“Unquestionably, the individual battles between Alma and Amlici and the king of the Lamanites are most significant. … [The] Lamanite force does not employ its numerical superiority. Rather than a general melee, Alma engages in two personal combats, one with Amlici and one with the Lamanite king.
“Thus, each leader represents his army in a battle of kings, not a battle between the armies themselves. Alma crossed the river with a small number of men under his immediate command and began combat with Amlici. It could not have happened by chance that, in an army as numerous as grains of sand, Alma coincidentally fell on one of two opponents of his own social ranking” (Gardner, Second Witness, 4:65–66).
Is there an explanation for repeated phrases in some verses? (3:1) “Epanalepsis is the name of a significant literary device known in antiquity. It occurs where an author repeats certain words in the course of a lengthy sentence, to pick up a previous train of thought after a parenthetical aside, to remind the reader of the original idea of the sentence. This technique was noted in antiquity by Demetrius, and it is sometimes called ‘resumptive repetition’” (Childs, “Epanalepsis in the Book of Mormon,” 165).