Alma 13:12 Textual Variants

The original manuscript is not extant here for the word an; but based on the placement of nearby fragments, there is clearly room for the indefinite article in the original manuscript. Scribe 2 in the printer’s manuscript wrote the text as follows:

• Alma 13:12 (lines 36–37, page 201 of 𝓟)
  • save it were with abhorence and there were many, an exceeding great many which were made pure and entered into the rest of the Lord their God, and now my

Scribe 2 sometimes punctuated the text as he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟 (by adding a comma or a period). At this place in 𝓟, he placed a comma after many, which is a clear indication that he was definitely aware of the need for a break between many and the following appositive phrase “an exceeding great many”. His use of the comma here means that there was probably an an in his copytext, the original manuscript; it is very doubtful that, having paid that much attention to parsing the text here, he accidentally inserted the an as he copied into 𝓟.

Yet the an in the printer’s manuscript is distinctly crossed out with heavier ink flow. The crossout appears to be Oliver Cowdery’s, not scribe 2’s—nor is it Joseph Smith’s (which would have occurred in his editing for the 1837 edition). The ink color is not as black as was Joseph’s ink; and a couple of the crossout strokes are quite thin, unlike Joseph’s broad ink flow. The deletion of the an appears to be due to editing, but one cannot think of any good reason for omitting the an. Elsewhere in the text, whenever we have “exceeding great many”, the indefinite article an always precedes:

• 1 Nephi 13:29 (original text)
  • and because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb an exceeding great many do stumble
• Helaman 3:3
  • yea there were much contentions and many dissensions in the which there were an exceeding great many which departed out of the land of Zarahemla

What is unusual about the usage in Alma 13:12 is that the noun phrase “(an) exceeding great many” is used appositively after many. It is possible that the original intent of the corrector in 𝓟 was to remove the appositive usage by deleting the initial many but that he accidentally ended up crossing out the an rather than the immediately preceding many. In other words, the corrector may have intended to emend the text to read consistently with usage elsewhere in the text (namely, as “and there were an exceeding great many which were made pure and entered into the rest of the Lord their God”).

In any event, the deletion of the indefinite article an here in Alma 13:12 appears to be an error. The critical text will restore the an and place dashes around the appositive phrase: “and there were many—an exceeding great many—which were made pure”.