Joseph Smith often spoke of miraculous things the way others might speak of the weather. Details that would have sent people reeling were, for him, offered in passing. He described visions, angelic visitors, and heavenly councils with the ease of someone reporting familiar events. When asked about sacred mysteries, he didn’t pause to dramatize. He simply answered. In 1832, in the early spring dust of frontier Ohio, Joseph sat with a few companions and dictated a short theological text. It slipped in quietly, without an announcement. The document, later called A Sample of Pure Language, read more like a spiritual note passed across the room than a formal revelation. Because it wasn’t a revelation.
The topic began with a single question: “What is the name of God in the pure language?” Joseph’s reply was immediate: “Awman. The Being which made all things in all its parts.” There was no preface, no citation. Just a name, resting between Joseph’s memory and revelation. The spelling later settled as Ahman, and that name began to ripple into hymns, into revelations, into sacred places. A second question followed: “What is the name of the Son of God?” Joseph responded: “The Son Awman, the greatest of all the parts of Awman, except Awman.” The document is compact and unfinished. It offers no grammatical rules, no dictionary, no syntax. But it leaves a pattern. Ahman. Son Ahman. Sons Ahman. When asked about sacred mysteries, he didn’t pause to dramatize. He simply answered.
William W. Phelps recognized this. He referred to the document as a specimen of the pure language and copied it into a letter to his wife. Soon, he began to write hymns invoking the name Ahman and included it in editorial work on church publications (Church History Catalog, MS 8532). When preparing the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 78:20), Joseph inserted the phrase “saith Son Ahman.” It wasn’t in the original manuscript, but reflected his evolving vocabulary of Edenic language. For those familiar with the earlier version, the meaning was clear. The language of Eden had been quietly woven into formal scripture. (See Jensen, pp. 385-386.)
In 1838, Joseph declared a valley in Missouri to be Adam-ondi-Ahman, revealed to him by God. The name implied that Adam once stood there with Ahman. The structure mirrored Semitic naming traditions. The revelation gave no explicit definition, but the sense was immediately understood. Adam once stood in the presence of God in that very place. W. W. Phelps had already invoked the name in hymns. Orson Pratt, years later, affirmed what he had learned from the Prophet and the early brethren: that Ahman was a name by which God had been known to Adam. The valley became sacred for what had occurred there, but even more so for what was promised to come. It was understood as the place where the first covenant between heaven and earth had been made, and where that covenant would someday be fulfilled.
What started as a brief Q&A in an Ohio notebook grew into a network of names, rooted in the identity of God, spreading through doctrine, scripture, and song. And yet, the deeper structure of it all remained unspoken. Joseph never laid out the grammar of the pure language. What is left is a set of terms, offered plainly, but arranged with care. By the early 1840s, Joseph Smith entered a new season of instruction. In Nauvoo, he spoke more freely about the nature of God, the structure of eternity, and the roles of divine beings. Revelation came in stages. Some teachings were delivered from the pulpit, while others took shape in more intimate settings. One such setting was the Nauvoo Lyceum, a circle of trusted Saints who explored theology in dialogue with Joseph’s reflections. Joseph often used these moments to teach the process by which he himself received revelation. From these accumulated moments, Joseph began to articulate a divine hierarchy and establish structures that reflected it. Priesthood quorums, the Relief Society, and the vision of an earthly Zion all emerged from this process. They were designed to mirror the divine order of the Elohim as described in the councils of heaven. (See Psalm 82:1; “Nauvoo Lyceum Minutes”; Bushman, pp. 419-430; Flake, ch. 3.) The valley became sacred for what had occurred there, but even more so for what was promised to come.
According to William P. McIntire, who recorded the moment in his journal, Joseph told the group: “The Great God has a name by which He will be called, which is Ahman.” And then he explained that when someone sought divine instruction, when one prayed, there was power in understanding God with a name as a being like Adam. God made mankind in His own image, Joseph said, and that knowledge could become a key to unlocking divine communication. It was a frame of reference. Ahman was the God who looked like Adam, and who still bore that familial connection in His title. Ahman is then a title reflecting the theological pattern Joseph Smith often taught in which the name of God shares a familial relationship with humanity.
Lorenzo Snow later expressed this pattern in a now-famous couplet: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.” Joseph confirmed this principle in his King Follett Discourse, teaching that God was once a mortal being and that mortals, through progression, could become like Him. The name Ahman thus aligns with Joseph’s understanding of revelation as relational. It echoed the belief that humans are not distant from the divine but are deeply connected to it across time, form, and potential. Humans are not distant from the divine but are deeply connected to it across time, form, and potential.
The Hebrew Bible follows a similar pattern. Names like Daniel, Ezekiel, Elijah, and Adonijah embed divine titles, El, Yah, Adonai, within personal missions. Joseph Smith had no formal training in ancient onomastics, yet he intuited what many philologists later confirmed: sacred names carry layered, relational meaning (Alter, and Noegel). Some Latter-day Saint writers later linked Ahman with “Man of Holiness,” a divine title from the Book of Moses (McConkie, p. 22, and Stapley). The Son was then called “Son of Man,” meaning Son of the Man of Holiness, a theology of relationship encoded in language. For Joseph, the name simply belonged. He offered it without preface or explanation, as if it had always been there. And in a way, it had. This brief note, later titled A Sample of Pure Language, was not a revelation in the formal sense. But it became a spark. Ben Spackman describes revelation as a layered reality, glimpsed in visions, refined through translation, and shaped by years of reflection. That is what this was. A moment of clarity inside a much larger process.
The name Ahman reflects how Joseph’s revelations often began. Rarely given in a grand vision, but with a question or phrase that opened space for inquiry. It was about being drawn into the pattern. For Joseph and the Saints, this small note became a theological key. It spurred conversations, inspired edits, clarified doctrines, and formed part of the sacred lexicon of Restoration scripture. The name itself is less a solution than an invitation to think relationally, to seek divine patterns, to follow meaning as it accumulates. Revelation, for Joseph, was not something dropped from heaven. It was something shaped by effort. The Restoration came word by word, name by name.
