Mosiah 9:2 Textual Variants

Here in Mosiah 9:2, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote that “the greatest number of our army was slain”. He immediately corrected his error, crossing out the word slain and writing the correct destroyed (spelled by him as destroid ) immediately afterwards (that is, inline). As expected, the correction shows no change in the level of ink flow. Oliver’s initial error was probably due to the occurrence of slain earlier in the verse (“but he being an austere and a bloodthirsty man commanded that I should be slain”).

Elsewhere the Book of Mormon text uses slain rather than destroyed in collocations with the word number:

• Mosiah 21:17 because of the greatness of their number that had been slain
• Alma 3:1 the number of the slain were not numbered
• Alma 19:21 because of the number which he had slain of their brethren
• Alma 24:26 more than the number which had been slain
• Alma 52:40 more than the number of those which had been slain
• Alma 56:10 having slain a vast number of our men
• Alma 57:33 the greater number of them were slain
• Alma 62:17 they were in number about four thousand which had not been slain
• Helaman 1:25 the greatness of the number of the Nephites which were slain
• Helaman 1:30 among the number which were slain

But with the word army, we can have either destroyed or slew (slain in the standard text):

• Alma 56:19 they might have perhaps destroyed our little army
• Ether 8:6 when they had slew the army of Jared

Thus the use of destroyed in Mosiah 9:2 (which has both number and army) is perfectly acceptable.