TIMOTHY

‡TIMOTHY

Lehite PN		Apostle, ca. 30 AD (3 Nephi 19:4)

Apparently Greek, cf. NT timoeos, Timothy. Nibley notes that Timothy is an Ionian name and that the Greeks in Palestine were Ionians (as evidenced by the fact that the 
name for Greeks in Hebrew derives from this term) (ABM, 238, LID, 34). Sperry, Book of Mormon Testifies, p. 305, also made similar observations.

With a Greek presence in the Levant at least since the eighth century,119 it is possible that a Greek name could have been preserved by the Lehites. It is also possible 
that the Mulekites were actually accompanied by an ethnic Greek, and/or that some Greek names were preserved by them. 

119 For a study of the relations between Assyria and Greece at an early state, see Giovani B. Lanfranchi, “The Ideological and Political Impact of the Assyrian Imperial 
Expansion on the Greek World in the 8th and 7th Centuries BC,” The Heirs of Assyria, Melammu Symposia I, ed. Sanna Aro and R. M. Whiting (Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian 
Text Corpus Project, 2000), 7-34. For instance, “by the second half of the 7th century, a slow but progressive decline of the Phœnician trade took place in favour of the 
Greek” (p. 9), including battles between the Assyrians and the Greeks as early as the late 8th century, indicating that Greek influence become more prominent in the 
Levant at about the same time Lehi was born and founded his own family.