RAMAH

Jaredite GN

1.

Hill (Ether 15:11) = CUMORAH

Despite the fact that ramah appears only in an Isaiah passage (2 Nephi 20:19-Wrong) (ramath appears in 2 Nephi 20:29) and the Book of Ether, in may be Mormon’s (i.e., Lehite) rendering of the Jaredite name of the hill otherwise known in the Book of Mormon as Cumorah. The name is also biblical, meaning “height, hill” (in KJV Ramah, from Hebrew rmh, “high, raised up”) (JAT; Reynolds, Dictionary of the Book of Mormon, p. 241, derives the name from the Hebrew construct form for “hill,” ramat).

Dear Royal:

You are right; I have not included “Ramath” in my onomasticon. I have added it.

The short answer to your question is that it looks like a construct form. As you know there are two problems with this: 1) It never occurs in construct form in the Tanakh. 2) In the Book of Mormon the context does not call for a construct form.

It certainly was either ה or ת, depending on whether there was a vowel in front of it. It would seem that if there was a vowel, it was ה. If there were no vowel, it was ת. If the noun with final ה became a construct, the ה became a ת. In classical Arabic the same letter is used in both cases, but the letter is pronounced as “h” or “t” depending on the context.

The fact that the ה becomes a ת in construct would lead some people to believe that the original form for the “feminine marker” was a “(a)t.” (See Moscati, ¶ 12.32–33.)

Do then the Brass Plates contain an older form of the place name, a form that has preserved the earlier grammatical marker? It is possible. However, I know of no variants that support this conjecture. The LXX just has the vowel “a.” IQIsa is not clear (ה and ת are quite similar in that script), but the best reading still seems to be ה.

Nevertheless, it is interesting that the best possibility is that the Brass Plates preserve an older form. How could Joseph have known that?

Yours,

Paul