Alma 9:22 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea and after having been delivered of God out of the land of Jerusalem by the hand of the Lord

Lyle Fletcher (personal communication, 23 August 2006) wonders if perhaps the of before God here might be an error for by, what we expect in modern English (“after having been delivered by God”). We note that the agentive preposition by is used later in the sentence (“by the hand of the Lord”); perhaps the intervening “out of the land of Jerusalem”, with its two of ’s, caused an original by before God to be replaced with of. In fact, there is an example in the early history of the text where by was momentarily replaced with of in a very similar phrase, “delivered by the power of God”:

Here scribe 2 of 𝓞 made the error, but his correction was immediate. Also note that the multiple occurrences of of in the following text probably led to the error (“the power of God out of the hands of all other nations”). Elsewhere in the text, there is one instance of someone being delivered by someone else (that is, where the preposition is by):

Nonetheless, we have to recognize that the original text of the Book of Mormon sometimes uses the archaic agentive preposition of instead of the modern by. For some general discussion regarding this choice, see under 1 Nephi 11:31. For a second case where agentive by has been replaced with of, see under 1 Nephi 22:5. For a case in the opposite direction, where an original agentive of has been replaced with by, see under Mormon 8:1. For each case of agentive by versus of, the critical text will follow the earliest reading, thus of here in Alma 9:22 since one can be “delivered of God”, although in today’s English we expect “delivered by God”.

Summary: Maintain the agentive preposition of in Alma 9:22 (“after having been delivered of God”), the reading of the earliest text; other examples of the archaic agentive of are found elsewhere in the text, although here in Alma 9:22 we could have an early error for an original by.

Alma 10:19, page 1784, line 9

The line here in the citation for Alma 10:29 should read this people instead of the people (giving “that the voice of this people should”, not “that the voice of the people should”).

Alma 11:6, page 1807, line 13

The an before onti in this sentence should be in italics, giving “scribe 2 miswrote an onti as anti ”.

Alma 11:19 [11:18], pages 1812–13

In the LDS text from 1879 on, the verse number for this sentence has been 19, as it is listed here. In the critical text, as explained just before under Alma 11:17–19, this verse will switch places with the preceding verse 18, so ultimately this sentence will be identified as Alma 11:18.

Alma 11:21, page 1815, line –12

Here I refer to three passages where one can read more about the variation between this and thus in the history of the text. For the second of these passages, Alma 52:24–25, I neglected to include that discussion in part 4, but it can be found here at the end of part 6 under its own addendum.

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

References