Alma 35:6 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and it came to pass that after they had found out the minds of all the people [these > those 0|those 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] which were in favor of the words which had been spoken by Alma and his brethren were cast out of the land

Oliver Cowdery initially wrote these in 𝓞; then he overwrote the first e in these with an o, thus changing the demonstrative to those. There is no change in the level of ink flow for the overwriting, which suggests a virtually immediate correction. As noted under Alma 14:15, the phrase “those who(m)/which” is considerably more frequent than “these who(m)/which” in the Book of Mormon text (181 to 6 in the original text). Although either these or those is in general possible, here in Alma 35:6 the use of those is definitely preferred. Even so, the correction in 𝓞 was probably not due to explicit editing on Oliver’s part, but instead it represents his attempt to get the text down correctly. For some discussion (and examples) of Oliver’s tendency to mix up these and those, see under Alma 3:25. The critical text will maintain the corrected reading here in Alma 35:6, “those which were in favor of the words which had been spoken by Alma and his brethren”.

Summary: Accept in Alma 35:6 Oliver Cowdery’s virtually immediate correction in 𝓞 of these to those for the phrase “those which were”.

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

References