Several Book of Mormon prophets warned the people that Christ is the only name by which they can be saved. This is a poetic figure, replacing the descriptor for the thing described, in which they tell us that Jesus is the only person who can save us. Right? Maybe not..

This time through the Book of Mormon I just realized that because an angel appeared to Jacob and revealed Christ’s name to him (what did the angel actually reveal to Jacob? Did he reveal “Jesus” or “Christ” or “Jesus Christ” and, if so, in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek or in Nephitish?), when the prophets said that Christ’s name was the only name by which men could be saved, they probably meant it literally. Since an angel had specially revealed His name, it must be significant. Nephite Mormonism may have had a Jehovah’s Witness flavor to it. None of our modern cant that Allah is another name for God and God another name for Allah. While I prefer our modern cant, our recognition that names are arbitrary symbols, meaningless in themselves, grew out of nominalism and early modern thought, so we should of course expect Book of Mormon prophets to have pre-modern attitudes towards names—and given the other problems with modernism, we shouldn’t be totally convinced that the pre-modern attitude is simply false. I also wonder if this insistence on Christ’s name may not have made sense if the Nephites were surrounded by pagan polytheists (which they were, given the frequent references to idols). Pagan polytheism is particularly given to syncretism and identifying gods with each other. I just read that the Carthaginians made a big thing out of the Greek Hercules, whom they identified with Marduk, and we see similar examples wherever polytheism has flourished. So the prophets’ insistence that Christ could only be called Christ probably served to keep the Nephites’ heads at least a little above the waters of their milieu.

But there’s also a theological point to insisting on Christ’s name. Insisting on his name is a way of insisting on his particularity and his real existence as a person in history. Personifications of natural forces or symbols for blocks of meaning don’t need specific names. People do.

Nephite Christianity isn’t Mormon Christianity in many ways. Our enemies sometimes exaggerate the differences, but the differences are real especially, as far as we can tell, in our respective relationships to our temples. But in the prophets’ concern with names, we see some slight prefiguring of our own endowment.

But if the Nephites took names this seriously, it makes the name “Amalickiah” more puzzling. “Amalickiah” probably means something like “God has made me king.”

The Nephites emphatically thought that God had not made Amalickiah king over them. They expressed this sentiment in the strongest possible terms. So why call him in their own records by that name? It could be sarcasm, though the Book of Mormon doesn’t have many other instances of sarcasm. It could also be that in the social milieu of the Nephites, making yourself the king of a people conferred a kind of validity on you, so they naturally called him by his name the way we’d talk about President Jefferson Davis and General Lee, though we technically dispute the legitimacy of those titles. Perhaps also “Amalickiah” was his name, not an assumed title at all, and the Nephites thought that Amalickiah was giving the name the wrong sense so they used his name as a kind of reproach to him. Or else he was given his name by persons whom the Nephites thought had the authority to do so, even if the Nephites disputed that they were right to do so.

The name element “Gid” is a puzzle in the same way. I don’t have the scholarly chops to prove that “Gid” is a Book of Mormon name element. But consider that the original Old Testament Gideon was a warrior hero. Gid was a Nephite military leader. Gideon was a strong swordsman who tried to kill King Noah and later served as his chief captain.
Gidgiddoni was “the chiefest of all the chief captains,” and notice how, being a captain of captains, he has the “gid” element twice.
Giddianhi was the leader of the Gadiantons when they were in open warfare against the Nephites.
Gidgiddonah was a leader of 10,000 under Mormon.
There are only two persons whose name begins with a “gid” that aren’t explicitly military figures. One is Giddonah, the chief priest of the land of Gideon, , whose name probably has to do with the land he ruled, and Amulek’s father, Giddonah, about whom we know nothing.
I can only speculate, but it seems that “Gid” is a name element for a military leader. And if it weren’t for Giddianhi, “Gid” would be a name for heroes, like Gideon was. So why did the Nephites record their enemy Giddianhi with an honored military prefix? I don’t know