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Last Names In Scriptures

Why do we not see any "last names" for people, in the scriptures, before the restoration?

Unless I am totally missing out, we only know them by their first name.
Example: ("Noah", "John the Baptist","Nephi", "Mormon" etc) instead of "Joseph SMITH".

Any thoughts you might want to share, on this?

Scriptures Names Last

It was mainly a tradition back then to use the name given associated with the location of the individual such as "Jesus of Nazareth" (making the location some sort of last name), with the trade or profession such as "Joseph, the Carpenter" or "John the Baptist" or being the "son of" (insert here the name of father).

A lot of last names in English (I assume very old ones) still have that same pattern such as Robertson and Blacksmith between others.

That's how it was back then, just the way things were no other particular reason in my opinion.

Last Names In Scriptures Studies Doctrine Mormon

Thanks for your comments!

How about in The Book of Mormon?. . . do you have any idea? There are no "Blacksmiths" there; for the most part, all we read is: Nephi, Alma, Mosiah etc.

Do you think they had enough "first names" for everyone, where no last names were needed to identify everybody? I understand there were thousands and thousands of people back then. I know there was "Alma the younger" and "Samuel the Lamanite" etc. , but it is just a few of them that are id'd these way.

Any thuoghts on this?

Scriptures Names Last

In the scriptures we often see something like this:

It is "Isaiah, son of Amoz" so we know who we're talking about. This eventually gave rise to the use of surnames called "patronymics": Johnson, Erickson, etc.

People, before the industrial revolution, typically lived in relatively small villages or tight-knit neighborhoods in larger cities. While I doubt there were "enough 'first names' for everyone", when people shared names, it was in either of two cases:

First, it would be a father-son thing, and people would use a diminutive like "Johnny" for the son, or "Big John" for the father. (I'm giving the examples in English, obviously, but the same patterns generally hold across the linguistic board.)

Second, if the two weren't related, John (A) and John (B) would have some distinctive additional "title", like "Little" if he was either very short or very tall (like a nickname) or "Baker" if he did that for a living, or Tom's son/son of Tom to connect him with his father. Hair or skin color (Brown), residence (Whitehall or Creek), and personal quirks (Greenleaf for a person who spent a lot of time in the woods) could all be appended to identify a specific John.

Amos is here identified as a herdman and as a resident of Tekoa. We can assume that, since Hebrew/Jewish*, the Nephites would have had similar traditions.

* Jewish in the ethnic, not tribal, sense. They were Manassans, until they joined with the Jewish Mulekites in Zarahemlah.

However, just how that would play out, aside from Alma the Younger/Elder, we don't know. The are specific references to "Helaman, the son of Helaman", for instance, but it is not a widespread usage in the Book of Mormon.

Furthermore, we can only assume that parallel traditions worked for women/girls, but there is scant written evidence for their situations. "Mary", as an example, has no distinctive name. "Mother of Jesus/God" is a rather late invention. (She'd have had a truly miserable life if the Jews of the I had heard it.) We have to guess that being Joseph's wife or daughter of Heli (or Jacob) if the traditions about the genealogy of Christ are true (one being of Joseph, the other of Mary), were all that her contemporaries would have used.

There are only a half dozen or so women mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Jesus' mother, Mary, Nephi's mother, Sariah, and Isabel, the harlot, are the only ones who have personal names at all. The other women are Lehi's and Ishmael's daughters. Only one of those, Nephi's wife, gets any individual mention, and only then because her tears contributed to saving her husband while crossing the ocean.

Rather off topic, but... In Wales, there is a similar "problem", although it is about last names rather than first. There are so many Joneses that there has arisen the need to discriminate among them. Typically it is done by trade: Jones the butcher, Jones the miner, etc. One odd and darkly humorous appendix is for the undertaker: Jones the death.

Strong families do not need much government--weak ones do.

Lehi

Scriptures Names Last

Thanks for the info.
I have not had much time to really research this, but I found this, even though it is not exactly what I was looking for; it is interesting. ( I was looking for "when and who started using "last names" )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name

I did not know there are still some cultures that do not use a "Last name", today.