Alma 49:5 Textual Variants

At the beginning of Alma 49, we read how Moroni had had the city of Ammonihah rebuilt (verses 2–3). This rebuilding so astonished the Lamanites when they came to attack the city that they decided instead to attack the city of Noah (verses 12–14). Here in the original manuscript for verse 5, Oliver Cowdery started to write prepairing but then erased the aborted initial p. As he erased this letter, he smeared the n at the end of the immediately preceding word, in. In fact, there is some space before the initial r of repairing, which means that Oliver had started only the initial p of prepairing when he decided to erase the p and start completely over with the correct word, repairing. But when Oliver copied this passage into the printer’s manuscript, his erasure was apparently not clear enough, and he ended up writing prepairing in 𝓟.

Either word is acceptable in this context. There are two other examples of the verb repair being used to describe the rebuilding of cities:

• Mosiah 9:8 and we began to build buildings and to repair the walls of the city
• 3 Nephi 6:7 and there were many old cities repaired

On the other hand, there are three examples of the verb prepare being used to refer to building up defenses:

• Alma 50:6 thus Moroni did prepare strong holds
• Alma 52:6 by casting up walls round about and preparing places of resort
• Alma 56:20 we had prepared our city and ourselves for defense

As far as the spelling prepair is concerned, Oliver Cowdery usually spelled prepare as prepare, but in the following cases he spelled the word as prepair:

This means that we cannot use the spelling prepair as an argument that the word here in Alma 49:5 must have been repair. In any event, 𝓞 itself is sufficiently clear: the immediately corrected reading is “repairing their places of security”.