Was Fort Ancient in Ohio a Nephite Fort in North America? – Part III

Continued from the previous post regarding a series of questions or comments sent to us by a visitor to our site.
Comment: “In North America the Shawnee have an account of a battle that led to the extermination of Ancient Whites called Yellow Hair. One Florida Native American Chief when taught the Gospel told of the Great battle in New York and they had great respect for the Opposing army's leader they buried him at the mouth of a river in New York after the destruction of his people.”

The event known in history as Custer’s Last Stand

In history, Yellow Hair was Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer who was killed in an epic battle at the Little Big Horn river in Montana, at the age of 37 on June 25, 1876, in which his entire command of 276 soldiers of the 7^th Calvary were killed by a band of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. Called the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Indians, and called the Battle of the Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand by the U.S., took place in the southeast corner of Montana, seven miles east of the Little Big Horn River.
    After the battle William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody collected the quirt and weapons of Yellow Hair (Custer). The next day, at Camp Robinson in Nebraska, the scout boxed up his Yellow Hair trophies and shipped them to his longtime friend, Moses Kerngood, in Rochester, New York.
    Following the Little Big Horn battle, Buffalo Bill Cody as part of and scouting for the command of 350 officers and troops of the 5^th Calvary out of Fort Laramie in Wyoming Territory, led by Colonel Wesley Merritt, defeated more than 800 Cheyenne and Sioux at Warbonnet Creek in July 1876, led by Dull Knife, with the noted and highly respected warrior chief namned Heova'ehe, or Yellow Hair (often misquoted as Yellow Hand), a Cheyenne warrior chief.
    Known as a showman, Buffalo Bill, called Pahaska or long Hair by the Indians, returned to the stage in October, his show highlighted by a melodramatic reenactment of his duel with Yellow Hair. He displayed the fallen warrior's scalp, feather war bonnet, knife, saddle and other personal effects. It should be noted that later, he celebrated the killing during his Wild West shows in a reenactment he entitled "The Red Right Hand, or, Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer,” that toured most large cities in the northeast, including in New York, as well as most of Europe (Jerome A. Greene, Lakota and Cheyenne : Indian views of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press , Norman, p994).
Comment: “Cherokee claim to be from the tribe of Judah.”

The Cherokee, like many indigenous peoples, have similarities with the Middle East

Response: There are some similarities between Cherokees and Hebrews, though other than claims of DNA of some living on the Qualla Reservation in North Carolina, not nearly as many similarities as found in Andean South America. Even so, the haplotypes lead to results for North Africa and the Middle East; however, Judah was never in North Africa nor were there Jews who moved into that area in sufficient quantities to warrant such a connection of DNA tests resulting in a North Africa match.
    Having said that, it should be note that Lamanites would be found all over the Americas, north, central and south.
Comment: “They and other native Americans name for God is Yud Hey Ha and understand the other consonant that makes up the tetragrammaton. Also their phonetics is similar to Hebrew.”
Result: Tetragrammaton, is referred to in rabbinic literature as HaShem “The Name,” or Shem Hameforash “The Special Name,” is the word used to refer to the four-letter word, yud-hey-vav-hey (יהוה), that is the name for God used in the Hebrew Bible.
    Havayah is the most sacred of the Names of God. Although no name can fully express God’s essence, Havayah refers to God’s essence. For this reason it is sometimes referred to as “the essential Name” (שֵׁם הָעֶצֶם), or “the unique Name” (שֵׁם הַמְיֻחָד), or “the explicit Name” (שֵׁם הַמְפֹרָשׁ).
    The name, which some people pronounce as Yahweh and others (mostly Christians) as Jehovah, appears 5,410 times in the Bible (1,419 of those in the Torah). However, it should be noted that we do not have any record of the name the Nephites called God in the Hebrew language (or the Reformed Egyptian), nor how or why the Spirit accepted Joseph Smith’s translation of God, Lord, etc.
    Due to its great sanctity, this Name was only pronounced in the Holy Temple, and its correct pronunciation is not known today. For this reason, today it is referred to this name by either the word Hashem, which simply means “the Name,” or Havayah (הֲוָיָ־ה), one of the permutations of its letters.
    There are many verses in the Bible in which God’s essential Name appears twice or more. Sometimes, the repetition even seems redundant. The most prominent among these is the first of the two verses that contain the Thirteen Principles of Divine Mercy, [Exodus 34:6-7] which begin with the words: “Havayah, Havayah,….” The seemingly redundant appearance of the essential Name in this verse is interpreted in Chassidic teachings as referring to two ways in which the Name describes the Almighty. In the KJV of Exodus 34:6-7, the word Hayvayah is translated as Lord and the Lord God.
    The letter Yod (Yud) is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and represents the world to come and completeness. This letter is the most used letter and the smallest, illustrating and symbolizing “wisdom.”
    Consequently, “yud-hey-vav-hey,” means the “Name,”

yud-hey-vav-hey in Hebrew

It should also be noted that this word was never pronounced in Jewish tradition. Wherever it appears in the prayerbook or in the Torah, it is usually substituted with a different word, such as “Adonai,” but Adonai is not God’s name. Adonai is a Hebrew word that means, roughly, “My Lord.” That is why most Jewish and Christian translations of the Bible into English use the word “Lord” wherever Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey appears, even though that is not what the text says. 
    Also, it has long been a habit or tradition, to use title or the many attributes of God, rather than a name, when referring  to the Supreme Being.
    Because of this situation, most scholars posit or assume as a fact, that the Israelites’ ancestors in Genesis worshiped the god “El“ (God), as did the Canaanites and other West Semites, and that later Israelites began to worship YHWH/Jehovah. Over time, because the pronunciation of w and v alternates in different languages, the four letters of this divine name were variously written in English as YHWH, YHVH, and JHVH. Whatever the variations in English and other modern languages, the four Hebrew consonants are always the same: יְהֹוָה /yhwh (there are no vowel letters nor capital letters in Hebrew).
    In fact, in certain passages, Jehovah’s name and titles seem to function as substitutes in place of him. In fact, Jehovah is thus an artificial, hybrid form created by combining the consonants yhwh and the vowels from ‘adonay (a-o-a)—YaHoWaH, which became Jehovah in English. It is mentioned 6,800 times in the Old Testament and basically means “He is,” or “He causes to be.”
    It should also be noted that the word ‘adon occurs as a title for Jehovah over four hundred times in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, usually as a plural form with a first person singular pronominal suffix, ‘adonay, literally “my lords,” but usually translated “(the) Lord.” Isaiah 6:1, for example, reads “I saw also the Lord [‘adonay] sitting upon a throne.” Israelite personal names composed with this title include ‘adoniyah/Adonijah, “my lord is YHWH,” and ‘adoniram/ Adoniram, “my lord is exalted.”
    Thus, the phrase “Yud Hey Ha,” would less be used as a name of God, than the attributes that are Godk, such as the Quechua title Pachacamac (Pachakamaq) literally means “Earth Maker,” and is usually translated as “the Maker of the Earth,” and also “the Creator God.” Others in ancient Peru referred to God as Viracocha (Wiraqucha), also called Kin-Tiki, who was “the Creator of all things,” “Creator of the universe, sun, moon, and stars and all mankind.”