Alma 22:22–23 Textual Variants

In Alma 22:23, Oliver Cowdery edited “many of his servants” to “many of the servants”. He made this change in pencil. As discussed under Alma 10:28, corrections in pencil apparently took place in the 1830 print shop and were made by Oliver or by John Gilbert (the 1830 typesetter)—and without reference to the original manuscript. These changes do not necessarily represent the reading of the original text, although some apparently do. But in every instance, they involve conscious editing. For some nearby examples, see under Alma 17:8, Alma 17:18, and Alma 18:1–2; only the last of these three appears to have restored the original reading. For the example here in Alma 22:23, we have definite proof that the original manuscript did not read according to Oliver’s editing: 𝓞 is extant here and reads “many of his servants”.

For Oliver Cowdery, the immediate difficulty was that the king (the referent for the his in verse 23) is not mentioned at all in that sentence but in the previous sentence (in verse 22): “and he stood upon his feet receiving his strength”. In verse 23, on the other hand, “and many of his servants” is immediately preceded by “the queen”, and that conjunctive combination leads the reader to expect a possessive pronoun referring to the queen, not the king. So Oliver chose the more general determiner the. As we shall see, her will not work here.

The narrative here in Alma 22:17–23 refers to both the servants of the king and the servants of the queen. Initially, we have only the king’s servants, who are described as running to the queen and getting her to come to the king’s room:

• Alma 22:18–19
  • and now when the king had said these words he was struck as if he were dead and it came to pass that his servants ran and told the queen all that had happened unto the king and she came in unto the king

The queen then commands the king’s servants to kill Aaron and his fellow missionaries:

• Alma 22:19
  • and when she saw him lay as if he were dead and also Aaron and his brethren standing as though they had been the cause of his fall she was angry with them and commanded that her servants or the servants of the king should take them and slay them

Here Mormon seems to have initially miswritten “her servants” on the plates, not unsurprisingly since the preceding text refers to the actions of the queen (“and when she saw him lay … she was angry”). But in reality, she did not command her own servants but the king’s servants to kill Aaron and his companions. So Mormon corrected what he had written by adding “or the servants of the king”.

The Book of Mormon text has many examples of the corrective or. Probably the most striking example in the entire Book of Mormon occurs nearby:

• Alma 24:19
  • and thus we see that they buried the weapons of peace or they buried the weapons of war for peace

Another striking example of the corrective or removes an obvious syntactic error that Mormon appears to have initially written on the plates:

• Alma 43:38
  • while on the other hand there was now and then a man fell among the Nephites by their wounds and the loss of blood they being shielded from the more vital parts of the body or the more vital parts of the body being shielded from the strokes of the Lamanites by their breastplates and their armshields and their headplates

There are also two original instances of the corrective or that have been removed from the standard text, the first accidentally and the second one consciously:

• Mormon 6:10 (or omitted by the 1830 typesetter)
  • and it came to pass that my men were hewn down yea or even my ten thousand which were with me
• Ether 9:2 (for the 1837 edition Joseph Smith retained only the corrective part)
  • nevertheless the Lord was merciful unto Omer and also to his sons and to his daughters which were not or which did not seek his destruction

In these two examples, I give the original text and in bold I indicate the words that were removed. The second example is interesting in that Moroni had written on the plates only the equivalent first part of “which were not seeking his destruction” when he decided to adjust the syntax; in this instance, the corrective or corrects an error midstream. For a third example where an original or may have been omitted when Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟, see under Alma 58:18 (there the original text may have read “I caused that my men or those which were with me should retreat into the wilderness”).

Mormon’s corrective or-statement in Alma 22:19 is supported by the subsequent narrative where the king’s servants protest against doing anything to these Nephites because of their great powers:

• Alma 22:20
  • now the servants had seen the cause of the king’s fall therefore they durst not lay their hands on Aaron and his brethren and they pled with the queen saying why commandest thou that we should slay these men when behold one of them is mightier than us all therefore we shall fall before them

So when the queen realized that the king’s servants would not do her bidding, she commanded her own servants to get help from the people:

• Alma 22:21
  • now when the queen saw the fear of the servants she also began to fear exceedingly lest there should some evil come upon her and she commanded her servants that they should go and call the people that they might slay Aaron and his brethren

One might ask why the queen did not command her own servants to kill Aaron and the others. The probable reason is that the queen’s servants were female and were not armed.

One might then ask why the original text in verse 23 read “many of his servants” rather than Oliver Cowdery’s “many of the servants”. The main reason is that the queen’s servants had actually left the room to do the queen’s bidding, as explained later in the narrative:

• Alma 22:24
  • now there was a multitude gathered together because of the commandment of the queen and there began to be great murmurings among them because of Aaron and his brethren

All of this evidence thus argues that in Alma 22:23 the original reading “many of his servants” is indeed correct and did not need to be emended to “many of the servants”.

We should also note that in verse 23 Mormon used the restrictive expression “many of his servants” rather than the full “his servants” (as earlier in the narrative, in verse 19). Perhaps Mormon wanted to make clear that not all of the king’s servants were there in the room to witness what happened but that many were.