Abstract: Mormon uses pejorative wordplay on the name Jaredites based on the meaning of the Hebrew verb yārad. The onomastic rhetoric involving the meaning of yārad first surfaces in Helaman 6 where Mormon also employs wordplay on the name Cain in terms of qānâ or “getting gain.” The first wordplay occurs in the negative purpose clause “lest they should be a means of bringing down [cf. lĕhôrîd] the people unto destruction” (Helaman 6:25) and the second in the prepositional phrase “until they had come down [cf. yārĕdû/yordû] to believe in their works” (Helaman 6:38). Mormon uses these pejorative wordplays as a means of emphasizing the genetic link that he sees between Jareditic secret combinations and the derivative Gadianton robbers. Moroni reflects upon his father’s earlier use of this type of pejorative wordplay on “Jaredites” and yārad when he directly informs latter-day Gentiles regarding the “decrees of God” upon the land of promise “that ye may repent and not continue in your iniquities until the fullness be come, that ye may not bring down [cf. *tôrîdû/hôradtem] the fullness of the wrath of God upon you as the inhabitants of the land hath hitherto done” (Ether 2:11). All three of these onomastic allusions constitute an urgent and timely warning to latter-day Gentiles living upon the land of promise. They warn the Gentiles against “coming down” to believe in and partake of the works and spoils of secret combinations like the Jaredites and the Nephites did, and thus “bringing down” their own people to destruction and “bringing down” the “fullness of the wrath of God” upon themselves, as the Jaredites and the Nephites both did.

[Page 398]The Jaredites occupy a conspicuous place within Mormon’s (and Moroni’s) history. Brant Gardner writes: “Mormon does not blame Nephite woes on Satan — he blames the Jaredites. They were the model from history of how a nation might be utterly destroyed. More than simply being a model for destruction, Mormon asserts that Jaredite history actively affected the Nephites. Mormon carefully links the Jaredite secret combinations to destruction, then links both Jaredites and the destruction of governments to the secret combination he calls the Gaddianton robbers.”1 Gardner sees a genetic relationship between Jaredite secret combinations and the robbers.2 In other words, the Gaddiantons represented a Jaredite infection of Nephite society.

There are at least two textual peculiarities in Helaman 6:25, 38 (where Mormon details the menace of Gaddianton secret combinations) and one in Ether 2:11 (as part of a warning) that offer striking support for Gardner’s theses. Using unique collocations Mormon and Moroni appear to create distinctive onomastic allusions to the Jaredites based on the Hebrew verb yārad (“go down” or “come down”; causative “bring down”).