A Different Speech for the People of Gideon

John W. Welch

In Alma 5, there were 50 questions. How many questions can you count in Alma 7? There is not one! What a shift in terms of voice register. We have a completely different style here. If biblical scholars who specialize in hypotheses about authorship were to analyze these two texts, I wonder if they would tell us that they were written by two different people. But authorship attribution is not that easy. When people generally are talking to different audiences they communicate in different ways. In Alma 5, Alma was bearing down on the people and he did not want to answer the questions he posed because he wanted them to answer those questions. In Alma 7, he just laid out the doctrine. He could open up and give them the straight teachings.

John W. Welch Notes

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