for behold the armies of the Lamanites had come in on the wilderness side into the borders of the land even into the city of Ammonihah and began to slay the people and [to 1APS|
BCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRT] destroy the city
Here the 1837 edition accidentally omitted the infinitival marker to before the verb destroy. It was restored to the RLDS text in the 1908 RLDS edition. The repeated infinitival
to for conjuncts is more frequent in the Book of Mormon than the nonrepeated to. For instance, when the verb is begin, there are 34 occurrences of “begin
to X and to Y” and 15 of “begin to X and Y”, as in the following contrastive pair of examples:
- Helaman 6:34
- and thus we see that the Nephites did begin to dwindle in unbelief and grow in wickedness and abominations while the Lamanites began to grow exceedingly
in the knowledge of their God yea they did begin to keep his statutes and commandments and to walk in truth and uprightness before him
The clear tendency in the history of the text has been to accidentally remove the repeated to. Besides the example here in Alma 16:2, we have the following isolated examples involving
the verb begin:
- Jacob 7:2 (1892 RLDS edition)
- and it came to pass that he began to preach among the people and [to 01ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRST| K] declare unto them that there should be no Christ
- Alma 62:48 (Oliver Cowdery, initially in 𝓟)
- and the people of Nephi began to prosper again in the land and began to multiply and [to 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|NULL > to 1] wax exceeding strong again in the land
- 3 Nephi 6:4 (1892 RLDS edition)
- and they began again to prosper and [to 1ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRST| K] wax great
- Ether 6:18 (1840 edition)
- and it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land and [to 1ABDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST| C] multiply and to till the earth
In each case, the critical text will follow the earliest textual sources in determining whether the infinitival to is repeated or not. For a complete discussion, see under conjunctive
repetition in volume 3.
