Alma 7:27 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and now may the peace of God rest upon you and upon your houses and lands and upon your flocks and herds and all that you possess [ 1|; ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|, RT] your women and your children

One wonders here if there is a missing and before “your women and your children”. There is even a possibility that the preposition upon is also missing, although it should be noted that for the previous noun phrase there is no preposition either: “and all that you possess”. Moreover, the loss of a single character, an ampersand, would be more plausible than the loss of the longer & upon.

It is doubtful that “your women and your children” should be considered as belonging to the general class of “all that you possess”. One could, I suppose, consider the 1920 LDS change in punctuation (from the 1830 semicolon to a comma) as making this interpretation, but it is more likely that the 1920 change in punctuation was simply an attempt to make sure that “your women and your children” would be considered part of the larger list (all the way from “upon you” to “your women and your children”). Elsewhere, the text uses the verb possess to refer to actual possessions (physical objects as well as lands and cities) but not to family members.

Sometimes lists in the Book of Mormon lack the expected conjunction between pairs of related conjuncts, as in the following example where no and is used to separate three pairs of conjunctive noun phrases:

Similarly in Alma 7:27, the list ends with a pair of related conjuncts, “your women and your children”. Notice, in particular, the repetition of the determiner your in this conjunctive noun phrase (just like in Alma 43:20, where the determiner their is consistently repeated). The critical text will therefore maintain the earliest reading without the normally expected and before “your women and your children”, even though there is a possibility that this conjunctive phrase may be missing a preceding and.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 7:27 the conjunctive noun phrase “your women and your children” without any preceding conjunction and; there is some evidence for this kind of asyndetic coordination elsewhere in the text.

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

References