Alma 43:45 Textual Variants

One wonders here if the word rites (extant in 𝓞) might be a mistake for the homophone rights, especially since Oliver Cowdery frequently spelled right(s) as rite(s) in the manuscripts. In order to deal with this issue, we first consider the manuscript spellings for all cases of the noun right, excluding those instances that refer to the right hand (as in Alma 58:17: “now Gid and his men was on the right”). Similarly, we exclude all adjective uses of right. (None of these examples of adjectival right or nominal right with the meaning ‘right hand’ have ever been misspelled in the text as rite.) In the following list of cases where right and rite could have been mixed up (at least in theory), those written in Oliver Cowdery’s hand are given in bold:

In extant portions of the original manuscript, all the spellings are Oliver Cowdery’s, and they are almost equally distributed between right(s) and rite(s), with four of the former and six of the latter. For the first three extant spellings (listed above as cases 8–10), Oliver used the spelling rights, which seems to be the correct word in these three cases since rights is conjoined with the semantically related privileges or liberties. But when the subject turns to religion, worship, or the church, Oliver seems to have consciously switched to the spelling rites in 𝓞 (cases 11–13, 16); he may have also used that spelling for the two nonextant cases (14–15) since they too are conjoined with the word religion. But the following extant examples of rite(s) do not follow these collocations: we get a mixture for the two cases of “their right(s) to the government” (17–18) in Alma 54 (the first is spelled rite, but the second is spelled rights). And in the next case (19), the conjoined noun is privileges, but now Oliver uses the spelling rites instead of the rights that he used in earlier cases (8–9). So if Oliver started out trying to follow some kind of semantic distinction between the two words, he did not maintain it.

When we turn to Oliver Cowdery’s spellings in the printer’s manuscript, we find that he frequently replaced the rites of 𝓞 with rights in 𝓟. In three cases (16–17, 19), the change was made without any correction in 𝓟; that is, he simply wrote right(s) in 𝓟 rather than the rite(s) of 𝓞. In one case (12), he started to write rites (the reading in 𝓞), but then he immediately corrected the rites to rights (he never finished writing the rites in 𝓟 since he left the t uncrossed; he immediately overwrote the tes with gh and then finished the word by writing ts inline). But there is one complicated case (22), where Oliver initially wrote rights in 𝓟 but then somewhat later corrected rights by crossing it out and supralinearly inserting rites (the level of ink flow is somewhat heavier for the correction).

The 1830 compositor basically set the reading of his copytext. When 𝓟 was his copytext, he usually set the reading of 𝓟; for three cases (2–3, 5) of wright(s), Hyrum Smith’s misspelling of right(s), the compositor set the obviously correct right(s). In five cases (22–26), the 1830 edition was set from 𝓞 rather than 𝓟. In all those cases, the 1830 edition reads right(s), including the one case (22) where Oliver Cowdery corrected 𝓟 from rights to rites. In all, the 1830 edition ended up with only two cases of rites (11, 13).

All subsequent editions of the Book of Mormon have followed the 1830 readings for right(s) and rite(s) except for the one case in 3 Nephi 2:12. Since in that case the printer’s manuscript was corrected to rites, the 1908 RLDS edition (for which 𝓟 was used to correct the text) adopted that reading for the RLDS text. Thus the RLDS text ends up with three cases of rites (11, 13, 22). The LDS text continues with the two 1830 cases of rites (11, 13). Those two readings are the only ones that specifically refer to “rites of worship”; each also collocates with the word church. The third case of rites (22), restricted to the RLDS text, also collocates with the words church and worship:

• 3 Nephi 2:12 (the current RLDS text)
  • yea and also to maintain their rites and their privileges of their church and of their worship and their freedom and their liberty

(The earliest text here reads “and their privileges of their church and of their worship”. For discussion of why their privileges is probably an error for the privileges, see the discussion under 3 Nephi 2:12.) In general, rites has been maintained in the text when it collocates with worship and church. Quite obviously, rights would work perfectly well in 3 Nephi 2:12 since there are so many other cases (5–6, 8–9, 16, 19) where rights is directly conjoined with privileges.

There remains the question of whether rites should be continued in the two LDS cases, namely, in the set phrase “rites of worship” (11, 13). In the first case, there is no problem with stating that the Nephites could fight “for their rights of worship and their church”:

• Alma 43:45 (as emended)
  • but they were fighting for their homes and their liberties their wives and their children and their all yea for their rights of worship and their church

In the second case, Moroni commands Zerahemnah to surrender, and with that command Moroni provides reasons for why this command should be taken seriously:

• Alma 44:5 (as emended)
  • and now Zerahemnah I command you in the name of that all-powerful God who hath strengthened our arms that we have gained power over you by our faith by our religion and by our rights of worship and by our church and by the sacred support which we owe to our wives and our children and by that liberty which binds us to our lands and our country yea and also by the maintenance of the sacred word of God to which we owe all our happiness and by all that is most dear unto us

Here Moroni lists all the important reasons why the Nephites are fighting to maintain their free society, one that protects family, country, homestead, and freedom of religion (including their faith, the church, and the scriptures). In particular, they are fighting to protect their rights of worship.

For Alma 44:5, the reader can easily misinterpret the series of by-phrases as an explanation for why the Nephites have gained power over Zerahemnah and his army: “we have gained power over you by our faith by our religion and by our rights of worship and by our church” and so on. But as David Calabro points out (personal communication), this long series of by-phrases refers to the earlier “I command you in the name of that all-powerful God”, not “we have gained power over you”. Here Moroni is emphasizing the seriousness of the command he had just given Zerahemnah: it is not just a military command, it is a command backed by everything that the Nephites hold most dear. Calabro also notes that this interpretation is directly supported by the language of the very next verse (which gives Zerahemnah and his men another good reason for obeying Moroni’s command):

• Alma 44:6
  • yea and this is not all :
    I command you by all the desires which ye have for life that ye deliver up your weapons of war unto us and we will seek not your blood but we will spare your lives if ye will go your way and come not again to war against us

In verse 5, the 1830 compositor placed no punctuation after the resultive clause “that we have gained power over you”; the 1920 LDS edition placed a comma after this clause, but that is probably insufficient to prevent the reader from misinterpreting the meaning of this passage. One possibility is to place dashes around the parenthetical part of this sentence in order to strengthen the connection between “I command you” and the following series of by-phrases:

• Alma 44:5
  • and now Zerahemnah I command you in the name of that all-powerful God
    —who hath strengthened our arms that we have gained power over you—
    by our faith by our religion and by our rights of worship and by our church …

The evidence in 𝓞 indicates that the individual scribes were responsible for determining the spelling for ordinary English words as they took down Joseph Smith’s dictation. There is at most only one example in all the extant parts of 𝓞 where Joseph might have helped the scribe with the spelling of an English word (namely, the spelling of genealogy in 1 Nephi 5:16); for discussion of this issue, see pages 76–79 in Royal Skousen, “Translating the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript”, in Noel B. Reynolds (editor), Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins, 61–93 (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1997). On the other hand, there is abundant evidence in the manuscripts that the scribes corrected for the spelling of unfamiliar Book of Mormon names (but not, it should be noted, for the spelling of recognizable biblical names). As an example of correcting the spelling of Book of Mormon names in 𝓞, see the discussion under 1 Nephi 19:10 regarding the name Zenoch.

More specifically, we can find no evidence in 𝓞 that the spellings of homophones in English were ever controlled for. Besides the case of right versus rite, the scribes apparently had to decide on their own how to spell the following homophones (each case is discussed under the designated scripture reference):

The manuscript spellings for homophones are generally mixed up and do not always correspond to their appropriate meanings. And like rite versus right, none of these homophonic spellings are ever corrected in 𝓞. (It should be pointed out that there are corrections in 𝓞 regarding him versus them. Joseph Smith, like English speakers in general, often pronounced both of these as /ßm/, but this is a question of casual pronunciation rather than full homophonic merger. For further discussion of this case, see under 1 Nephi 10:18–19.)

In general, evidence from spelling corrections in 𝓞 (and the lack of it in certain cases) argues that it was Oliver Cowdery rather than Joseph Smith who decided to write rite(s) in 𝓞, beginning here at Alma 43:45. And of course, when Oliver copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he made additional decisions on whether to maintain rite(s) or replace it with right(s).

The idea that the two instances of rites in the phrase “rites of worship” should be emended to rights was first proposed by Stan Larson on page 565 of his article “Conjectural Emendation and the Text of the Book of Mormon”, Brigham Young University Studies 18/4 (1978): 563–569. In support of this emendation, Larson points out that Alma 43:9 shows that the Nephites were fighting so “that they might preserve their rights and their privileges / yea and also their liberty that they might worship God according to their desires”.