The Mulekites came over from Jerusalem about the same time as Lehi but didn’t hook up with the Nephites until much later (~480 years). Because the Mulekites didn’t bring with them any written records their language had changed considerably by that time and the Nephites couldn’t understand them.
Interestingly, according to the Book of Mormon, Mulek was a son of King Zedekiah and escaped the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon. You’ll recall from the Bible that Zedekiah was an unrighteous Jewish king and was killed along with all his family by King Nebuchadnezzar. Josephus tells the same story and adds that after Zedekiah’s sons were killed that Nebuchadnezzar had his eyes put out and then deported him to Babylon.
This would appear to be a discrepancy with the Book of Mormon account. The Bible says Zedekiah’s sons were killed but we have Mulek, son of King Zedekiah sailing to the Americas in the Book of Mormon.
The interesting part is that some scrolls found outside of Jerusalem in the ancient city of Lachish by archaeologists now known as the Lachish Letters tells the same story of King Zedekiah’s sons being killed but tells it slightly differently than the Biblical account. It adds to the story the account of a servant of King Zedekiah who hid the youngest child of the king from the Babylonian army, thus proving that it is very possible the King did indeed have a child who survived.
But it goes even further than that. Even non-LDS scholarship suggests that Zedekiah probably did indeed have a son named Mulek! If true, this would be an IMPOSSIBLE coincidence for Joseph Smith!
*The first clue of the existence and escape of Mulek, son of Zedekiah, can be found in 2 Kings 25:1-10, which reports that Nebuchadrezzar and “all his host” scattered “all the men” and “all [the king’s] army” and burnt “all the houses of Jerusalem,” and with “all the army” they destroyed the walls. In the midst of all this, however, 2 Kings 25:7 omits the word all when it reports only that “the sons” of Zedekiah were killed, leaving open the question whether all of his sons were slain.
Biblical scholars have recently had interesting things to say about a person named Malchiah. Jeremiah 38:6 speaks of a “dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech . . . in the court of the prison.” But the Hebrew name here, MalkiYahu ben-hamMelek, should be translated “MalkiYahu, son of the king,” the Hebrew word melek meaning “king.”
Was this MalkiYahu a son of King Zedekiah? Several factors indicate that he was. For one thing, the title “son of the king” was used throughout the ancient Near East to refer to actual sons of kings who served as high officers of imperial administration [Rainey, 1975, pp. 427-432]. The same is certainly true of the Bible, in which kings’ sons ran prisons (see 1 Kings 22:26-27; Jeremiah 36:26; 38:6) or performed other official functions (see 2 Kings 15:5; 2 Chronicles 28:7). Moreover, in view of the fact that the name MalkiYahu has been found on two ostraca from Arad (in southern Judah), the late head of the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Yohanan Aharoni, said that “Malkiyahu is a common name and was even borne by a contemporary son of king Zedekiah” [Aharoni, 1970, p. 22].
But was this MalkiYahu the same person as Mulek? Study of these names tells us he may very well be. In the case of Baruch, scribe of Jeremiah, for example, the long form of his name, BerekYahu, has been discovered on a seal impression by Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem [Avigad, 1979]. The full name has been shortened in Jeremiah’s record to Baruch.
In view of this shortening, as in many other biblical names, there is no reason why a short form such as Mulek might not be possible…
A prominent non-Mormon ancient Near Eastern specialist declared recently of the Book of Mormon’s naming “Mulek” as a son of Zedekiah, “If Joseph Smith came up with that one, he did pretty good!” He added that the vowels in the name could be accounted for as the Phoenician style of pronunciation. He found himself in general agreement that “MalkiYahu, son of the King” might very well be a son of King Zedekiah, and that the short-form of the name could indeed be Mulek. *
John Welch, Deseret Book Comp., Salt Lake City, UT, 1992, pp. 142-144
See also:
Rainey, Anson, “The Prince and the Pauper,” Ugarit-Forschungen 7 (1975): 427-432.
Aharoni, Yohanan. “Three Hebrew Ostraca from Arad,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 197 (Feb. 1970):16-42.
Avigad, Nahman, “Jerahmeel and Baruch: King’s Son and Scribe,” Biblical Archeologist 42 (Spring 1979): 114-118.
