Ether 10:8 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
the people [raised >+ did raise 1|did raise ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|did rise RT] up in rebellion against him

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “the people raised up in rebellion”. Later, probably when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞, Oliver corrected the verb form from raised to did raise. The level of ink flow for the supralinearly inserted did is somewhat heavier, as is the crossout of the d in raised. There are two other instances in the book of Ether where Oliver initially omitted the do auxiliary as he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟; in both these cases, 𝓞 is extant and has the auxiliary:

Here in Ether 10:8, 𝓞 is not extant but very likely read did raise, the same as the corrected reading in 𝓟.

In the 1920 LDS edition, the verb raise was replaced with rise since in modern English we expect the phraseology “to rise up in rebellion”. However, the original text has a number of instances of intransitive raise; in fact, as explained under 2 Nephi 3:24, some of these have been retained in the current text. For further discussion of the competition between “to raise up in rebellion” and “to rise up in rebellion”, see under Alma 57:32. For each case of raise versus rise, the critical text will follow the earliest extant reading, thus did raise here in Ether 10:8. (For a complete listing of the variation between raise and rise, see under raise in volume 3. Also see under Ether 10:14 for another example where the same change to rise was made in the 1920 edition.)

Summary: Restore in Ether 10:8 the original reading with the intransitive verb raise (namely, “the people did raise up in rebellion against him”, the corrected reading in 𝓟).

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

References