The printer’s manuscript in Mosiah 25:2 has the spelling Muloch, which the 1830 typesetter changed to Mulok. For the 1879 edition, Orson Pratt changed Mulok to Mulek in the LDS text, under the reasonable assumption that the individual named is the Mulek mentioned in the book of Helaman. This Mulek, the son of king Zedekiah, came to the promised land shortly after Lehi and was the most prominent founder for the people of Zarahemla:
It is, of course, theoretically possible that the Book of Mormon is referring to two different individuals: Muloch, an ancestor of Zarahemla, in the book of Mosiah; and Mulek, a son of king Zedekiah, in the book of Helaman. The reference to Muloch in Mosiah 25:2 is rather surprising; Mormon writes here as if he has already mentioned this Muloch and those who came with him. There is a similar example in the book of Alma where Amulek refers to an ancestor of his (namely, Aminadi) that he assumes his listeners are already familiar with:
The sudden reference to Muloch in Mosiah 25:2 may not be the first mention of Muloch in the original Book of Mormon text. We are missing the book of Lehi as well as, it would appear, the first two chapters of the original book of Mosiah, which would have described how the first king Mosiah found the people of Zarahemla. (For discussion regarding these two missing chapters at the beginning of the book of Mosiah, see pages 137–139 of my article “Critical Methodology and the Text of the Book of Mormon”, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6/1 (1994): 121–144; also see the section in volume 3 of the critical text that deals with chapters in the Book of Mormon.) It is quite possible that those now-lost portions of the original text mentioned this Muloch; in fact, Aminadi too may have been mentioned in the original book of Lehi or in the first two original chapters of Mosiah. In other words, the loss of the 116 pages of manuscript may be the reason for the abruptness of the comment here in Mosiah 25:2 concerning Muloch. The book of Omni, it should also be pointed out, briefly describes the founding of Zarahemla and indirectly refers to its founders but without mentioning Muloch (or Mulek) by name:
It is important to note here that both Omni 1:16 and Mosiah 25:2 refer to these ancestors of the people of Zarahemla as having traveled in the wilderness:
In other words, these two passages appear to be referring to the same group of people. When these two statements are combined with the two in the book of Helaman, we find strong support for concluding that Muloch and Mulek are the same person.
Another reason for believing that both the books of Mosiah and Helaman are referring to the same individual is that the probable meaning for Mosiah 25:2 is actually a plural one:
The original text of the Book of Mormon sometimes used the singular a descendant to refer to the ancestral descent of a whole group of people, as in 1 Nephi 6:2: “we are a descendant of Joseph” rather than “we are descendants of Joseph”, the current LDS reading (see the discussion under 1 Nephi 6:2). We should also note that the use of the singular was to refer to plural antecedents is also quite common in the original text, as nearby in Mosiah 25:11: “when they thought upon the Lamanites which was their brethren” (now edited to “when they thought upon the Lamanites who were their brethren”). In other words, it is quite possible that the text in Mosiah 25:2 is referring to the lineage of the people of Zarahemla, not Zarahemla himself. The purpose of this passage is to compare the population sizes for the two peoples that had united under the first king Mosiah. The description lists the original founding fathers for each group, Nephi in the first case and Muloch, with others, in the second:
The text is not providing an offhand remark about the lineage of Zarahemla, which explains why we have the added reference to the others who came with Muloch.
Under this plural interpretation of “which was a descendant of Muloch”, the identification of Muloch with the Mulek mentioned in the book of Helaman is considerably firmer. This interpretation also implies that there is one more instance of a descendant with a plural referent (see the list under 1 Nephi 6:2) and, by implication, one more instance of the need to grammatically emend a descendant to descendants in the standard text for Mosiah 25:2, thus “the people of Zarahemla who were descendants of Muloch and those who came with him into the wilderness”.
This interpretation is also consistent with the following result: everywhere else in the text, individuals are always given a single line of descent (24 times), never a multiple one:
On the other hand, when the text refers to the line of descent for a group of people, those people can descend from one or more ancestors (below I mark each case of plural ancestors with an asterisk); in the following list, I provide the original text, which includes four cases of a descendant and six of descendants:
Thus the evidence, taken as a whole, argues that Mosiah 25:2 is referring to the people of Zarahemla and their descent from Muloch and the others who came with him after the fall of the kingdom of Judah. So now the question is: What was the actual name of this son of Zedekiah who survived and was one of the founding fathers for the people of Zarahemla? Based on the manuscript readings, there are two possibilities: Muloch or Mulek. Internal evidence strongly argues that the correct name is Muloch. First of all, the earliest extant occurrence of the name in the text is here in Mosiah 25:2. We have only the printer’s manuscript for this occurrence, but the same limitation holds for the occurrences of Mulek in the book of Helaman. Secondly, the tendency in the transmission of the text has always been to replace the final ch spelling in a name with either ck or k: (1) the 1830 typesetter changed Muloch to Mulok here in Mosiah 25:2; (2) Oliver Cowdery normally misspelled Zenoch as Zenock, with the result that the standard text now has only the misspelled Zenock (see the discussion under 1 Nephi 19:10). Clearly, the final ch spelling in names is difficult to maintain in the text.
On the other hand, there are no examples of a name ending in a final k ever being misspelled as ch. In the manuscripts, the scribes correctly spelled the final k for every occurrence of the names Amulek, Melchizedek, Melek (the land), and Mulek (the city). For one of the three cases in the book of Helaman where Mulek refers to Muloch, Oliver initially miswrote the final k as an h, but this scribal misstroke was virtually immediately corrected (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the overwriting):
This kind of miswriting is found elsewhere in Oliver Cowdery’s scribal work; for instance, in the printer’s manuscript for Jacob 2:21, Oliver wrote heep, which the 1830 compositor correctly set as keep:
The important point here is that there is no evidence whatsoever in the manuscripts (or in the editions, for that matter) for misspelling a final k as ch. Final k’s in names are virtually impervious to any sort of change, while final ch ’s in names are readily subject to change.
So if Muloch is the original reading for the name of the son of king Zedekiah, then why is it spelled all three times as Mulek in the book of Helaman? My guess is that the error entered the text when Joseph Smith dictated that book. Normally, when a name first appeared in the text, Joseph and his scribe would make sure it was spelled correctly, especially if the name was unusual. Clearly, when the name first appeared in Mosiah 25:2, there would have been a need to spell out the strange Muloch (at least to Oliver Cowdery, Joseph’s scribe after the loss of the 116 manuscript pages). Joseph probably pronounced Muloch as /myulßk/; as with the name Zenoch, he must have taken care to make sure his scribe got the name /myulßk/ down correctly as Muloch. Thus in Mosiah 25:2, Joseph and his scribe would have made sure of the spelling, the difficult Muloch. Presumably this difficult spelling was later copied correctly into 𝓟 by Oliver Cowdery.
When Joseph Smith came to dictating Muloch in the book of Helaman, he and his scribe probably did not check the spelling. The scribe in 𝓞 for Helaman 6–8 was probably Oliver Cowdery since all the extant portions of that book are in Oliver’s hand. As before, Joseph would have pronounced the name Muloch as /myulßk/, but now the scribe (presumably Oliver) may have not asked how to spell the name since the pronounced form would have been the same as the name of the city of Mulek, which had been written down by Oliver 12 times in Alma 51–53 and then once more just before Helaman 6–8:
Oliver would have been used to writing the name with the pronunciation /myulßk/ as Mulek, so he continued to write it as Mulek when Joseph read off the three examples of Muloch in Helaman 6–8. It is also possible that in the original manuscript Oliver wrote down Muloch for these three instances in Helaman 6–8 but then decided to consistently replace Muloch with Mulek when he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟. We do know that Oliver sometimes consistently changed the spelling of names; see, for instance, the discussion under Mosiah 18:12–14 regarding the name Helam. With respect to Muloch in Helaman 6–8, it seems more reasonable to assume that Oliver simply neglected to ask Joseph how this /myulßk/ was spelled as he took down the original dictation. He probably assumed it was Mulek, the name he had been writing down for the last while.
The spelling Muloch (ending in och) reminds us of the biblical spelling Enoch and the Book of Mormon spelling Zenoch for an earlier prophet in Israel. Thus the spelling Muloch for this son of Zedekiah is quite reasonable; it also conforms to other biblical spellings ending in och (such as Antioch, Arioch, and Hanoch, the last a variant of Enoch). The spelling Muloch suggests an ominous connection with the god Molech /Moloch (to which children in Israel were sacrificed prior to the Babylonian captivity):
Naming a child Muloch might not have been that much out of character for some of the people living in the kingdom of Judah prior to its fall to the Babylonians.
It should be noted that changing the spelling of the name of the son of Zedekiah to Muloch means that his people should be referred to as the Mulochites, not the Mulekites. Of course, this designation (as either Mulekites or Mulochites) occurs nowhere in the Book of Mormon text per se but only in extracanonical material, as in the following chapter summaries (with original accidentals) written for the 1981 LDS edition:
Summary: Restore in Mosiah 25:2 the original earliest spelling Muloch for the name of the son of king Zedekiah; this spelling should also be extended to the three other occurrences of this name in Helaman 6:10 (two times) and Helaman 8:21; also the phrase “the people of Zarahemla which was a descendant of X” should be interpreted as meaning ‘the people of Zarahemla who were descendants of X’, especially since X here is the plural “Muloch and those which came with him into the wilderness”.