Here both the original and printer’s manuscripts read “the many murders and their awful wickedness”. The 1830 typesetter replaced the definite article the with the possessive pronoun their. It is possible that Joseph Smith read off “their many murders” but that Oliver Cowdery, the scribe here in the original manuscript, wrote the instead of their. There is considerable evidence that Oliver tended to replace their with the. In the following, I list instances where he initially made the error in 𝓞 or in 𝓟 and then immediately—or virtually immediately—corrected it:
initial errors in 𝓞
initial errors in 𝓟
There is also one instance where Oliver appears to have miscopied the their of 𝓞 into 𝓟 as the:
Although in Alma 13:10 the original manuscript is not extant for the ir at the end of their, there is room for it between extant fragments of 𝓞. The resulting conjunctive structure in Alma 13:10 is strikingly similar to that of the earliest reading for Alma 27:23 (both have the form “the X and their Y”).
When we consider other instances of “the many X” in the text, we find that there are actually four instances of “the many X” without any postmodification, but these are all restricted to the phrase “the many waters” (meaning ‘ocean’) and are found only in 1 Nephi 13. For all remaining examples of “the many X” (24 of them), the X is restrictively postmodified by a relative clause, as in these nearby examples where the text refers to “the many murders” and the sins committed by the Anti-Nephi-Lehies:
It could well be that these previous occurrences of “the many murders”, especially the two in verses 6 and 8 of this chapter, led Oliver to accidentally write “the many murders” one more time in Alma 27:23, an error that he did not catch.
One could argue that “the many murders”, the earliest text in Alma 27:23, involves ellipsis and presumes that the reader will recognize that “the many murders” refers to the ones committed by these repentant Lamanites (and referred to earlier in the chapter). The only evidence for this kind of ellipsis in the text is based on examples like the one listed earlier, “the exceeding faith and repentance” in Alma 13:10, which is apparently an error for “their exceeding faith and repentance” (see the discussion under that passage). Another possibility for emending Alma 27:23 would be to assume that there was a relative clause in the original text and that this clause was somehow omitted during the early transmission of the text; in other words, the original text may have read something like “on account of the many murders which they had committed and their awful wickedness”. But the possibility of a relative clause being lost seems much less plausible than an original their being accidentally replaced by the. The most probable solution here is to assume that the strange reading “the many murders” in 𝓞 and 𝓟 is in error and that the the is a mistake for their. The critical text will accept the 1830 emendation as the probable reading of the original text.
Summary: Accept in Alma 27:23 the 1830 typesetter’s emendation of “the many murders” to “their many murders”; this emendation is supported by Oliver Cowdery’s tendency to write the in place of their and by the fact that the otherwise expected postmodifying relative clause is lacking.