Alma 60:36 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
I seek not for power but to pull it down I seek not for honor of the world but for the glory of my God and the freedom and welfare of my country

One might wonder here in Alma 60:36 if the definite article the shouldn’t precede honor (“I seek not for the honor of the world”), especially since this sentence has the before glory and also before the phrase freedom and welfare, each of which is postmodified by a prepositional phrase headed by of (“the glory of my God and the freedom and welfare of my country”). In general, the definite article the is expected before a noun postmodified by “of NP” (where NP is a noun phrase). The King James Bible has six examples of the expression “the honor of NP” but none without the definite article before honor.

The original manuscript is not extant for any portion from Alma 60:23 through Alma 61:10 (that is, more than an entire leaf of 𝓞 is missing here), so spacing considerations are of no help in determining whether a the preceded honor in 𝓞. Another possibility is that the singular honor is an error for the plural honors (“I seek not for honors of the world”) or even an error for the honors (“I seek not for the honors of the world”).

It should be noted that parallelism with the preceding clause suggests that the definite article is not necessary here in Alma 60:36:

Of course, one could argue that an original the before honor was lost because the preceding power lacks the definite article.

The noun honor is relatively infrequent in the Book of Mormon; there are only two other instances of it in the text; one has the the, the other does not:

Given this paucity of evidence, the critical text will follow the earliest textual source, the printer’s manuscript, in Alma 60:36, which reads without any definite article for honor. The parallelism of the preceding clause can be taken as evidence that the the is lacking before both power and honor.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 60:36 the reading of all the extant textual sources, namely, honor without the determiner the (“I seek not for honor of the world”).

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References