Alma 49:28 Textual Variants

In the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery wrote hands. The s at the end of the word looks like it could have been erased, but there is a distinct possibility that this s has actually been damaged by the poor physical conditions the manuscript was subjected to when it was in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House. This same deterioration is found, for instance, in the word of which immediately follows hands. In addition, the d immediately preceding the s in hands has been overwritten, which further weakens the appearance of the s.

When Oliver Cowdery copied this passage into the printer’s manuscript, he wrote the plural hands (although he initially skipped the word and had to supralinearly insert it). The occurrence of hands in 𝓟 suggests that the s was also in 𝓞, although an ink erasure can be poorly done and the copyist can therefore fail to notice the erasure (see, for instance, the nearby discussion under Alma 49:5 regarding the erasure in 𝓞 of the aborted p before repairing). And there is always the possibility here in verse 28 that Oliver simply expected the plural and incorrectly wrote hands a second time. In any event, hands has been retained throughout the printed editions of the Book of Mormon.

Elsewhere in the text, when the verb is deliver, we consistently get the plural hands in the phrase “the hand(s) of one’s enemies” (17 times). Of these examples, 16 read with the preposition out of (“deliver out of the hands of one’s enemies”); there is one with the preposition into (“deliver into the hands of their enemies”, Mosiah 11:21). Alma 49:28 is the only example of “the hand(s) of one’s enemies” that takes the preposition from. Of course, from is semantically like out of, so there is nothing really unusual about the plural hands for the phrase “deliver from the hands of one’s enemies”. The critical text will therefore maintain the plural hands in Alma 49:28.

The King James Bible, in contrast to Book of Mormon usage, strongly prefers the singular hand in the phrase “the hand(s) of one’s enemies” when the verb is deliver: there are 12 instances of the singular hand (as in 1 Samuel 12:11: “and the LORD … delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side”). But there is one example in the King James Bible of the plural “the hands of one’s enemies” when the verb is deliver (namely, in Judges 8:34: “and the children of Israel remembered not the LORD their God who had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every side”). Yet the original Hebrew for the last example reads in the singular, in agreement with the 12 other instances of “the hand of one’s enemies” in the King James Bible. In other words, the plural hands in the King James version for Judges 8:34 is not literally translated from the original (as it is in the 12 other cases).