Alma 33:13 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold if ye do / ye must believe what Zenos [says > sayeth 0|sayeth >js said 1|saith A|said BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] for behold he [sayes > sayeth 0|sayeth >js said 1|saith A|said BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] thou hast turned away thy judgments

Here we have two instances in 𝓞 where Oliver Cowdery started to write says rather than the correct saith (but spelled by Oliver as sayeth in 𝓞 and 𝓟). In this passage, either inflected form of the verb say (that is, sayeth or says) is theoretically possible. The form ending in s is, of course, the modern form, the one that Oliver would have expected in normal English, while the form ending in -eth is the archaic form expected in biblically styled language. Here in 𝓞, both initial instances of says were immediately changed to sayeth. In the first instance, Oliver crossed out the s ending, overwrote it with an e, and then continued inline with the th. In the second instance, Oliver initially wrote sayes, a blend of says and sayeth; he aborted his final s before finishing it, overwrote it with a t, and then wrote inline the h. In both these instances of the verb say, the critical text will accept saith as the original reading. (For discussion of Oliver’s spelling sayeth, see under 1 Nephi 2:1 as well as more generally under saith in volume 3.)

It turns out that in the original text there were no examples at all of the inflected form says. The current text has five instances of says, all the result of Joseph Smith’s editing for the 1837 edition:

For further discussion of this kind of grammatical emendation, see under infl tional endings in volume 3. In the original text, the form saith frequently represented the historical present tense, which Joseph typically emended to the past-tense said in his editing for the 1837 edition (as he did both times here in Alma 33:13). For further discussion of this other kind of grammatical emendation (from saith to said rather than to says), see under historical present in volume 3. The critical text will restore both instances of saith here in Alma 33:13.

Summary: Restore the two instances of the present-tense saith in Alma 33:13; in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery started to write these instances of saith as says, but he immediately caught his error and corrected each says to sayeth (a typical spelling of his for saith).

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

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