Alma 29:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea and I know that good and evil [hath 0A|hath >js has >js have 1|have BCDEFGIJLMNOPQRST| HK] come before all men or he that knoweth not good from evil is blameless

Here the 1874 RLDS edition omitted the perfective auxiliary have (originally hath). The surrounding clauses lack the perfect auxiliary, which may be the reason the have was omitted (but probably unintentionally). The 1908 RLDS edition restored the have to the RLDS text. The original hath was emended to have by Joseph Smith in his editing for the 1837 edition. At first Joseph thought to emend hath to has, but then he decided to treat the subject “good and evil” as a plural; so he changed the has to the plural have. In the original text, hath frequently occurred with plural subjects. For a complete discussion of the -(e)th ending and how it has been edited in the text, see under infl al endings in volume 3.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 29:5 the use of the perfective auxiliary; the original hath will be restored in place of the grammatically correct have.

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

References