Some suggestions for emendation have been made regarding this passage. The most significant ones deal with the odd phraseology “on the line Bountiful”. Elsewhere in the text, the place-name Bountiful is always referred to as a place, land, or city. In other words, except for here in Alma 22:32, Bountiful always occurs with the word place, land, or city; nowhere else is there a “line Bountiful”. Greg Wright (personal communication, 14 December 2004) suggests that there is a missing relative clause “which was between the land” between line and Bountiful—that is, the original text read “on the line which was between the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”. Usage elsewhere for the noun line suggests that something like this is indeed missing here in Alma 22:32:
The language in Alma 50:11 suggests the shorter emendation “on the line between the land Bountiful and the land Desolation” for Alma 22:32 (that is, without which was). On the other hand, Wright’s emendation for Alma 22:32 (“which was between the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”) follows the 1830 reading of 3 Nephi 3:23. There the reading of the printer’s manuscript has the prepositional betwixt, which suggests a third emendation for Alma 22:32: “on the line which was betwixt the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”. And combining the language of Alma 50:11 and 3 Nephi 3:23, we could propose a fourth emendation: “on the line betwixt the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”. As far as 3 Nephi 3:23 is concerned, both 𝓟 and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of 𝓞, so either preposition is theoretically possible. However, elsewhere in the text the preposition betwixt is never used to describe geography. For that reason, the last two emendations using betwixt seem less likely. (For a complete discussion of the original text for 3 Nephi 3:23, see under that passage.)
The original manuscript is partially extant for Alma 22:32 and is transcribed as follows in volume 1 of the critical text:
( ) & now it was only the
HAD COME FROM THE LAND NORTHWARD FOR FOOD
( i)te on the linebounti
DISTANCE OF A DAY & A HALFS JOURNEY FOR A NEPH
( )t Sea & thus the land of Nep
-FUL & THE LAND DESOLATION FROM THE EAST TO THE WES
Here there is no room between extant fragments of 𝓞 for the phrase “(which was) between the land” except by supralinear insertion. Normally Oliver Cowdery correctly copied into 𝓟 supralinear insertions that originated in 𝓞, so if there is an omission here in the text, it probably occurred as Oliver took down Joseph Smith’s dictation. One possible indication of an error here is that after Oliver had written “on the line” in 𝓞, he initially started to write some word that began with w (see the extant portion for line 22 in the above transcription). Oliver immediately erased this w, which suggests that the original text did not have a word here beginning with w. Thus the transcript in 𝓞 provides some minor evidence in favor of the following proposal: the original text here read “on the line between the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”, but Oliver started to write “on the line which”; Oliver caught his error and erased the w that he had initially written, but then he ended up skipping between the land.
Since the extant reading for Alma 22:32 is quite unacceptable, the critical text will assume that some phrase was accidentally omitted in 𝓞 as Oliver Cowdery took down Joseph Smith’s dictation. Given what Oliver actually wrote in 𝓞 as well as usage elsewhere in the text, the most probable phrase that he omitted was “between the land”. He skipped from between to Bountiful, facilitated by the phonetic similarity of line and land (especially since land would most readily have been pronounced as /læn/—that is, without its final d—when followed by the consonantinitial Bountiful ).
Another problem here in Alma 22:32, brought up by Albert Story (personal communication, 7 October 2003), deals with the question of how to interpret the phrase “from the east”—namely, does the text here mean simply from the eastern region, or does it more specifically involve ellipsis of the word sea? In fact, it’s even possible that the word sea was accidentally omitted here during the early transmission of the text. In dealing with this issue, we first note that the text has three cases where the word sea is repeated in conjunctive noun phrases referring to the west and east sea:
But there are even more cases where sea is ellipted, sometimes for the word east, sometimes for west, yet all seem to be referring to the same geographic “sea west” and “sea east”:
Note the variety for those cases that specifically refer to narrow regions:
The first case listed here (Alma 22:27) supports interpreting the three other cases as meaning ‘the east sea’ rather than simply ‘the east’. Similarly, we should interpret all the other cases as instances of ellipted sea. Moreover, there is no evidence in the manuscripts for sea ever being accidentally added or omitted, even momentarily, in these geographical descriptions. Thus the critical text will leave unchanged all those instances of east and west for which sea, it would appear, has been ellipted.
Summary: Emend Alma 22:32 by adding the phrase between the land between line and Bountiful, thus giving “on the line between the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”; the phrase “from the east” should be left unchanged, with the understanding that the word sea is purposely ellipted; this analysis holds for other conjunctive occurrences involving sea and the compass directions east and west.