Alma 7:1 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
seeing that it is the first time that I have spoken unto you by the words of my mouth I [having 1ABCDEGHIJKLMNOPQRST|have > having F] been wholly confined to the judgment seat having [NULL > had 1|had ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] much business that I could not come unto you

This passage has undergone an interesting dittography in the second printing of the 1852 LDS edition. This edition was set from a copy of the 1849 LDS edition and, for this part of the page, line-for-line. The last five lines on page 226 of the 1849 edition read as follows:

When this passage was originally set for the 1852 edition, having was accidentally replaced by have:

Thus the 1852 typesetter changed the last clause on the page (a present participial clause) into a finite clause. In preparing for the second printing of the 1852 edition, the editors discovered this error and had the have replaced with the correct having in the stereotyped plates. But because of the difficulty in repairing a single word in the last line, at the edge of the stereotyped plate, the entire last line was reset (in fact, the word spacing for that whole line was much improved). But in that resetting, the whole next-to-last line was also reset and, along with the entirely reset last line, added to the bottom of the plate. Yet only the last line of type was actually removed from the original stereotyped plate; thus the next-to-last line was accidentally repeated in the corrected plate (shown below with an arrow):

The dittography is, of course, obvious and was therefore removed from the subsequent LDS edition (1879).

Also in this verse, scribe 2 of 𝓟 initially wrote “having much business”; but then almost immediately he supralinearly inserted the main verb had (there is no change in the level of ink flow). The participial clause without the had is not impossible, which implies that scribe 2’s correction was not the result of editing. The preceding participial clause also has having followed by a past participle, been: “I having been wholly confined to the judgment seat”.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 7:1 the original present participle having in “having been wholly con- fined to the judgment seat” as well as the had after having in the following present participial clause (“having had much business that I could not come unto you”).

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

References