Alma 24:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and also that he hath forgiven us of these our many sins and murders which we have committed and [took 01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|taken RT] away the guilt from our hearts

Here the original text conjoins “and took away the guilt from our hearts” with “he hath forgiven us of these our many sins and murders which we have committed”. The question here is whether took should be interpreted as the simple past-tense form of the verb take or as the past participial form, equivalent to the standard taken. The 1920 LDS edition changed the original took to taken, thus showing that the editors for that edition interpreted the original took as equivalent to taken (the change was intentional since it was marked in the copy of the 1911 LDS Book of Mormon used by the committee). As explained under Alma 8:26, the original text allowed for such instances of “and took” conjoined with predicates in the perfect; the critical text will restore all such instances of took even though it is being used as a past participle. The earliest text definitely allows took as the past participle for take:

(For the first example, Alma 47:1, the change from took to taken in 𝓞 may be due to editing on the part of Oliver Cowdery; see the discussion under that passage.) For further discussion of took as the past participle of take, see under past participle in volume 3.

Summary: Restore in Alma 24:10 the original took in the conjoined predicate “and took away the guilt from our hearts”; here took is the past participle for the verb take.

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

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