The expression “in a preparation” seems quite strange. One wonders if the indefinite article a is an accident. There are no other examples of “in a preparation” in the Book of Mormon text. But there is one example of “in preparation”, and most interestingly this one example was initially written in 𝓞 as “in a preparation”, but then Oliver Cowdery erased the indefinite article a:
Here Oliver Cowdery wrote “a preparation” in 𝓞 as a single word (namely, as apreperation). One could interpret this correction in Alma 47:7 as evidence that Oliver tended to write “in a preparation”, which he caught once (in Alma 47:7) but not in Alma 32:6.
There are a few other places in the manuscripts where Oliver wrote the indefinite article a and its following noun as a single word; in most cases, he caught his error and made some correction to indicate that the a and the noun were separate words:
These corrections suggest an alternative interpretation for Alma 47:7: perhaps Oliver intended to rewrite apreperation as a preperation, so he erased the a but then neglected to rewrite it (separated, of course, from preperation with a space). In other words, the original text for Alma 47:7 may actually be a second instance of “in a preparation”.
In support of the strange “in a preparation”, it is worth noting that there are other instances in the text where we get unexpected uses of the indefinite article a:
In these examples, the 1837 edition omitted the unusual a (for evidence that these unexpected uses of a represent the original text, see the discussion under each passage). But in Alma 32:6 the a in “in a preparation” has never been removed from the text.
Interestingly, there is strong support for maintaining “in a preparation”, at least in Alma 32:6, since examples of this phraseology can be found in English as far back as Early Modern English. Although there are no online examples of this expression in the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 16 different texts with examples of this usage in Literature Online , with two in the latter 1700s and the rest in the 1600s. Here is a sampling, with accidentals regularized:
Thus the critical text will maintain in Alma 32:6 the unusual use of a in the phrase “in a preparation”, even though this use of a may be an early error in the transmission. As far as Alma 47:7 is concerned, it is probably safer to follow the corrected reading in 𝓞 (namely, “in preparation”) rather than supposing that the correction is an error for “in a preparation”. This decision means that we end up with variation, one case of “in a preparation” (Alma 32:6) and one of “in preparation” (Alma 47:7).
Summary: Maintain in Alma 32:6 the indefinite article a in the prepositional phrase “in a preparation”, the consistent reading of all the textual sources; usage from Early Modern English up to the late 1700s supports the occurrence of a here, although it is possible that this a is an error, as shown by Alma 47:7 where Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “in a preparation” in 𝓞 but then erased the a; less likely is the possibility that Alma 47:7 represents a failed attempt to rewrite the single-word spelling apreperation as two words, a preperation.