DESERET
Kevin Barney suggested that deseret is connected to the Hebrew word for “bee”, deborah (DBRH), the changing of the t to an h being accounted for by the historically-documented evolution of the feminine suffix in Hebrew. I’m no linguist, but I think that means deseret is an earlier form of the Hebrew word for bee; deborah came later. [2]
Either way, one of the meanings of deborah is “swarm”. I think Moroni confirms that deseret held some relation to deborah when he clarifies that they took “swarms of bees” with them (Ether 2:3).
Hugh Nibley promoted the discovery that deseret is practically identical to deshret (dšrt), the Egyptian word for the Red Crown of Lower Egypt [9]. This crown was very commonly drawn resting upon the head of the Egyptian mother goddess Neith, whose temple was called the House of the Bee [10]. This pretty compellingly suggests to me that by using deseret, Moroni is implying something about the Mother Goddess.
We mentioned earlier how deborah may be a form of the word deseret. Deborah comes from the root word dabar, which has a ton of very peculiar meanings:
‘דבר’ – ‘dabar’: speak, say, talk, promise, tell, commune, pronounce, utter, command, declare, converse, warn, threaten, sing, to lead away, put to flight, wilderness (as dabar is root of midbar, meaning wilderness) [15]
I find these definitions extremely interesting for a root nestled inside of the word that means “bee”. You’ve got to ask why dabar gave rise to deborah… Maybe it’s got something to do with the reverence the ancients gave to both bees and the Mother Goddess?
I don’t know what the reason is, but it’s remarkable that the Lord basically does all of these dabar things in Ether 1-3 while he’s hidden behind a cloud:
He speaks to them, He commands them, He leads them away, He warns and threatens them, He promises things to them (even a promised land), and He takes them to the wilderness. [16]:
Read the first part of Ether now and all these little dabars of the Lord will jump out at you. Isn’t it amazing how many little wordplays there are in this section of Ether? Could this be a clue that the Lord was in a cloud of deborahs?
And then one last etymology for deseret comes from David Richins. After explaining that the name Jared is from the Hebrew yaret, meaning “to descend” or “to go down”, he points out that deseret may also contain the same yaret root: des + yaret [17]. This implies that deseret has something to do with descending.
Are the bees ever explicitly described as descending in Ether 1-3? No, but God (as He’s hidden in a cloud) is:
Ether 2:4And it came to pass that when they had come down into the valley of Nimrod the Lord came down and talked with the brother of Jared; and he was in a cloud, and the brother of Jared saw him not.
God Himself came down to speak with BJ, just as He would have to descend from heaven to speak to any mortal on earth. And just as any of us would do if we saw Him, BJ fell down at his feet (see also 3 Nephi 11:12).
At this point, is it any surprise that The Mayan Bee God, Ah Muzen Cab, the Savior God, was also called the Descending God?
Science Is True and the Church Is Too 