Alma 30:7 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for it was strictly contrary to the [commandments 0|commands 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of God that there should be a law which should bring men onto unequal grounds

The extant portion of the original manuscript clearly reads commandm. The rest of the word is lost. But the m is clear and is definitely not deleted or erased. Further, spacing between extant fragments clearly has room for the final four letters of the word, ents.

Except in Jacob’s writings, the rest of the Book of Mormon uniformly uses the precise phraseology “commandments of God” (69 times) instead of “commands of God”. But Jacob uses two occurrences of “commands of God”; the choice of commands over commandments may represent the immediacy of Jacob’s discourse style:

There is also a more convoluted occurrence of “command of God” in the text; in this instance, Mormon is the source for the usage: “the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither to the dividing asunder at the command of our great and everlasting God” (Helaman 12:8). Of course, this use of “command of God” is different in that it does not refer to the Lord giving commands to a person but instead to nature. For further discussion of the phrase “command(s) of God”, see under Jacob 2:10.

There is considerable evidence that two scribes, Oliver Cowdery and scribe 2 of 𝓟, tended to replace commandments with command(s):

The only complicated case is the one in 3 Nephi 6:14. In that instance, both 𝓟 and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of 𝓞. Since elsewhere the 1830 typesetter never mixed up command(s) and commandments(s), the odds are that it was the scribe in 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery, who was responsible for the change in 3 Nephi 6:14, namely, of commandments to commands (which was Oliver’s tendency elsewhere in the text). Moreover, no scribe ever made the opposite change, replacing command(s) with commandment(s). There is only one case where this error occurred in the printed editions, and that was in the 1841 British edition for Jacob 2:10 (see under that passage for discussion).

David Calabro points out (personal communication) that since the last part of commandments in Alma 30:7 is not extant in 𝓞, it is worth considering whether 𝓞 might have read in the singular as “contrary to the commandment of God”. Of course, the replacement in 𝓟 by the plural commands supports the plural commandments. Moreover, other passages in the Book of Mormon have only the plural usage, “contrary to the commandments of God”:

In fact, there is no occurrence of the singular “commandment of God” anywhere in the Book of Mormon (although this phrase is found six times in the King James New Testament). Thus the odds are quite high that in Alma 30:7 the original manuscript read commandments rather than the singular commandment.

Summary: Restore in Alma 30:7 “the commandments of God”, in accord with the reading of the original manuscript and usage elsewhere in the text.

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

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