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 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 without regard to their signification in sources from Babylonia and other regions adjacent to Assyria."1 Other Assyriologists have observed that the ancient Assyrian term sheum was used at various times to refer to barley, grains generally, and even pine nuts...
In the New World many Spanish names were applied to American plants following the Conquest, because of the plants' apparent similarity to European ones, even though the New World plants were, from a botanical perspective, often a different species or variety. For example, the Spanish called the fruit of the prickly pear cactus a "fig," and emigrants from England called maize "corn," an English term referring to grains in general. A similar practice may have been employed when Book of Mormon people encountered New World plant species for the first time.
