Alma 10:6 Textual Variants

The phrase “the reign of the judges”, with the before judges, is the expected phrase in the Book of Mormon, with at least 100 occurrences in the original text. (For an example where “of the reign” was accidentally omitted from the LDS text, see under Alma 17:6. There I also discuss two other cases, Alma 16:9 and Alma 54:1, where “of the reign” may have been lost early in the transmission of the text.)

Given the frequency of “the reign of the judges”, it’s not surprising that the 1837 edition changed the determiner our to the here in Alma 10:6. The change may very well have been accidental (a typo by the 1837 typesetter) since there is nothing wrong with “the reign of our judges”, despite the fact that there’s only this one occurrence of it in the text. Here we have a direct quotation of Amulek’s speech rather than Mormon’s third-person summary of the chronology, so Amulek’s use of our in “the reign of our judges” is quite natural. There is only one example where “the reign of the judges” is used in someone’s first-person speech (namely, when Alma is speaking to Korihor in Alma 30:32). Mormon, on the other hand, would have avoided using our in the phrase since not too long after the birth of Christ, the Nephites started using the number of years after Christ’s birth to mark the year, thus eliminating the older system based on the reign of the judges, as Mormon explicitly mentions:

• 3 Nephi 2:7–8
  • and nine years had passed away from the time which the sign was given which was spoken of by the prophets that Christ should come into the world now the Nephites began to reckon their time from this period which the sign was given or from the coming of Christ therefore nine years had passed away

The critical text will therefore restore the unique occurrence of “the reign of our judges” in Alma 10:6.