This passage presents a difficult reading. Alma and his brethren were probably born in the land of Nephi, not in the land of Zarahemla; between the time that the people of Zeniff left the land of Zarahemla and then returned under king Limhi, at least two generations had elapsed (from Zeniff to Noah and from Noah to Limhi). Earlier the text refers to Alma as a young priest of Noah:
Moreover, even if Alma had been born in the land of Zarahemla and left for the land of Nephi as an infant, he did not have any religious brethren until after his conversion. Thus it seems impossible to refer to “Alma and his brethren” as having left the land of Zarahemla and returning again. One might conjecture that in Mosiah 25:5–6 we have an unintended parallelism: when Mormon came to writing about the people of Alma, he repeated the language that he had just written regarding the people of Zeniff (“from the time they left the land of Zarahemla until the time they returned again”). In other words, to be accurate, Mormon should have written only “and he also read the account of Alma and his brethren and all their afflictions”. One could, I suppose, go even further and construct a cultural explanation for the current reading: perhaps a group of people, once formed, are always considered an integral whole going back into time to include ancestors that were technically never a part of that group. Or one might interpret the repetition as perfunctory, that it means simply ‘from the beginning to the end’. Nonetheless, the Book of Mormon text is usually quite careful in its statements, so the incongruity of using the same specific phraseology to refer to Alma and his people does seem quite out of place.
An intriguing conjectural emendation for this passage has been suggested by Ellis Harris (personal communication, 19 September 2004): a large visual skip may have occurred during the early transmission of the text for Mosiah 25:5–6 (probably when copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟). That skip could have been an entire line of text that was virtually identical to the immediately preceding line:
Such a visual jump is clearly possible, with Oliver’s eye skipping from one line of 𝓞 to the next one, with the result that in 𝓟 he ended up creating the anomalous statement referring to Alma and his brethren as having left the land of Zarahemla and returning to it again. The amount of missing text is of the appropriate line length.
Oliver Cowdery was the scribe in 𝓟 for Mosiah 25:5–6. Earlier in the book of Mosiah there are four cases where he initially skipped a whole line of 𝓞 (or nearly a whole line of text) as he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟. In the first two cases, there are some identical or partially identical words that may have facilitated the skip (I mark these words in bold in the following listing); but in the two last cases, Oliver seems to have simply omitted a whole line. In each case, I lay out the proposed reading of the original manuscript (although the lines may have ended differently); I mark each line that was initially skipped with an arrow:
Of course, if a whole line of text was skipped in Mosiah 25:6, we can’t be precisely sure about what was in that line. Skipping a large part of a line of text allows for a number of additional conjectures: maybe the also was not repeated; perhaps the word record or records occurred instead of account; maybe the phrase “and all their afflictions” was not repeated. And perhaps there were other variations in the text, including substitutions or even extra words. One could argue, however, that if two lines had been virtually identical, it would have been harder during proofing to discover that one of those lines had been skipped.
Another possible emendation for Mosiah 25:6 would be to simply replace Alma with Ammon. While copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery (the scribe here in 𝓟), could have miscopied “Ammon and his brethren” as “Alma and his brethren”, especially since in the chapters immediately preceding Mosiah 25:6, we get varying examples of “X and his brethren”, as shown by the following sequence:
| Ammon and his brethren | 3 times | Mosiah 21:22, 23, 29 |
| Alma and his brethren | 1 time | Mosiah 21:34 |
| Ammon and his brethren | 1 time | Mosiah 22:11 |
| Alma and his brethren | 1 time | Mosiah 23:29 |
| Amulon and his brethren | 2 times | Mosiah 23:34, 35 |
| Alma and his brethren | 5 times | Mosiah 23:35, 36, 37 ; 24:8, 15 |
So just before coming to Mosiah 25:6, Oliver had written five uninterrupted occurrences of “Alma and his brethren”, and thus he could have easily ended up writing the same in Mosiah 25:6 instead of the correct “Ammon and his brethren”. And as far as Ammon is concerned, there is no doubt that he and his men left the land of Zarahemla and suffered numerous afflictions before finding the people of Zeniff and returning again to Zarahemla:
We can also find scribal evidence that scribes were sometimes influenced by the name Ammon as they started to write the name Alma:
Of course, in Mosiah 25:6 the proposed emendation has an original Ammon being replaced by Alma, while these examples show the opposite influence.
One difficulty with the simpler emendation (replacing Alma with Ammon) is that the subsequent text clearly implies that king Mosiah read to his people the record of Alma and his brethren:
One could argue, of course, that the record of Alma and his brethren was included as part of “the records of the people of Zeniff”. But this proposal is contradicted by the separate historical account for the people of Alma in Mosiah 23–24, especially with its own individual preface that distinguishes Alma’s people from king Noah’s: “An account of Alma and the people of the Lord which was driven into the wilderness by the people of king Noah”.
In opposition to any emendation that would introduce Ammon into this passage, one might argue that Ammon’s expedition to find the people of Zeniff was a minor one and not worthy of its own historical account. Yet the text itself treats Ammon and his men on a par with Limhi and his people, even though Ammon’s party of 16 men (Mosiah 7:2) was immensely smaller in number:
In fact, the text in the above passage lists “Ammon and his people” first. Moreover, Ammon’s expedition seems to have remained an important event in the history of the Nephites; note Mormon’s reference to it later on when Nephi and Lehi, great-great-grandsons of the first Alma, were thrown into a Lamanite prison in the land of Nephi:
Ammon’s expedition is an important one, and it is quite reasonable that Ammon and his men would have kept their own record.
Thus the odds are that there was some kind of long visual skip in Mosiah 25:6 that was never corrected. The problem, of course, is in reconstructing that original line of text. The simplest solution is to make two lines identical except for the names Alma and Ammon, but obviously other possibilities remain.
Summary: Emend Mosiah 25:6 so that it reads “and he also read the account of Alma and his brethren and all their afflictions and he also read the account of Ammon and his brethren and all their afflictions from the time they left the land of Zarahemla until the time they returned again”; this emendation is based on the assumption that, except for the names Alma and Ammon, two lines of text in 𝓞 were identical and that Oliver Cowdery’s eye skipped down one whole line as he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟, thus leading to the anomalous current text that states that Alma and his people left the land of Zarahemla and then returned again to it; other possible emendations would involve variation in the wording, including one that would simply replace Alma with Ammon, although that emendation doesn’t readily explain the subsequent reaction of the people to king Mosiah’s reading of the records.