Alma 28:2–3 Textual Variants

The original manuscript is extant here and reads “and thus a tremendious battle”—that is, without any verb. This expression may be a literalism carried over from the original language of the Book of Mormon, but it is quite unacceptable in English as a stand-alone sentence. (For tremendious rather than the standard tremendous, see below.) Of course, here the reading in 𝓞 may represent an accidental loss of some words, although this sentence fragment must have not been too objectionable since the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition reproduced this reading without any emendation.

In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith added the words “there was”, giving us the current reading: “and thus there was a tremendous battle”. This phraseology is definitely characteristic of the Book of Mormon since the existential “there was a(n) X” occurs 42 times in the earliest text. Moreover, in the very next verse we have precisely this kind of existential construction—and with the word tremendious:

• Alma 28:3
  • yea and also there was a tremendious slaughter among the people of Nephi

The parallelism between these two adjacent verses, plus the use of the word also, suggests that the original manuscript is defective here in verse 2 and that it should have read as Joseph edited it for the 1837 edition. He probably patterned his emendation in verse 2 on the reading in verse 3.

In the original (and current) text, there are no other examples of “(and) thus ” with the existential meaning ‘and thus there is/was ’—that is, there are no examples of existential “(and) thus” without the there and a corresponding existential verb. As expected, there are other examples of “(and) thus there ”:

• Alma 4:9 and thus … there began to be great contentions among the people of the church
• Alma 25:6 and thus there were many of them converted in the wilderness
• 3 Nephi 6:14 and thus there became a great unequality in all the land
• Mormon 2:11 thus there began to be a mourning and a lamentation in all the land

In none of these instances have the there and the existential verb phrase ever been omitted. There are, however, a couple of cases where other instances of the existential there have been momentarily lost during the early transmission of the text:

• Helaman 11:1 (there momentarily omitted in 𝓟 by Oliver Cowdery)
  • insomuch that [NULL > there 1|there ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] were wars throughout all the land
• 3 Nephi 28:37 (there must omitted by scribe 2 of 𝓟, supplied by Oliver Cowdery)
  • and he hath made it manifest unto me that [𝓢① NULL > 𝓢② there must 1|there must ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] needs be a change wrought upon their bodies

The omission of there was in Alma 28:2 is possible, although there is no other omission precisely like it.