SARIAH

SARIAH

Lehite PN		Wife of Lehi No. 1, ca. 600 BC (1 Nephi 2:5; 8:14)

The feminine personal name Sariah is attested, albeit in a partial restoration, in the Aramaic papyri of Elephantine and appears in Papyrus #22.111 Although the language of 
the documents is Aramaic, Cowley observes that the names are in fact Hebrew.  Line 4 of C-22 lists the personal name as sry[h br]t hws‘ br hrman, which may be vocalized as 
Sariah barat Hoshea bar Harman and translated as “Sariah daughter of Hoshea son of Harman.” Cowley was obliged to reconstruct part of the text, supplying the final h of 
Sariah and the initial b and r of barat, but the spacing of the letters is reasonable, and the reconstructed text established by Cowley has been accepted as accurate. “The 
extant final t of barat assures us,” observes Jeffrey Chadwick, “that the person was a daughter, not a son and, after the letters b-r are supplied, there is only room for one 
additional letter—the final h of Sariah.”112 Further, although Sariah is not attested as a woman’s name in the Old Testament, it is mentioned nineteen times in its masculine 
form, Seraiah, in reference to nine persons.113  
SDR)

Cf. Biblical Sarai and Sarah (also named in the Book of Mormon)

111 Arthur E. Cowley,  Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 67. In a later and more exhaustive study, Archives from Elephantine (Berkeley: 
University of California, 1968), 320, Bezalel Porten agrees with Cowley’s reading and translation.  In the most recent study of the papyri, Frank Moore Cross’s.

112 Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “Sariah in the Elephantine Papyri,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 2/2 (1993): 197. 

113 There are examples in Hebrew of the same name being used for a man or a woman, though it is not the norm.  For example, Abijah is an Israelite man’s name (e.g., Abiah 
in 1 Chronicles 6:28 and 7:8) as well as a woman’s name—the name of Hezekiah’s mother (e.g., 2 Chronicles 29:1). In the Anglo-American tradition of naming  are the 
interchangeable man’s and woman’s names Aubrey, Dana, Jordan, Kim, Leslie, Morgan, Robin, Shirley, Stac(e)y, and Tracy in the Anglo-American tradition of naming