The reading of the printer’s manuscript here in Alma 62:27–28 is rather difficult to deal with. There are two ways to interpret how Mormon starts out here in verse 27. Both interpretations deal with the word as. One possibility is that the as is a subordinate conjunction that introduces the idea that many of the Lamanite prisoners wanted to join the people of Ammon. In this case, as can be interpreted as meaning ‘since’. Under this interpretation, we end up with a sentence fragment. But there is clear evidence for this kind of incomplete as-construction elsewhere in the original (and current) text:
The 1830 typesetter dealt with the awkward construction here in Alma 62:27–28 by deleting the as in verse 27, which produced a main clause and thus allowed him to place a period at the end of “to join the people of Ammon and become a free people”. In other words, the 1830 typesetter treated the as as an extraneous use of the subordinate conjunction as. Although the current text retains some of these examples, many have been removed in later editing of the text. For some discussion of this editing, see under 1 Nephi 8:7.
Don Brugger (personal communication) indicates that there is another way to interpret the use of as many here in Alma 62:27, one that does not lead to a sentence fragment but instead means ‘all’. He suggests that what we actually have in this passage is a form of the phrase “as many as”. The text uses the phrase “as many as” to refer to all that meet some stated conditions; in other words, there is an implied universal quantifier (‘every one’). In most cases, the specific form of the phrase is simply as many as (49 times), as later on in Alma 62:28: “as many as were desirous” (meaning ‘all who were desirous’). In five instances, the many modifies a noun, as in the following example:
In nine cases, there is a postmodifying prepositional phrase headed by of, as in this example:
In two cases, there is a displaced prepositional phrase that is directly associated with the verb rather than with “as many as”:
But the most interesting type is when the postmodifying phrase includes a relative clause. There are two cases of this construction in the original text, here in Alma 62:27 and earlier in Alma 3:3. In each instance, the relative pronoun takes the place of the second as, but the intended meaning is ‘all’, just as with the normal cases of “as many as”. The first example of this construction has never been edited:
The first sentence is equivalent to “and now all of the Lamanites and the Amlicites which had been slain upon the bank of the river Sidon were cast into the waters of Sidon”. We could just as well replace the which with as to get the following equivalence: “and now as many of the Lamanites and the Amlicites as had been slain upon the bank of the river Sidon were cast into the waters of Sidon”. Note that it would be wrong here to omit the as, giving “and now many of the Lamanites and the Amlicites … were cast into the waters of Sidon”; instead, all of them were cast into the river. The same universal interpretation holds for the original language here in Alma 62:27:
In other words, “all of the Lamanites that were prisoners were desirous to join the people of Ammon” or “as many of the Lamanites as were prisoners were desirous to join the people of Ammon”. Thus the 1830 omission of the as in Alma 62:27 is a mistake since it turns out that all of these Lamanite prisoners wanted to join the people of Ammon. Although the language in verse 28 might imply that not all were desirous, verse 29 makes it clear that indeed all were desirous (just as the original text in verse 27 states):
It would appear that the point of verse 28 is to emphasize that each individual Lamanite soldier retained his free choice in the matter (“as many as were desirous / unto them it was granted according to their desires”).
In conclusion, this second interpretation (where as many means ‘all’) appears to be the correct one here in Alma 62:27. The first interpretation (where as means ‘since’) is not correct since all of the Lamanite soldiers that survived desired to join the people of Ammon, not just many of them. The critical text will therefore restore the original as in this passage since it is precisely correct under the second interpretation.
Summary: Restore the original as in Alma 62:27; the intended meaning of as many in this sentence is ‘all’; the construction here is supported by the language in Alma 3:3 as well as the text in Alma 62:29, which explicitly refers to “all the prisoners of the Lamanites” as joining the people of Ammon.