Alma 63:4 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
there was a large company of men even to the amount of five thousand and four hundred [NULL > men 1|men ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] with their wives and their children departed out of the land of Zarahemla

The original manuscript is not extant for the word men after the number “five thousand and four hundred”. However, spacing between extant portions of 𝓞 indicates that men was probably there. Oliver Cowdery’s supralinear insertion of men in the printer’s manuscript was written without any change in the level of ink flow, which further supports the reading with men. Of course, one could argue that the men is redundant here since it has just been mentioned in the preceding “there was a large company of men”. And there are instances in the text where women and children are referred to without any specific prior reference to men, as in the following example:

Here in Alma 63:4, the probable reason Oliver initially dropped the second men was simply because it is not necessary. The critical text will, of course, maintain the occurrence of men after the number.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 63:4 the word men that occurs after the number “five thousand and four hundred”; the repetition of men in this passage is the corrected reading in 𝓟 as well as the probable reading in 𝓞 (based on spacing considerations).

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

References