Alma 38:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
I would that ye should remember that as much as ye shall put your trust in God even so much [ 01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRT|as S] ye shall be delivered out of your trials and your troubles and your afflictions and ye shall be lifted up at the last day

The connective even so much normally needs a connective word after it. The 1953 RLDS edition supplied the word as here in Alma 38:5, apparently because as much as occurs in the preceding clause (“as much as ye shall put your trust in God”). There is some evidence that Oliver Cowdery sometimes omitted as, if only momentarily (for a list of examples, see under 2 Nephi 9:16). So it is possible that Oliver omitted the as in Alma 38:5 as he took down Joseph Smith’s dictation.

It seems that the meaning in this passage does not involve a comparison of degree; that is, the text does not say that “you will be delivered out of difficulties according to the degree that you put your trust in God”. Rather, the meaning is basically conditional: “by putting your trust in God / you will be delivered out of difficulties”. The 1953 addition of as to the RLDS text does not improve the reading at all, but makes it even more confusing. The manuscript reading without any conjunctive element after even so much is apparently correct, although difficult.

Elsewhere in the text, we have three occurrences of even so much; each of these is followed by that:

Yet in all three of these examples, we expect the subordinate conjunction that because even so much introduces a resultive clause. This is not the situation in Alma 38:5. Here we have a conjunctive pair of connectives: “as much as … even so much …”, with a finite clause after each connective phrase.

Summary: Despite the difficulty of the reading, there is no need in Alma 38:5 to emend even so much by adding a subordinate conjunction (such as the 1953 RLDS edition’s as or possibly that) to precede the following finite clause.

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

References