Alma 48:24 Textual Variants

Keith and Joan Skousen (personal communication, April 1998) have suggested that there might be a problem with the use of the word suffer here in Alma 48:24. Normally in today’s English, suffer means ‘to physically endure pain’, but in Early Modern English it was very often used with the meaning ‘to allow’; one can see this in many passages in the King James Bible and in the Book of Mormon, as in the following examples:

• Mark 10:14
  • suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not
• 1 Nephi 13:30
  • the Lord God will not suffer that the Gentiles will utterly destroy the mixture of thy seed

However, in Alma 48:24, the word suffer does not seem to mean ‘allow’. But there is a related meaning that will work. Under definition 15 for suffer in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find an obsolete meaning for this verb, namely, ‘to consent to’ (or ‘to submit to’), which is undoubtedly the meaning here in Alma 48:24 (that is, the passage means ‘they could not consent to lay down their lives’). Here are two more occurrences of this use of suffer in the scriptures:

• Mark 10:4 (King James Bible)
  • and they said : Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement and to put her away
• Mormon 8:25
  • and behold their prayers were also in behalf of him that the Lord should suffer to bring these things forth

The OED cites a number of examples from the early 1300s on with this meaning, including this 1764 example from Oliver Goldsmith: “I must not suffer to have the laws broken before my face”. Thus there is no error in the Book of Mormon text in Alma 48:24 and Mormon 8:25, but the meaning of suffer appears to be archaic in these two verses.