Alma 19:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but as for myself to me he [doath 0|doth 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] not stink

As discussed under Alma 3:19, there is at least one case in the earliest text where we find the stressed verb form doeth in place of the expected unstressed form doth. The original manuscript is extant here in Alma 19:5 and it has the spelling doath for doth. One wonders whether this misspelling doath might be an attempt to spell doeth rather than doth, but the evidence argues otherwise. First of all, the main verb form doeth occurs 24 times in the text and not once was it misspelled as doath. Secondly, there are four other instances of the misspelling doath, all in the original manuscript and all by Oliver Cowdery. In each instance, Oliver copied the word correctly into 𝓟 as doth (just as here in Alma 19:5):

Joseph Smith, as he dictated the text to Oliver, may have pronounced doth as /douh/ (not as /dßh/), perhaps under the influence of the word both, which would imply that Joseph was unfamiliar with the correct pronunciation of the biblically styled doth. This mispronunciation then led Oliver to occasionally spell doth in 𝓞 as doath (based on the spelling for the word oath rather than both). In any event, the critical text will maintain the standard spelling doth for all five cases where Oliver misspelled the word in 𝓞 as doath. Oliver usually spelled doth correctly in 𝓞—and always in 𝓟.

Summary: The misspelling doath in Alma 19:5 and elsewhere in the text (only in 𝓞 and in Oliver Cowdery’s hand) is an error for doth and not doeth.

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

References