“MHMD”/Muhammad was never used as a title in Ugaritic or Canaanite, and “MHMD” means only “desire” in these languages

Despite being corrected many times and despite promising to stop teaching blatant errors, Jay Smith continues to teach things about the written form of the name Muhammad, “MHMD,” that he makes up. One of his favorite false narratives is that “MHMD” represents “mamed,” “machmad,” or “mahmad” in early Islamic texts; that it comes from another language other than Arabic; and that it means the Messiah and refers to Jesus.

None of these claims are true. In fact, they are all trivially disproven. This article will explain why Semitic languages other than Arabic have the same letters as in Muhammad, “MHMD,” representing a word in their languages. It will lay out the relation between these languages and Arabic. It will also demonstrate that “MHMD”/Muhammad has never been used as a title or even as a name in two of the Northwest Semitic languages (Proto-Canaanite and Ugaritic) and that MHMD in those languages means “desire,” not “chosen one.” We have previously demonstrated that “MHMD” was a name used in pre-Islamic Arabia for ordinary human beings in both Arabic and Old South Arabian languages and that the root means “praise” in those languages.

“MHMD”/”HMD”: a native Semitic root

Arabic is a Semitic language, along with many others that together descend from a common original ancestor, called proto-Semitic.

All Semitic languages, like the original Proto-Semitic language, have triliteral (three-letter) roots that carry basic meanings. HMD is one of these roots. These roots are altered with vowels, prefixes, and suffixes to form different words that have different grammatical functions with the same base meaning.

Distinct word forms can also acquire new, unique meanings alongside the original meaning still held by the base word forms. And finally, just like in any language, word meanings can change, one replacing another entirely. So a root can acquire a different meaning over time in different languages. This is the case with the root “HMD,” from which “MHMD” comes in all languages in which it appears.

“HMD” meant “praise/thanks” in proto-West Semitic

Robert M. Kerr is the director of INARAH, the fringe Muhammad mythicist academic group whose largely non-peer-reviewed work is a very loose basis for the some of the ideas that Jay Smith alters to fit his narrative. Jay Smith openly claims to be largely in agreement with many members of the INARAH group. Robert Kerr is also a source for Jay Smith’s primary real collaborator, Mel. Mel is a monolingual public school teacher who publishes his speculations on a Youtube channel named Islamic Origins.

In his work, Kerr states without qualification that HMD/MHMD is a native word in Arabic, Old South Arabian (the ancient extinct languages of Yemen), and Modern South Arabian (the surviving languages of Oman) and that it means “praise/thanks” in all three of these languages, as discussed in more detail in this article. We even very recently have confirmation through the work of Ahmad al-Jallad that the ancient, pre-Islamic meaning of HMD was “praise/thanks” in Modern South Arabian, as Kerr had deduced based on modern usage.

Kerr also takes care to point out that a supposed Akkadian instance of it having a different meaning is actually a Proto-Canaanite word in a mostly Akkadian text, as shown by a different academic. This is correct, and it means that the original meaning of HMD in at least proto-West Semitic if not proto-Semitic as a whole was “praise/thanks.” This is an astute observation first made by Kerr.

Meanwhile, in the Northwest Semitic language group, Kerr accurately notes that the meaning of the root HMD was “desire.” This must have been a change, since it is localized to one part of the West Semitic language family.

In Northwest Semitic languages, “HMD” is used for things that are highly sought after or highly prized and has both positive and negative connotations, depending on the context.

The diagram below, borrowed from Ahmad al-Jallad and modified, shows why the change had to have happened in the Northwest Semitic group. You see that “praise/thanks” is represented in two different branches of the West Semitic family, showing that it was the original meaning. The meaning “praise,” meanwhile, is only represented withinin the Northwest Semitic group, indicating a local change.

“HMD” exists in sister Semitic languages independently, coming from a common ancestor

Despite being corrected, both publicly and privately, Jay Smith continues to teach as recently as January 22, 2026, that the root “HMD” and specifically its form “MHMD” “comes from” Ugaritic. No academic has ever made this claim because it is transparently ridiculous, like claiming that native French words “come from” Romanian. Of course, everyone knows that native French and native Romanian words ultimately derive from their common ancestor, Latin. There was no need to borrow from one into the other. This is also the case with HMD/MHMD, as Kerr lays out.

The Northwest Semitic family tree includes the language of the city of Ugarit, called Ugaritic; the Canaanite languages, of which the Phoenician varieties and Hebrew are considered to be dialects; and Aramaic, the language of Aram and the Aramaeans that eventually became the lingua franca or common language of the Achaemenid Empire. Mass migrations of Aramaeans into Assyria and Mesopotamia had caused Aramaic to be the most commonly spoken language there. Even though the Achaemenids spoke Persian, they took Aramaic as the language of administration in the West Asian part of their empire.

As previously mentioned, the root “HMD” changed meaning in proto-Northwest Semitic from “praise/thanks” to “desire.” The word “HMD”/”MHMD” appears in two non-Hebrew Northwest Semitic languages during the Bronze to Middle Iron Age: Ugaritic and (proto)-Canaanite.

A proto-Canaanite example comes from between 1363 to 1323 BC. Ugarit was destroyed in 1190 BC, and most of its tablets come from after 1365 BC. The INARAH contributor Volker Popp emphasizes the Ugarit examples, and therefore so does Jay Smith, who isn’t even aware of a Canaanite exampled.

Note that by claiming that “MHMD” “comes from” Ugaritic and then “goes into” Hebrew and from there is borrowed into Aramaic and then into Arabic, Jay Smith has positively asserted not only a late date of the Exodus (if there is an Exodus at all) but that Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch. Jay Smith declares, “the Ugarites were the ones that kind of introduced it. The Hebrews then took it from Ugaritic and they introduced it into the Old Testament.”

Ugarit was a city far to the north of the Northwest Semitic-speaking area. The Israelites had been enslaved (not free to travel) in Egypt from before 1400 BC. There is zero evidence of Ugaritic speakers in Egypt, much less Ugarit having such an influence on people in Egypt that it would lead to the borrowing of words there. The first substantial contact between Ugarit and Hebrew speakers could have only happened decades after the Exodus and long after the death of Moses. Yet we find a form of the word HMD in the Ten Commandments that were given in Sinai.

This leaves two possibilities in Jay’s scheme: 1) God chose to use a word that Israelites could not yet understand to put in the Ten Commandments, or 2) the Ten Commandments were not given by God at all. Additionally, HMD first appears in the Bible in Genesis to describe fruit trees of Eden generally and more specifically the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Moses could not have used this word, if it was borrowed from Ugaritic in the Northwest Semitic meaning, so by Jay’s argument, Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch.

Jay Smith does seem to have a hazy grasp that there is a chronological issue: he always throws out the unsubstantiated date of 1400 BC for this Ugaritic invention of the word HMD/MHMD, as if pushing the date back to the absolute limits of possibility could help the conflict with Mosaic authorship. But he doesn’t seem to understand that the geographical absurdity would remain. This is hardly the only time that Jay Smith, however inadvertently, promotes an anti-Christian narrative in his desire to push alternative theories about Islam.

“HMD” in Proto-Canaanite means “desire,” not “chosen” or “praised one”

The earliest surviving occurrence of “HMD” in an original Northwest Semitic text is likely written in Proto-Canaanite. This instance is found in an Amarna letter (written between 1363 and 1332) in which a man from Byblos begs for troops from the Egyptian king. He called these wished-for troops “HMD”–desired, spelled ha-mu-du in syllabic cuneiform. Most desirable in his position, indeed! (It is this letter that is mostly written in Akkadian and so is often misidentified as an example of HMD in Akkadian.) Note that there is a good chance this predates the Ugaritic texts, so the language of which Hebrew is a dialect may have a record of this root with the standard Northwest Semitic meaning before the Ugaritic that Jay Smith considers to have “introduced” it. (Keep in mind that MHMD is just a grammatical form of HMD.)

There is one more partially legible Canaanite inscription with HMD that says “Desire this village…and there place their name whether by desire or by hate and malice….”

INARAH director Robert M. Kerr is familiar with these texts and concedes this meaning. We have one adjective, one verb, and one noun in these examples. The noun is referencing not any person but the abstract emotion, and the meaning of all three instances is “desire.”

There is no one with the name HMD/MHMD in any Canaanite text. HMD/MHMD is never used as a title. MHMD within the Bible will be the subject of the next article, but this holds true for Hebrew, too.

“MHMD”/”HMD” in Ugaritic means “desire,” not “chosen” or “praised one”

Ugaritic is a dead language. It was written in cuneiform and with few vowels, so we do not know how the words were pronounced. That is, we cannot say with confidence whether “MHMD” represented two, three, or even four syllables in Ugaritic. But it certainly is not the same as John of Damascus’ Greek version of Muhammad’s name, Mamed (Μαμεδ), as Jay Smith bizarrely claims.

The Ugaritic Dictionary by Joaquín Sanmartín gives the definition of this word and lists all its instances in surviving Ugaritic texts. This is the most recent and authoritative dictionary of the language.

The form “MHMD” of the root “HMD” us defined as “desired, desirable, precious.” Sanmartín first lists the same form in other languages and its meaning in those languages. He notes that it only occurs in the singular form in surviving Ugaritic texts. He then gives the only two texts where it can be read clearly, in the phrase “desired for its cedars” and in another sentence “may … the hills bring you the most precious gold.” The third example contains a textual corruption and so may not actually represent the word “mhmd,” but if it does, the phrase means “comely precious statue.”

In all documented instances, “MHMD” is used as an adjective for an object. It is never even used in reference to any animate being, much less as the title for a person. Yet Jay Smith is still confidently teaching that the people of Ugarit used it with the meanings “the praised one” and “chosen one.” Notice that neither of these meanings is present in this dictionary–or any Ugaritic dictionary. Nor is it ever a noun, much less a title, as Jay Smith baselessly asserts. Some other scholars give it a gloss of “most desirable,” seeing an intensification in this word form. Not one Semitic scholar gives it the meaning Jay uses.

Sanmartín advises us to cross-reference the base triliteral root, HMD. Doing that, we find this entry:

This entry has the same format. He gives the definition as “to desire.” He gives other examples in other languages (listing by mistake the proto-Canaanite as “El Amarna Akkadian”). Then he gives the surviving phrases where it is found: “ardently desired (them),” then in a broken context, “she desired her(?),” and thirdly, “the virgin, Ba’al desired her.” Finally, there is one more time when HMD appears alone with a suffix, its surrounding words unable to be read.

Once again, there is no other meaning in the Ugaritic texts except that of desire–especially sexual desire. Nothing about praise, which is not a meaning found in the Northwest Semitic languages. Nothing about a chosen one. Nothing about a messiah or anointed one. The word is also a verb in all these cases.

To emphasize: MHMD and HMD never even appear as nouns in surviving Ugaritic texts. They never mean anything except desire/desirable, with precious being an alternative choice as a word for something that is highly desired. They are also never names. And they are never titles.

Yet Jay Smith claims that the word is a title and means “chosen one.”

Popp’s false claims about “MHMD” in Ugaritic

Jay Smith very loosely bases his script on a specious claim by INARAH member Volker Popp, who has no relevant academic credentials and no training in linguistics. Popp does not claim that the meaning was “praised” in Ugaritic. Nor did he claim that MHMD is a title in Ugaritic, nor that Ugaritic introduced the word or directly or indirectly caused the word to have its meaning in Arabic. Popp believes that Ugaritic proves that the native meaning of the MHMD is “chosen” in all the West Semitic languages, a meaning that Arabic retained until it was changed in the Abbasid period.

Popp is very wrong, but Jay Smith mangles what he says into something hardly recognizable. Jay Smith has repeatedly said that he has no time to watch any videos or do research himself, so perhaps he got confused by the telephone game he plays with people he relies on to tell him what scholars say. Regardless, once he gets a wrong idea, he refuses any correction, which is a disqualifying trait.

Here is what Popp actually claims:

Popp’s article is found in the book Early Islam: A Critical Reconstruction Based on Contemporary Sources, which did not undergo peer review but was instead collected by another INARAH member, Karl-Hans Ohlig, and published by Prometheus Books, the “grandfather of atheist publishing in America.” It was of interest to this non-academic anti-Christian publishing company because the theories of INARAH center around the assertion that no such thing as a cohesive Christian faith existed in the 7th century AD. The INARAH cabal sees reinventing Islamic history as a handy tool to attack Christianity with. Yet Jay Smith is INARAH’s most eager and prominent useful idiot in this endeavor.

Volker Popp’s contribution to this volume is called “From Ugarit to Samarra – An Archeological Journey on the Trail of Ernst Herzfeld.” It was published here and not in a peer-reviewed academic journal because it is nonsense. (The absurdities begin with declarations such that “Arabia originally had nothing too do with the Arabian Peninsula, but was in Mesopotamia”–really?–and degenerates from there.)

Let us evaluate what Popp has done in the excerpt above. Popp goes to only one of the three Ugaritic texts and declares that the word MHMD is inherently “connected to gold” and “refers to the best, selected quality of gold at its highest quality.” There is no basis for either claim. MHMD just happens to be the word picked to emphasize how wonderful gold is in this text. In the two other surviving examples, it is connected to a different noun. To claim that it was a word inherently “connected to gold” in the mind of the Ugaritic author has the same degree of credibility as claiming that “much” was a word inherently “connected to silver.” It is also not plausible to presume that there was any concept of gold that isn’t “precious/desirable” based on this text, just as someone today saying that he hid all his “precious Rolexes” has no implication that this person possesses Rolexes that aren’t precious to him. Popp is beginning with the presumption that Semitic writers wouldn’t use pleonasm for emphasis–an assumption that is overtly absurd.

Then Popp descends into fallacies of equivocation. He handpicked a definition from an out-of-date lexicon from 1955 (indeed, originally from 1948!) that gives the definition “to be pleasant” for HMD and “best/choicest of” for MHMD. These definitions were early educated guesses later replaced by the more accurate and comprehensive word “desire” after the cataloging of more more examples and better research. From this outdated source, Popp freely associates, declaring without source or cause that the real meaning of this word is “best, select(ed)” or–here is the kicker–“choicest of, chosen.”

Note that Gordon picked the word “choicest” to be a synonym for “best,” and “best” does not have the same semantic domain as the word “chosen.” That is, while one definition of “choicest of” means “chosen,” “chosen” is not a synonym for “best,” while the entire reason “choicest” was selected was to further narrow the definition of “best.” Popp thus illegitimately used a loose translation in English to shift to an entirely new and unintended definition for this Ugaritic word. This is an equivocation fallacy, and even worse, it’s not even equivocation in the target language. No one with a shred of both intelligence and academic integrity would take this logical chain seriously.

A parallel example: An English newspaper states, ‘Tommy figured out that Sarah was a murderer.’ Marta Gomez, a translator, renders it, ‘Tomas se dio cuenta que Sara era asesina.’ ‘Darse cuenta’ means ‘to realize,’ which translates the meaning of ‘figure out’ close enough. Then Volker Popp sees this and says, “‘Cuenta’ is a form of the verb for telling fictional stories, and ‘dar’ means to give. So the meaning is clearly that Thomas gave out the false story that Sarah is a murderer!”

Popp’s penultimate statement, that this is a “meaning which remained until the time of early ‘Islam'” is entirely false. INARAH’s director is Robert M. Kerr, the only one in the group with linguistic credentials. He flatly states that the meaning in Arabic, Old South Arabian, and Modern South Arabian was natively “praise,” not “chosen.” And he explicitly states that the meaning in the Northwest Semitic families is “desire”–again, not chosen. The meaning in Northwest Semitic was the change and was not the original West Semitic meaning. How is it that peer review failed so utterly in this INARAH-associated publication? Simply because it was not sought. Even self-policing fails in this “institute.”

Popp’s final statement is even more absurd: “Even the fathers of Islamic tradition still take muhammad{un) to mean selected or chosen one.” Popp then provides a citation that he translates from a German translation of an Arabic source that just happens to have the German word for “chosen” in it. In this quote, Ibn Musayyib is explaining why there are so many Arabs named “Muhammad” if being named “Muhammad” is supposed to be a proof of prophethood:

“‘The Arabs had heard from the proprietors of scripts and their own prophesiers that a prophet would emerge from amongst them and his name would be Mohammed. Some fathers then called their sons Mohammad in the hope that they would be chosen to take on this responsibility.’” (p. 15)

Hoping that a son is chosen is proof to Popp that the meaning of the name is literally “chosen.” In context, though, the Arabs are picking the name Muhammad because the Jews and Christians are supposedly telling them that the prophet’s name will be Muhammad. Its meaning is completely irrelevant. So already, the intelligent reader would find Popp’s word association games without basis.

When we go to the Arabic, we discover how embarrassing this is for Popp, because this is what the Arabic says:

سعيد بن المسيب قال: كانت العرب تسمع من أهل الكتاب ومن الكهان أن نبيا يبعث من العرب اسمه محمد ، [فسمى من بلغه ذلك من العرب ولده محمدا] طمعا في النبوة . (Read it here in Ibn al-Jawzi.)

Sa’id Ibn Musayyid said: “The Arabs used to hear from the People of the Book and from the soothsayers that a prophet would be sent from among the Arabs whose name would be Muhammad, [so whoever among the Arabs heard this named his son Muhammad] out of hope for prophethood.”

There is no “chosen” in the Arabic near any statement about naming their sons Muhammad. That is the German translator Sprenger’s addition, which Popp was too lazy or ignorant to check or else chose to lie about. The last four words are “tamiean fi al-nubua,” “hope/greed for the prophethood.” Therefore, the only support that Popp had for his argument, a blatant misunderstanding of a quote, turned out to not even have the crucial word that Popp relied upon for his entire thesis. Aside from this, there are two words in Arabic that are commonly taken to mean selected/chosen, and neither one have the HMD root.

This is typical INARAH “scholarship”: sloppily chain together anything that gets you closer to crackpot theories with no regard to accuracy. Adding Jay Smith’s confusion and his stubbornness due to cognitive impairment into the mix, and you have a sea of garbled unsubstantiated claims that deceive the ignorant and make critics of Islam look gullible, stupid, or dishonest.

Kerr’s embarrassing attempt at rescuing an Ugaritic link

As mentioned repeatedly, Kerr admits that the meaning of HMD/MHMD in Ugaritic is “desire.” He does not attempt to back up Volker Popp’s “chosen” nonsense. But he also wants HMD/MHMD to have some kind of special specifically religious significance. So he goes on a fishing expedition and comes back with a whopping big fish story of his own.

Kerr observes that the Ugaritic word for “god” can be used as in adjective, “divine,” to mean something that is not literally divine at all but is really nice. (Unexpectedly, English has a precise parallel with the way we use “divine” to describe things like good chocolate, a wonderful mattress, or a really good bubble bath. Parallels like this are not common across language families.)

Then Kerr then works through the standard INARAH method of free association. Something that is very desirable is also really nice. So if Ugaritic writers used “divine” to mean something really nice, then something that is desirable must have certainly been a synonym with “divine.” And so the meaning of desirable in Ugarit must be then really divine, as in really having to do with a god.

Kerr says this despite the word for god never even appearing together with HMD, never mind the fact that when “god” is used in this way it loses all literal meaning. Kerr could declare that modern wine moms worship a good afternoon glass of rosé with this kind of logic!

Conclusion

The simple and straightforward data shows that the meaning of MHMD/HMD in Arabic is “praise” and is the original meaning in proto-West-Semitic while the meaning in the Northwest Semitic languages underwent a change and became “desire.”

MHMD does not mean “chosen,” “chosen one,” “messiah,” or “praised one” in Ugaritic. It means “desirable” and is found only as an adjective describing objects, not people, in the few surviving texts. The attempt at connecting it to the concept by Volker Popp was a masterpiece in bad scholarship and logical fallacies. The feeble attempt by Robert M. Kerr to free-associate to a connection with divinity did nothing to give the word a spiritual mystique.

Jay Smith cannot even understand the arguments presented by the INARAH group at this point in his career, much less critically evaluate them. Through confabulation, he creates even more ridiculous narratives in his mind which he presents as fact to an audience that does not know that he is not a reliable source for this type of information. When corrections are brought to him, he refuses to amend his narrative, which is a disqualifying trait. He should not be platformed when speaking on this topic, as it brings disrepute to his distinguished legacy and endangers his mission.

To summarize: MHMD/HMD never appear as a name in either Canaanite or Ugaritic. MHMD/HMD never appear as a title in either Canaanite or Ugaritic. MHMD/HMD never mean anything other than “desire” either Canaanite or Ugaritic. And they did not lend their meanings to other sister or cousin languages.