Alma 58:17 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold I remained with the remainder of my army in [that 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPRST|the > that 1|the Q] same place where we had first pitched our tents

Here the original text reads “in that same place where we had first pitched our tents”. When Oliver Cowdery initially copied this phrase from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he wrote “in the same place”. Virtually immediately he crossed out the the and supralinearly inserted the correct that (there is no change in the level of ink flow). The same mistake was made in the 1911 LDS edition, but the subsequent 1920 LDS edition, by reference to earlier editions, restored the correct that.

There is one occurrence of “in the same place” elsewhere in the text but none of “in that same place”:

Either reading is theoretically possible in Alma 58:17, so the reading of the earliest textual sources should be followed. For discussion of other places in the text where Oliver Cowdery replaced “that same ” with “the same ” (if only momentarily), see under Alma 47:34.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 58:17 the current reading “in that same place”, which is the reading in 𝓞 and the corrected reading in 𝓟.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References