Alma 56:37 Textual Variants

The original manuscript reads “& as we suppose that it was their intent to slay us before Antipus should overtake them”. The present-tense suppose appears to be an error for supposed since Helaman is explaining in a letter the intent of the Lamanites during the battle, not afterwards when Helaman was composing this letter. The past-tense d is missing because it was hard for Oliver Cowdery to hear the final voiced stop d when it was immediately followed by a voiced interdental fricative /d/ (the initial th sound of that ).

Oliver Cowdery copied suppose into the printer’s manuscript, but the 1830 compositor correctly set supposed since he realized that Helaman was reporting what they, Helaman and his men, had been thinking during their engagement with the Lamanites. At the same time, the compositor realized that his copytext read as a sentence fragment, so his solution was to treat “as we supposed” as a parenthetical clause. Thus he omitted the that and placed commas around “as we supposed”:

• Alma 56:37 (the 1830 text with its original accidentals)
  • and, as we supposed, it was their intent to slay us before Antipus should overtake them, and this that they might not be surrounded by our people.

The 1849 LDS edition reverted to the present-tense suppose (but without reference to the manuscripts, which were unavailable at that time). Perhaps Orson Pratt, the editor for the 1849 edition, felt that the present tense was more appropriate for a parenthetical statement made by Helaman when he wrote his letter to Moroni. The 1858 Wright edition made the same change to the present tense, independently it would seem since that edition was set in New York City directly from a copy of the 1840 edition and presumably without reference to any other edition. Both the LDS and RLDS texts have continued with the present-tense suppose.

Later in this letter from Helaman, there is another clause referring to Helaman’s state of knowledge where the past-tense verb form has been similarly replaced with a present-tense form:

• Alma 56:43
  • and now whether they were overtaken by Antipus we [kew 0|knew 1ABCDEGIJKLMNOPQRST|know > knew F|know H] not

Here the 1852 edition, in its first printing, and the 1874 RLDS edition replaced the correct past-tense knew with know. Yet knew is clearly correct since by the time Helaman wrote this letter, he defi- nitely knew that the Lamanites had overtaken Antipus and his men (as described in Alma 56:49).

An alternative emendation here in Alma 56:37 would be to omit the subordinate conjunction as, thus giving “and we supposed that it was their intent to slay us before Antipus should overtake them”. Elsewhere in the original text, there are quite a few instances of as-clauses that are never completed. The typical editorial solution for removing such fragments has been to delete the as (for some examples and discussion, see under 1 Nephi 8:7).

The critical text will restore in Alma 56:37 the conjectured original reading with its past-tense supposed: “and as we supposed that it was their intent to slay us before Antipus should overtake them”. The sentence fragment will be maintained. The incomplete as-clause would not be as diffi- cult to comprehend if we placed a dash before the following independent clause, thereby showing that the as-clause had been cut off:

• Alma 56:37 (the original text, as conjectured, with revised accidentals)
  • and as we supposed that it was their intent to slay us before Antipus should overtake them—and this that they might not be surrounded by our people.

The subordinate conjunction that will also be maintained since the that is extant in 𝓞 and was, in fact, the reason why Oliver Cowdery was unable to perceive the past-tense d at the end of the immediately preceding supposed.

Elsewhere in the text, when the verb suppose takes a finite clause as its complement, the that almost always precedes the clause (96 times). In only three cases is the that lacking in the earliest textual sources:

• 1 Nephi 4:28 for they supposed it was Laban
• 2 Nephi 9:28 supposing they know of themselves
• 3 Nephi 15:22 for they supposed it had been the Gentiles

For each case of “suppose (that) S”, where S stands for a finite clause, we follow the earliest textual sources in determining whether the that is there or not. For some discussion regarding the occasional loss of the that when the verb is suppose, see under Alma 47:5.