Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote their law, then crossed out the final ir to form the law, the probable reading of the original manuscript. This their probably resulted from the their found in the next phrase (“and their lawyers”), although we shall see that language earlier in this chapter may have contributed to this error.
The expression “their lawyers and judges of the land” sounds very strange. Perhaps there is a determiner (such as the) missing before judges; we expect something here because of the postmodifying prepositional phrase “of the land”. There are five other examples of “judge(s) of the land” in the text, and all of them are preceded by the definite article the:
“the chief judge of the land” Alma 14:4, Alma 14:5, Alma 14:14, 3 Nephi 7:1
“the lower judges of the land” Alma 46:4
These examples suggest that in the original text Alma 14:5 read “they had reviled against the law and their lawyers and the judges of the land”. There is a nearby preceding example of “their lawyers and judges”, but without any postmodification:
Note that the phraseology here in verse 2 is precisely what Oliver Cowdery initially wrote in verse 5: their before law and no determiner before judges. One could argue that in verse 5 Oliver corrected their law to the law in accord with the reading in 𝓞 but that he neglected to provide the the before “judges of the land”.
There is considerable evidence that Oliver Cowdery tended to omit the definite article the. Here are some examples where the reading without the the is possible:
There are also at least 25 instances in the manuscripts where Oliver accidentally omitted a the that was obviously required, as in the following two examples where Oliver omitted the the after an and, thus creating a difficult reading:
Thus evidence from scribal errors and language elsewhere in the text supports the possibility that the definite article the was lost before judges in Alma 14:5.
David Calabro proposes (personal communication) another way to get the reading “the judges of the land”—namely, by emending the text so that the their before lawyers is replaced by the definite article the: “and the lawyers and judges of the land”. Yet there are a couple of problems with this particular use of the definite article. First of all, it would be more difficult to explain why Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “against their law” just before unless there was a their in the following “and their lawyers”. And secondly, a conjunctive expression like “and the lawyers and judges of the land” would imply that the lawyers were “lawyers of the land”. That expression is found nowhere else in the Book of Mormon text.
Summary: In accord with internal evidence, emend “their lawyers and judges of the land” in Alma 14:5 to read “their lawyers and the judges of the land”; also accept in this passage the corrected reading in 𝓟 of the law rather than the initially written their law.