Mosiah 10:6 Textual Variants

The 1874 RLDS edition added the indefinite article a here before rebellion, although the preferred expression in modern English is without the a (“in rebellion”). This intrusive a here in Mosiah 10:6 was probably unintentional; it was removed from the RLDS text in the 1908 edition. There is one other example of rebellion occurring with “to stir up”; here the preposition is to rather than in, and in this case the indefinite article a is found in the earliest text:

• Mosiah 18:33
  • and now the king saith that
    Alma was a stirring up the people to [a 1A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] rebellion against him

The 1837 edition removed the a from this expression, thus creating “to rebellion”, which is parallel to the phrase “in rebellion”. For discussion of this other example, see under Mosiah 18:33.

Elsewhere the earliest text consistently has the phrase “in rebellion”—that is, without any indefinite article. All the other examples are found in the expression “to rise/raise up in rebellion”:

• Alma 57:32 and they did raise up in rebellion against us
• Alma 61:3 they have risen up in rebellion against me
• Alma 61:7 those which have rose up in rebellion against us
• Alma 61:11 if they would not rise up in rebellion
• Helaman 1:7 to rise up in rebellion against their brethren
• Helaman 1:8 for he had raised up in rebellion
• Ether 10:8 the people did raise up in rebellion against him
• Ether 10:14 and his brother did raise up in rebellion against him

Douglas Stringer points out (personal communication, 2 November 2003) a potential problem here in Mosiah 10:6 with the use of the word rebellion: the people of Zeniff did not rule over the Lamanites, so it seems strange that the text would refer to the Lamanites as rebelling against the people of Zeniff. But the Oxford English Dictionary gives examples of the verb rebel being used by extension and figuratively (under definition 1c of the verb rebel ) to mean ‘to offer resistance, exhibit opposition, to feel or manifest repugnance’. There are citations beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer (1386) and ending with the following examples in the 1800s:

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1859)
  Amorous adulation, till the maid Rebell’d against it.
• John Green (1874)
  The temper of the whole people rebelled against so lawless a usurpation.

In other words, Mosiah 10:6 means ‘he began to stir his people up in opposition against my people’. Similarly, many of the references in 1 Nephi and 2 Nephi to Laman and Lemuel rebelling against Nephi may be interpreted as these brothers being in opposition to Nephi, as in the 1 Nephi preface: “Nephi’s brethren rebelleth against him”; the use of the verb rebel here does not necessarily mean that they were fighting against constituted authority, only that they opposed Nephi.