Alma 7:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
cry unto this people saying repent ye [repent ye 1PS| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRT] and prepare the way of the Lord

Here the 1830 typesetter accidentally deleted the repeated phrase “repent ye”. He made the same mistake a little further on in the text:

The 1908 RLDS text restored both these instances of the repeated “repent ye” to the RLDS text. Elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, there are five more instances of this repeated usage:

There are also four instances in the earliest text of nonrepeated “repent ye”:

On the other hand, the King James Bible has no instances of the repeated “repent ye”, only the nonrepeated “repent ye”:

But as David Calabro points out (personal communication), there is repetition for similar calls to repentance in the King James Bible, as in Ezekiel 33:11: “turn ye turn ye from your evil ways”. Interestingly, this same repetition of “turn ye turn ye” is found in one of the Book of Mormon passages where “repent ye” is also repeated:

The parallelism in this Book of Mormon couplet clearly supports the repetition of both “repent ye” and “turn ye”. And there is support from the Hebrew biblical text (in Ezekiel 33:11) for repetition in calls for repentance. The Book of Mormon critical text will in each case follow the earliest reading, thus restoring the two instances of repeated “repent ye” in Alma 7:9 and Alma 9:25.

Summary: Restore in Alma 7:9 and Alma 9:25 the repeated usage “repent ye repent ye”; such usage is actually more prevalent in the original text than the nonrepeated “repent ye”.

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

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