Alma 23:17 Textual Variants

There are several questions here that need to be considered:

• Should the name Anti-Nephi-Lehi be in the plural?
• If so, should the plural be Anti-Nephi-Lehies or Anti-Nephi-Lehites?
• If the plural is Anti-Nephi-Lehies, should it be spelled as initially in the 1953 RLDS edition, as Anti-Nephi-Lehis?
• Should the first morpheme in the name be Anti or Ante?

I shall deal with these questions in order.

Anti-Nephi-Lehies or Anti-Nephi-Lehi?

Elsewhere in the text, Anti-Nephi-Lehi occurs only in a singular form. This name is also the adopted name of the brother of king Lamoni who becomes king over all the Lamanites at the death of his father (Alma 24:3). We expect, of course, this personal name to always be in the singular. When the name refers to the people of Ammon, we get “the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi” (eight times), of which seven of these could be interpreted (probably incorrectly) as ‘the people of the king named Anti-Nephi-Lehi’. But there is one clear case where the singular Anti-Nephi-Lehi occurs with the word name:

• Alma 24:1
  • and it came to pass that the Amlicites and the Amulonites and the Lamanites ... which had not been converted and had not taken upon them the name of Anti-Nephi-Lehi were stirred up by the Amlicites and by the Amulonites to anger against their brethren

In this passage, we get the singular Anti-Nephi-Lehi, not the plural Anti-Nephi-Lehies. In other words, the original manuscript has the plural Anti-Nephi-Lehies in Alma 23:17 but the singular Anti-Nephi-Lehi in Alma 24:1. Thus the plural Anti-Nephi-Lehies occurs only once. Nonetheless, the critical text will maintain this unique occurrence of the plural since that is how it reads in 𝓞. Moreover, there is really nothing wrong with the plural form.

Anti-Nephi-Lehies or Anti-Nephi-Lehites?

The plural reading for Anti-Nephi-Lehies is very clear in the original manuscript; the name defi- nitely ends with Lehies, and there is no overwriting. The name does appear at the end of a line, but there appears to be no attempt at crowding the text and thus no indication of a potential error.

Given other names in the Book of Mormon, we might expect Anti-Nephi-Lehites. One could argue that the reading in the original manuscript was indeed an error—that the t was accidentally dropped out, especially since Oliver Cowdery was writing the name at the end of a line. There are at least 13 Book of Mormon names ending in -ite that are derived from proper nouns:

But each of these -ite names is based on a personal name, whereas Anti-Nephi-Lehi is not originally a personal name. (Only later does the brother of king Lamoni take this as his personal name, in Alma 24:3.) Of course, Lehi is a personal name, but Lehite is not found as an independent name in the text (though it is sometimes used by modern commentators to refer to Lehi’s descendants). The tendency to write Anti-Nephi-Lehites is very natural. In fact, for one of the noncanonical headings in 𝓞, Oliver Cowdery appears to have written the plural Anti-Nephi-Lehites (that is, Lehites rather than Lehies):

heading for page 338ªof 𝓞

( h)i(t)es take up arms in defence [ f ]
( t)es &C

In other words, Oliver wrote something equivalent to “the Anti-Nephi-Lehites take up arms in defense of the Nephites etc.” This heading covers the text for Alma 53:10–22, although the text itself uses the term “the people of Ammon” to refer to this people (Alma 53:10). We have to go all the way back to Alma 43:11 to find the last use in the text of the name Anti-Nephi-Lehi. And we have to go even further back to Alma 23:17 to find the only occurrence in the text of the plural Anti-Nephi-Lehies. So it is not surprising that Oliver substituted Anti-Nephi-Lehites for the correct plural Anti-Nephi-Lehies when he composed the heading for this much later page in 𝓞.

There is one example of a name for a group of Book of Mormon people using a name derived from a personal name, but without the -ite ending, namely Nehors:

• Alma 21:4
  • for they had built synagogues after the order of the Nehors for many of the Amlicites and the Amulonites were after the order of the Nehors
• Alma 24:28
  • now the greatest number of those of the Lamanites which slew so many of their brethren were Amlicites and Amulonites the greatest number of whom were after the order of the Nehors

So s can be directly added to a personal name to form the plural name for a group of people. Thus Anti-Nephi-Lehies (or Anti-Nephi-Lehis) is possible. And since Anti-Nephi-Lehi itself was not in the beginning a personal name, the dominance of the -ite ending should not play a significant factor in determining whether Anti-Nephi-Lehies is a mistake for Anti-Nephi-Lehites.

Anti-Nephi-Lehies or Anti-Nephi-Lehis?

Since there is no overwhelming evidence to reject Anti-Nephi-Lehies, we should consider whether Lehies is spelled correctly—that is, should the plural ending be -es rather than -s? As far as spelling in the Book of Mormon is concerned, we have some evidence for the -es plural after a final i — namely, the plural spelling for onti, for which the manuscripts consistently give the plural spelling onties, or mistakenly as anties but still ending in -es (in Alma 11:22, 25). Of course, since the singular onti already occurred in the immediately preceding text (in Alma 11:6, 13), the plural ending -es may simply be Oliver Cowdery’s own plural spelling for onties. On the other hand, the plural Anti-Nephi-Lehies is the very first occurrence of that name in the text, so it is possible that its plural ending -es was spelled out by Joseph Smith as part of the dictation. Yet Lehi is already known to the scribe, so it is also possible that Joseph left it to Oliver to spell the plural as Lehies.

Current English definitely prefers the -s plural ending for words ending in i. For instance, in two statistical samplings of material written in the 1960s (the Brown corpus and the American Heritage corpus), there are nine different words ending in i for which the plural ending had been added, and in a total of 82 instances the plural ending was always -s:

alibis (1), alkalis (2), bikinis (1), martinis (2), Nazis (27), rabbis (3), safaris (3), skis (19), taxis (24)

For the Brown corpus, see W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kucˇera, Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); for the American Heritage corpus, see John Carroll, Peter Davies, and Barry Richman, Word Frequency Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

But in earlier centuries, according to spellings cited in the Oxford English Dictionary under the appropriate lexical item, the ending -es seems to have been preferred. The 1800s and early 1900s was a period of transition from -es to -s. For each of the following words, I list the dates for the plural spellings as cited in the OED under the respective lexical item; instances taking -s that postdate the latest -es spelling are given in bold while instances taking -es that predate the earliest -s spelling are in italics:

Thus the -es spellings in Anti-Nephi-Lehies and onties appear to be fully acceptable 19th-century spellings. They could be respelled as Anti-Nephi-Lehis and ontis, but since today’s Book of Mormon readers are familiar with these archaic spellings, it is probably best to retain the original -es ending for these two Book of Mormon words.

Anti-Nephi-Lehi or Ante-Nephi-Lehi?

Jared Weaver (personal communication, 29 September 2003) wonders whether the first morpheme, Anti, might be an error for Ante. He suggests that the Anti should not be interpreted as the Greek prefix anti- (with its meaning ‘against’) but instead Anti should be revised to read Ante-, based on the Latin prefix ante- (with its meaning ‘before’).

I myself think that the Anti of Anti-Nephi-Lehies should not be interpreted as either the Greek prefix anti- ‘against’ or the Latin prefix ante- ‘before’. Instead, Anti appears to be a proper noun in the Nephite-Lamanite language. Consider how many uses there are in the text of the morpheme Anti in Nephite and Lamanite proper nouns: Ani-Anti, Antiomno, Antionah, Antionum, Antiparah, Antipas, and Antipus; perhaps the Nephite monetary unit antion could also be added to this list. Further, the only other combinations of Nephi and Lehi in the text refer to the land (and city) of Lehi-Nephi in Mosiah 7–9, which is the place that Nephi fled to after leaving his brothers, the Lamanites, behind. I would suggest that whatever Anti means, it has something to do either with that part of their territory or with the righteous heritage of Nephi and Lehi. I don’t think it should be interpreted as meaning ‘neither Nephi nor Lehi’ (Anti-Nephi-Lehi, interpreted according to the Greek anti-) or as ‘before Nephi and Lehi’ (Ante-Nephi-Lehi, interpreted according to the Latin ante-). Other interpretations for Anti in Anti-Nephi-Lehi have been proposed, but ultimately the text itself provides no explicit evidence for what Anti means.