Alma 62:6 Textual Variants

Here the original text reads “uniting his forces with that of Parhoron’s”—that is, the plural forces is used to refer to Moroni’s troops, but the singular force is implied in referring to Parhoron’s troops, as if the text read “with that of Parhoron’s force”. When we look at the entire text (but excluding this one case of ellipsis), we find that it is equally divided between force and forces when referring to troops; there are 11 instances of the singular and 11 of the plural, among them the following contrastive pairs:

small force(s)

• Mosiah 19:2 the forces of the king were small
• Alma 58:12 we did take courage with our small force which we had received

all one’s force(s)

• Alma 53:5 he desired all his forces when he should make an attackt
• Alma 59:10 he retained all his force to maintain those places

a part of one’s force(s)

• Alma 52:13 to draw away a part of their forces
• Alma 57:8 or with a part of our strong force

There is considerable evidence that Oliver Cowdery tended to write the plural forces in place of the singular force, at least momentarily in 𝓞 as he took down Joseph Smith’s dictation; in each case, Oliver immediately corrected his error by erasure:

• Alma 57:2 (the first forces is extant in 𝓞)
  • we were sure that our forces were sufficient to take the city of Antiparah by our [ forces >% force 0|force 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST]
• Alma 57:8 (the second force is not extant in 𝓞)
  • yea with our strong [ forces >% force 0|force 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] or with a part of our strong force we did surround by night the city Cumeni
• Alma 57:13
  • we were obliged to employ all our [ forces to >% forc to 0|force to 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] keep them or put them to death

The first of these passages contains both a singular and a plural instance of force, although the singular force in that passage may mean ‘strength’ (as explained under Alma 57:2). Here in Alma 62:6, the editors for the 1920 LDS edition decided to remove the implied difference in number for force(s) by grammatically emending the singular that to the plural those.

One question here is whether the demonstrative pronoun that might represent some primitive error in the text. We note that there is one case in the early transmission of the text where Oliver Cowdery started to write either “that part of the land” or simply “that land” instead of the correct “those parts of the land”:

• Alma 50:32
  • and thus he would obtain possession of [those 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|that > those 1] parts of the land

Oliver’s correction in 𝓟 for Alma 50:32 was immediate since he never wrote the entire originally intended noun phrase, either “that land” or “that part of the land”. But it is very unlikely that the original that in Alma 62:6 is an error for those, especially since the use of that is so striking yet Oliver did not remove it. The critical text will restore this instance of original that.