The original manuscript is extant here for the words “behold we trust that our God”. The resulting text is clearly a sentence fragment. The editors for the 1920 LDS edition minimally revised the text here by replacing the that with in: “we trust in our God”. Another possible emendation would be to omit the original that, which would give “we trust our God”. Yet both these emendations seem inappropriate for the context. Helaman is not simply declaring his trust in God. Perhaps what he intends to say here is “we trust that it is our God who hath given us victory over those lands”. One could thus propose emending this passage by inserting it is. Another possibility would be to omit the relative pronoun who: “we trust that our God hath given us victory over those lands”. It seems very possible that here in the early transmission of the text some error occurred.
Besides the sentence fragment, the relative clause itself (“who hath given us victory over those lands”) seems strange in referring to victory over lands per se rather than over the Lamanites (Alma 46:7) or one of their armies (Alma 53:6). No part of this relative clause in Alma 58:33 is extant in 𝓞. Even so, it is difficult to see how any kind of reasonable emendation could avoid referring to victory over lands; however strange, the reading seems to be intended. Taking back lands and holding them is, to be sure, a part of being victorious, as suggested in a nearby passage:
The Book of Mormon text has three basic types of phrases involving the word trust; for each basic type, I provide some typical examples (here NP stands for a noun phrase and S for a finite clause):
) “to put one’s trust in NP” (18 times)
(2a) “to trust that S” (8 times)
(2b) “to trust S” (2 times)
(3) “to trust in NP” (6 times)
There are two examples that combine the second and third types to form instances of “to trust in NP that S”:
Instead of the finite clause complement S, we can have an infinitive clause as the complement:
There are three examples where the complement is verbless:
And finally, there are a couple of oddities found only in Isaiah quotes from the King James Bible, one with a different preposition and one without any complement at all for the verb trust:
As far as Alma 58:33 is concerned, the earliest text appears to be of the second basic type, “to trust (that) S”, except that the S is an NP.
As noted above, one possible emendation would be to insert the words it is between that and our God, even though the original manuscript is extant here and it is is definitely not there. This emendation adds another occurrence of a finite that- clause after the verb trust. Such a minimal emendation makes very good sense and also avoids a shift in the meaning. Moreover, the phraseology equivalent to “it is God who …” occurs in a number of places in the Book of Mormon:
In fact, three of these (Alma 44:9, Alma 57:35, and Helaman 5:26) have the present perfective hath in the relative clause (just as in Alma 58:33).
There is also some evidence in the early transmission of the text for the loss of existential subjects with their be verb form (see under each of these passages for discussion):
The last example shows the loss of it is, the same loss that is being proposed here in Alma 58:33. Also see under Alma 60:12 for another case where an original it is may have been lost during the dictation of the text; in the 1840 edition, the phrase it is was added to the text (presumably by Joseph Smith), thus emending the reading there to “do ye suppose that because so many of your brethren have been killed it is because of their wickedness”.
In contrast to these errors, there is no evidence in the history of the text for accidentally inserting extra relative pronouns such as who or which. Nor is there any evidence for mixing up in with that (or vice versa, for that matter). It is true that one can find some evidence for the occasional unintended addition of the subordinate conjunction that (see, for instance, under 2 Nephi 1:1). But as we have already seen, the proposed emendation “we trust our God” seems inappropriate here, as does “we trust in our God”. The most reasonable conjecture is that during the dictation of Alma 58:33, it is was accidentally lost. The critical text will accept this emendation since the earliest extant reading (the sentence fragment, “we trust that our God who hath given us victory over those lands”) seems unacceptable while the conjectural emendation it is seems the most successful in achieving the intended meaning for this sentence.
Summary: Emend Alma 58:33 by inserting it is before our God, thus supplying an existential subject and verb for the noun phrase our God; also restore the original preceding subordinate conjunction that; evidence from usage and errors elsewhere in the text supports this conjectural emendation (“we trust that it is our God who hath given us victory over those lands”).