Alma 3:1 Textual Variants

The original text here has an extra and after an intervening parenthetical statement (“now the number of the slain were not numbered because of the greatness of their number”). In the original text, there are a number of Hebrew-like examples where and occurs between a long initial subordinate clause and its following main clause, as in the following example later on in the book of Alma:

• Alma 16:21
  • and now after the church having been established throughout all the land having got the victory over the devil and the word of God being preached in its purity in all the land and the Lord pouring out his blessings upon the people [& >js NULL 1|and A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] thus ended the fourteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi

In many instances (as in Alma 3:1 and Alma 16:21), the and was removed by Joseph Smith in his editing for the 1837 edition. The critical text will restore all these Hebrew-like instances of and that Joseph Smith removed in his editing. For further discussion, see under hebraisms in volume 3. The example here in Alma 3:1 is unusual in two respects. First of all, its main clause actually begins with a subordinate clause: “after they had finished burying their dead / they all returned to their lands”. Yet this kind of subordinate construction can be found elsewhere in the original text:

• Alma 32:38
  • and when the heat of the sun cometh and scorcheth it [& 0|& >js NULL 1|and A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] because it hath no root it withereth away

This example, just like in Alma 3:1, originally had an and between the initial subordinate clause and the following main clause that begins with a subordinate clause.

The other unusual aspect of Alma 3:1 is that the second after-clause is completely redundant:

after having buried those which had been slain …
and after they had finished burying their dead

Obviously, this redundancy is fully intended and is not the result of some kind of scribal error.