John L. Sorenson, in his Mesoamerican Theory, has written: “Two other puzzling plants are mentioned in Mosiah 9:9, among those cultivated by the Zeniffites: "sheum" and "neas." The former word has recently been identified as "a precise match for Akkadian s(h)e'um, 'barley' (Old Assyrian 'wheat'); the most popular ancient Mesopotamian cereal name." The word's sound pattern indicates it was probably a Jaredite term. This good North Semitic word was quite at home around the "valley of Nimrod," north of Mesopotamia, where the Jaredites paused and collected seeds before starting their long journey to America (Ether 2:1, 3). Incidentally, the form of the word as the Book of Mormon uses it dates to the third millennium B.C., when the Jaredites left the Near East. Later, it would have been pronounced and spelled differently.) Apparently the Nephite scribe could not translate it to any equivalent grain name, nor could Joseph Smith do so when he put the text into English. The plant and its name no doubt were passed down to the Nephites/Zeniffites through survivors from the First Tradition, just as corn itself was.”
It is interesting that Sorenson translates Mosiah 9:9 as “corn, wheat, barley, barley, and neas.” Yet, he goes on to correct this error, without apologizing for the foregoing description of a Jaredite barley plant, by saying: “Since the words barley and sheum were both used in the same verse (Mosiah 9:9), we know that two different grains were involved, but what "sheum" might specifically have been in our botanical terms we cannot tell at this time.”
The simple answer, of course is that sheum and neas were the grains found in the Andean area of South America, called quinoa and kiwicha.
However, forever trying to alter the meaning of the scriptural record, Robert R. Bennett writing in the Neal A. Maxwell Institute website, has said: “Research on this matter supports two possible explanations. First, the terms barley and wheat, as used in the Book of Mormon, may refer to certain other New World crop plants that were given Old World designations; and second, the terms may refer to genuine varieties of New World barley and wheat.”
There is, of course, a third possibility that seems to escape these theorists, and that is that the “wheat” and “barley” mentioned in the scriptural record were actually Old World wheat and barley, brought as seeds to the Land of Promise by either the Jaredites or Nephites or both as the scripture suggests. “they did also carry with them…all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind” (Ether 2:3), and “we began to plant seeds; yea, we did put all our seeds into the earth, which we had brought from the land of Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 18:24).
The ancient agricultural village of Artas, fifteen miles from Jerusalem, has always grown wheat, barley, apricot, grapes, figs, nuts, olives, pomegranate, etc. Obviously, these plants would have been well known to the farmer Lehi and his family.Joseph Smith, of course, growing up in a farmer family, would have known about corn, wheat and barley—but did not know the meaning of sheum and neas. Evidently ignoring this obvious understanding, Bennett goes on to write: “The Lehites may have used the terms translated in the Book of Mormon as barley and wheat to refer to other New World plants or species of grains that resembled barley and wheat.”
It is interesting that the Nephites would not have known real barley and wheat, since both were staple crops in and around Jerusalem in 600 B.C., or that they called other grains planted and harvested by those names. This latter is especially intriguing when they called two other grains “sheum” and “neas” which had not Old World connotation at all.
Again, Bennett goes on to write: "It is a well-known fact," writes Professor Hildegard Lewy, a specialist in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian (Akkadian) languages, "that the names of plants and particularly of [grains] are applied in various languages and dialects to different species." Lewy notes that this often poses a challenge in interpreting references to cereals in Near Eastern documents. When doing so, "the meaning of these Old Assyrian terms must be inferred from the Old Assyrian texts alone.”
Somehow, these theorists writing about the Book of Mormon seems to forget how it was translated by Joseph Smith who, himself, had no knowledge of Old World, New World, Akkadian or other exotic terminology. He, like his father, had been a farmer at the time he translated the plates. He knew wheat, corn, barley, rye, oats, buckwheat and other such staple crops grown in New England at the time. Actually, barley was a crop that was widely known in New England for it was in great demand—1826-27, thirty thousand bushels of barley were brought into the port of Boston from Germany and Turkey. Wheat, of course, was an extremely important crop in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut during Joseph’s young life, producing about two million bushels annually, with spring and winter, red and white, Siberian, Italian, Black Sea, and Tea Spring varieties, along with Tuscany red Chaff, and Turkey White as winter varieties. The Spring Wheat varieties were much preferred by New Englanders during the late 1700s and early 1800s because the English practice of fall sowing frequently resulted in winter kill. Corn was the biggest crop grown in New England at the time, and grown for the seed, which was either ground into meal for food, or animal feed.
The point seems quite clear that when Joseph chose the words “corn, wheat, and barley” in translating Mosiah 9:9, he knew exactly what he was talking about.
(See the next post, “Sheum in Ancient Times, Part II,” for more on the meaning and product the Nephites called sheum)
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