Alma 23:16 Textual Variants

and now it came to pass that the king and those [People 0|people 1A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] [which 1A|who BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] were converted were desirous that they might have a name

The 1837 edition omitted the word people from the phrase “those people which were converted”; in addition, the archaic use of which was replaced by who since the reference here is to persons. Joseph Smith did not mark this deletion (or the change to who) in his editing for the 1837 edition. Elsewhere, the text has seven occurrences of “those people” followed by a relative clause (which originally, edited to who in the 1837 edition):

Mosiah 28:12 those people which had been destroyed
Alma 37:21 those people which have been destroyed
Alma 46:4 those people which were wroth
Alma 51:21 those people which professed the blood of nobility
Alma 63:10 those people which had gone forth into that land
Helaman 1:9 those people which were desirous that he should be their governor
Helaman 8:10 those people which sought to destroy Nephi

So there is nothing wrong with this phraseology. Since people has never been removed from any of the other instances of this construction, the 1837 omission of people in Alma 23:16 was probably accidental.

Summary: Restore people in Alma 23:16, as well as the original relative pronoun which, giving “those people which were converted”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

References