Alma 4:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and thus in [the > this 1|this ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] eighth year of the reign of the judges there began to be great contentions among the people of the church

Scribe 2 of 𝓟 initially wrote “the eighth year”, but then he immediately corrected the the to this. The use of this with the number of the year does occur elsewhere, and in each case the year was originally referred to a few verses earlier:

And for Alma 4:9, the original reference to the eighth year occurs earlier in verse 6:

It is possible that the original text here in Alma 4:9 actually read “this the eighth year”—that is, perhaps scribe 2 of 𝓟 should have inserted the this rather than replace the the with this. There are a couple examples of this the involving periods of time:

But neither of these two examples are as similar to the language in Alma 4:6, 9 as are the two examples of the form “the Xth year … this Xth year” in 3 Nephi 2:11, 13 and 3 Nephi 4:5, 15. The critical text will therefore accept the corrected reading in 𝓟 for Alma 4:9: “and thus in this eighth year of the reign of the judges”.

Summary: Retain in Alma 4:9 the phraseology “this eighth year”, the corrected reading in 𝓟; such usage is strongly supported by the text in 3 Nephi 2:13 and 3 Nephi 4:15.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References