Dissenters and Descendants

In the midst of a war between the Lamanites and the Nephites, Mormon wrote a little aside saying this: “And the people of Ammon did give unto the Nephites a large portion of their substance to support their armies; and thus the Nephites were compelled, alone, to withstand against the Lamanites, who were a compound of Laman and Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, and all those who had dissented from the Nephites, who were Amalekites and Zoramites, and the descendants of the priests of Noah.  Now those descendants were as numerous, nearly, as were the Nephites; and thus the Nephites were obliged to contend with their brethren, even unto bloodshed” (Alma 43:13-14).  One of the tragedies repeated throughout Nephite history was when Nephites not only left the faith but turned to join the Nephites and fight against their own people.  That was in fact the main cause of the war recorded in the later chapters of Alma—it was the dissenters, not the Lamanites, that instigated the fighting.  Here Mormon recorded that Amalekites, Zoramites, and the descendants of the priests of Noah were all former Nephites who helped bring on the warfare between the Lamanites and Nephites.  

                Something about the above verse, though, doesn’t seem right.  It seems to be stating that the “descendants of the priest of Noah… were as numerous, nearly, as were the Nephites.”  The priests of Noah had been doing their mischief about 50 years or so before time in Alma 43, so to think that in that short of time they had had enough descendants to outnumber the whole of the Nephite people seems impossible.  What’s more, earlier Mormon had suggested that the descendants of the priests of Noah were actually almost extinct.  He said, “The Lamanites began to hunt the seed of Amulon and his brethren and began to slay them; and they fled into the east wilderness.  And behold they are hunted at this day by the Lamanites” (Alma 25:8-9).  So this makes it doubly hard to believe that the descendants of the priests of Noah were really “as numerous, nearly, as were the Nephites.”

                I see two ways to reconcile the apparent inconsistency.  One is simply that in Alma 43:14 the “descendants” mentioned were meant to not only refer to the posterity of the priests of Noah but also the descendants of the Amalekites and Zoramites.  That seems a bit of a stretch given the seeming direct language with the word “descendants” exclusively in front of “the priests of Noah,” but it’s a possibility.  The other possible way of understanding this passage is that the word descendants in verse 14 is simply the wrong word.  The word that seems to fit much better, at least to me, is dissenters.  Here’s how the verses would then read: “…all those who had dissented from the Nephites, who were Amalekites and Zoramites, and the descendants of the priests of Noah.  Now those dissenters were as numerous, nearly, as were the Nephites; and thus the Nephites were obliged to contend with their brethren, even unto bloodshed.”  That makes perfect sense—it’s surprising yet not improbable that by this time there were so many dissenters from the Nephites who joined the Lamanites that they almost now outnumbered the original Nephites.  And it seems not unreasonable to me that either Oliver heard Joseph wrong as he was scribing or that it got misread when being printed.  I just looked in Royal Skousen’s work The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, and it looks like he came to the same conclusion.  He shows that the earliest text we have said “now those desenters were as numerous nearly as were the Nephites” but this was subsequently changed to “now those descendants were as numerous nearly as were the Nephites.”  He conjectured that the right word was dissenters, meaning I think that the scribe (probably Oliver) simply spelled it wrong and then the printer subsequently interpreted it wrong.  At any rate, the whole point of the passage is what’s important: don’t be a dissenter from the faith!