Alma 43:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
[& > NULL 0| 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] yea [& 01|and ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] also their liberty

Initially in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery started to write “and also their liberty”. But after writing the ampersand for the and, he crossed it out, then wrote inline yea & followed by the rest of the text. His correction was therefore immediate. He seems to have been influenced by the lack of yea in the preceding text:

Since either reading, with or without the yea, is possible for the following that-clause, there would have been no motivation for Oliver to have consciously inserted the yea. The critical text will follow the corrected reading in 𝓞.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 43:9 the corrected reading in 𝓞, “yea and also their liberty”.

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

References