Alma 7:11 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and he will take upon him death that he may loose the bands of death which [binds >js bind 1|binds A|bind BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] his people

The original text here reads “the bands of death which binds his people”. The verb bind takes the third person singular ending -s under the influence of the nearest noun, death. Joseph Smith, in his editing for the 1837 edition, removed the s so that the associated noun for the verb bind would be the head noun bands. But the text here may actually mean that it is “death which binds his people” rather than the redundancy of “bands ... which bind his people”. Other passages, however, refer to bands that bind:

Therefore the redundancy in Alma 7:11 is acceptable, and Joseph’s grammatical interpretation is supportable. The critical text will, nonetheless, restore the original binds since proximity often determines subject-verb agreement in the original text. See the discussion under 1 Nephi 4:4, in particular the example “the judgments of God was upon them” (1 Nephi 18:5). Also see the general discussion under subject-verb agreement in volume 3.

Summary: Restore in Alma 7:11 the verb form binds; here the inflected form of the verb seems to be determined by the nearest noun, the singular death in “the bands of death which binds his people”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References