Alma 52:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and that he also would fortify and strengthen the cities round about which had not fallen into the [hand > hands 0|hands 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of the Lamanites

Here in 𝓞, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “into the hand of the Lamanites”; but then virtually immediately he inserted the plural s inline, giving “into the hands of the Lamanites”. Elsewhere the text has only the plural hands in expressions of the form “fall into the hand(s) of X” (26 times); and of these other occurrences, eight are of the form “fall into the hands of the Lamanites” (like here in Alma 52:10). In fact, in one instance, Oliver made the same error of initially writing hand, although in this case the error was in 𝓟:

For a list of the cases where hand and hands have been mixed up in the history of the text, especially in the manuscripts, see under Mosiah 16:1.

Summary: Accept in Alma 52:10 the corrected reading in 𝓞 of hands (“fallen into the hands of the Lamanites”); usage elsewhere in the text consistently supports the use of the plural hands in the expression “fall into the hands of X”.

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

References