Alma 33:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but behold I say unto you if ye suppose that ye cannot worship [your 01| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] God ye do greatly err

Here the two manuscripts read your God. The 1830 typesetter omitted the possessive pronoun your. This omission appears to have been accidental since the same your God is found in a parallel statement earlier in the verse and it has been retained in the text:

The use of your God sounds like the God of the Zoramite poor might not be the same as Alma’s God, but this kind of interpretation is not found in the Book of Mormon. The expression your God occurs nine other times in the text, just as it does twice here in Alma 33:2, and in each instance there is nothing contrastive or negative about its use. (This also holds for 12 instances of the Lord your God and one of your holy God.) In each instance the text could just have easily read our God (which also occurs in the text). In other words, the speaker never attempts in any of these instances of your God to distinguish his God from his listeners’ God.

Summary: Restore in Alma 33:2 your God, the reading of both manuscripts (“if ye suppose that ye cannot worship your God”); the same use of your God is found in the previous sentence in this verse (“ye have said that ye could not worship your God”).

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

References