“River Laman”

Alan C. Miner

Lehi named the river by which they first camped "the river Laman" (1 Nephi 2:8). Hugh Nibley asks rhetorically, by what right do these people rename streams and valleys to suit themselves? No westerner would tolerate such arrogance. But Lehi is not interested in western taste; he is following a good old Oriental custom. Among the laws "which no Bedouin would dream of transgressing," the first, according to Jennings-Bramley, is that "any water you may discover, either in our own territory or in the territory of another tribe, is named after you." So it happens that in Arabia a great wady (valley) will have different names at different points along its course, a respectable number of names being "all used for one and the same valley. . . . One and the same place may have several names, and the wady running close to the same, or the mountain connected with it, will naturally be called differently by members of different clans," according to Canaan, who tells how the Arabs "often coin a new name for a locality for which they have never used a proper name, or whose name they do not know," the name given being usually that of some person. However, names thus bestowed by wandering tribesmen" are neither generally known or commonly used," so that we need not expect any of Lehi's place names to survive. [Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, F.A.R.M.S., p. 75]

Step by Step Through the Book of Mormon: A Cultural Commentary

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