The contentions eating at all of Lehi-Nephi now penetrate the last of Noah’s loyalists. Among this self-selected group of men, only the king and the priests appear to stand together. The rest desert him. The official reason was their desire to avenge the deaths of their wives and children; but obviously, they are rejecting Noah’s authority. It is the final act of political rebellion. The king was definitively shown as less than infallible and certainly less than divine, which he might have claimed in Mesoamerican tradition.
These newly minted rebels decide to remove the government that had led them into embarrassment by killing the king. They would have also killed the priests if the priests had not escaped in some way Mormon failed to record.