Alma 22:31 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
it being the wilderness which was filled with all [kind > manner 1|manner ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of wild animals of every kind

The Book of Mormon text has examples of both “all manner of X” and “all kind(s) of X”, with 110 examples of the first and 4 of the second. (For discussion of the nonstandard “all kind of X”, see under Alma 20:29.) In modern English, “all kind(s) of X” is expected while “all manner of X” is either archaic or formulaic.

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “all kind of wild animals of every kind”, but then virtually immediately he corrected the first kind to manner (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the supralinearly inserted manner). His initial error was probably influenced by the kind that follows (“wild animals of every kind”). There are 11 other occurrences in the text of “all manner of X of every kind”, including a similar one in Enos 1:21 that also refers to animals: “and flocks of all manner of cattle of every kind”. In Alma 22:31, the original manuscript undoubtedly read “all manner of wild animals of every kind”.

Summary: Accept in Alma 22:31 Oliver Cowdery’s correction of “all kind of” to “all manner of”, the undoubted reading of the original manuscript.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

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