Alma 5:57 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and now I say unto you all you that are desirous to follow the voice of the good shepherd come ye out from the wicked and be ye separate and touch not their unclean things and [𝓢① NULL > 𝓢② behold 1|behold ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] their names shall be blotted out

Oliver Cowdery added the word behold here when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞. Since this passage could read with or without the behold, it was undoubtedly in 𝓞. There would have been no motivation for Oliver to have consciously added the behold here except that it was in 𝓞.

Summary: Accept in Alma 5:57 Oliver Cowdery’s corrected reading in 𝓟: “and behold their names shall be blotted out”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References