the consonants and their sequence and order. The problem with Sebus is that its first and third consonants, /s/ and /s/, are the same— something that is extremely rare in any Semitic language. That being the case, for a long time I shelved any attempt to etymologize Sebus.

Recommended Citation

Hoskisson, Paul Y. (2012) "What’s in a Name? Sebus," Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship: Vol. 32: No. 1, Article 2.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/insights/vol32/iss1/2