Alma 37:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
Ammon and his brethren could not have convinced so many [thousands 01BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|thousand A] of the Lamanites of the incorrect tradition of their fathers

As discussed under the Words of Mormon 1:14, the original text permits many thousand but only when directly followed by a noun, such as “many thousand lives” (in Alma 28:10). When postmodified by a prepositional phrase headed by of, we always get the plural thousands (“many thousands of X”). Here in Alma 37:9, the 1830 compositor accidentally set “many thousand of the Lamanites”. The subsequent 1837 edition restored the correct thousands.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 37:9 the plural thousands in “so many thousands of the Lamanites”, the reading of the manuscripts; usage elsewhere consistently supports the plural thousands in “many thousands of X”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

References