1 Nephi 13:18 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and I beheld that the power of God was with them and also that the wrath of God was upon [all 01BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST| A] [those 0BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|them >js those 1|them A] that were gathered together against them to battle

The 1830 edition accidentally dropped the all here, but it was restored in the 1837 edition (probably by reference to 𝓟, which had retained the all ). Such examples as “all those that”, “all they that”, and “all them that” are found elsewhere in the original text (13 other times), so the loss of the all here is simply a typesetting error.

We also note an interesting grammatical change that Oliver Cowdery introduced when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟—namely, he miscopied “all those that” as “all them that”, a dialectal usage. This example clearly shows that the scribes sometimes introduced their own dialectal forms into the text, but from this example one cannot assume that every dialectal form in the text derives from scribal error. (For an example of this point, see the discussion of “they was” in 1 Nephi 4:4.) In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith edited the them to those, which just happened to be the reading of the original manuscript. He did not have to refer to 𝓞 to make this grammatical emendation. For further discussion of this particular grammatical issue, see pronominal determiners in volume 3.

Summary: Maintain “all those that” in 1 Nephi 13:18, the reading of the original manuscript.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 1

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