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Where Did the Names Mahaway and Mahujah Come From? A Response to Colby Townsend’s “Returning to the Sources,” Part 2 of 2

October 23, 2020

Review of Colby Townsend, “Returning to the Sources: Integrating Textual Criticism in the Study of Early Mormon Texts and History,” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 10, no. 1 (2019): 55–85, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/imwjournal/vol10/iss1/6/.
 
Abstract: In the present article, Part 2 of 2 of a set of articles supporting Colby Townsend’s efforts to raise awareness of the importance of textual criticism, we focus on his argument that Joseph Smith created the Book of Moses names Mahijah and Mahujah after seeing a table of name variants in the Hebrew text of Genesis 4:18 in a Bible commentary written by Adam Clarke. While we are not averse in principle to the general possibility that Joseph Smith may have relied on study aids as part of his translation of the Bible, we discuss why in this case such a conjecture raises more questions than it answers. We argue that a common ancient source for Mahujah and Mahijah in the Book of Moses and similar names in the Bible and an ancient Dead Sea Scrolls Enoch text named the Book of Giants cannot be ruled out. More broadly, we reiterate and expand upon arguments we have made elsewhere that the short and fragmentary Book of Giants, a work not discovered until 1948, contains much more dense and generally more pertinent resemblances to Moses 6‒7 than the much longer 1 Enoch, the only ancient Enoch text outside the Bible that was published and translated into English in Joseph Smith’s lifetime.

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In a recent article, Colby Townsend commendably pointed the attention of readers to the importance of embracing textual criticism as a key [Page 182]element of methodology for studying Latter-day Saint documents. He rightfully argues that if important textual sources are missing, mistranscribed, or misunderstood, no amount of subsequent analysis can fully compensate for what may have been lost in the mishandling of this essential prerequisite.
Although Townsend’s examples range over several topics in Latter- day Saint history and scripture, our response focuses specifically on topics relevant to the Book of Moses. In Part 1 we discussed topics related to the state-of-the-art with respect to textual criticism of the Book of Moses, along with some illustrative examples.1 In this, Part 2, we discuss material provided by Townsend in his article and in subsequent clarifying discussions with him that relate to a small set of rare personal names that are found in what seem to be variant forms within the Book of Giants, the Book of Moses, and the Bible. We will structure the present article around two questions:

* Where does the Qumran Book of Giants name Mahaway (MHWY) come from?
* Where do the Book of Moses names Mahujah (MHWY/MḤWY) and Mahijah (MHYY/MḤYY) come from?

In section 3, we build on the answers to the questions above to address a third question: “Could the Book of Moses names and the Book of Giants names have had a common origin in the ancient world?” Following a thought experiment that examines the relative similarity of the Book of Moses names to closely corresponding counterparts in Genesis 4:18 and the Book...