Alma 44:14 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
so shall ye fall to the earth except ye [NULL > will 1|will ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] deliver up your weapons of war and depart with a covenant of peace

Here Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “except ye deliver up your weapons of war” in 𝓟, but virtually immediately he supralinearly inserted the modal verb will (there is no change in the level of ink flow). 𝓞 is not extant here, but spacing in the lacuna allows for a modal, probably will, although shall is another possibility. The modal forms shall and shalt are more frequent after except (occurring 18 times), but will and wilt also occur in the text (besides here in Alma 44:14): “except thou wilt grant unto me that …” (Alma 20:22) and “except ye will repent” (Helaman 7:19). There would have been no linguistic motivation for replacing shall with will here in Alma 44:14. Thus the critical text will accept will as the reading of the original text.

Summary: Accept in Alma 44:14 the virtually immediate correction in the printer’s manuscript (“except ye will deliver up your weapons”) as the original reading of the text.

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

References