Here Oliver Cowdery initially wrote steal as seal. He later (with distinctly heavier but uneven ink flow) corrected his scribal slip to steal (although in his supralinear correction he started to write seal once more). The correction of seal to steal was definitely made later. Oliver probably made the correction on his own, perhaps when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Stan Larson has claimed that Oliver originally wrote lead in 𝓞 and that the correction to steal is an example of conscious editing on Joseph Smith’s part as he dictated the text. The problem with this claim is that Oliver’s initial word in 𝓞 does not at all read lead, but seal. For Larson’s claim, see pages 9–10 of his “Textual Variants in Book of Mormon Manuscripts”, Dialogue 10/4 (1977): 8–30. Later on in this chapter, the text refers three times to “leading away the heart” (the first instance refers to sexual temptation, just as here in verse 4):
Elsewhere in the text, there are ten other instances that refer to “leading away the heart”. Clearly lead is possible here in Alma 39:4, but 𝓞 does not read lead. And as we might expect, there is independent evidence in the text for “stealing away the heart”:
The scribal error of seal for steal is not that unusual; Book of Mormon scribes occasionally omitted the second consonant from an orthographic word-initial consonant cluster. We have the following examples for Oliver Cowdery (the scribe in 𝓞 for Alma 39:4):
| scribal slip | intended spelling | manuscript source |
| fed | fled | Alma 43:50 (𝓟) |
| kew | knew | Alma 55:1 (𝓞*), Alma 56:43 (𝓞) |
| kow | know | Alma 32:36 (𝓞) |
| pay | pray | 3 Nephi 3:20 (𝓟*), Moroni 7:9 (𝓟*) |
| pepare | prepare | Alma 48:15 (𝓟) |
| pepared | prepared | 2 Nephi 28:23 (𝓟), Alma 49:8 (𝓟), |
| Ether 12:32 (𝓟*) | ||
| pove | prove | Helaman 2:13 (𝓟) |
| sould | should | Alma 20:26 (𝓟) |
| witten | written | 1 Nephi 22:30 (𝓟) |
Although there are no other examples of Oliver miswriting an initial st as s, scribe 2 of 𝓟 made this mistake a couple of times:
| scribal slip | intended spelling | manuscript source |
| seadiness | steadiness | Alma 1:29 (𝓟*) |
| sedfastly | stedfastly | 3 Nephi 19:30 (𝓟) |
The first case was corrected to steadiness by Oliver when he proofed 𝓟; but in the second case, Oliver missed correcting sedfastly (scribe 2 of 𝓟’s typical spelling of steadfast was stedfast).
It is very doubtful that the original text here in Alma 39:4 actually read as originally written in 𝓞, “she did seal away the hearts of many”. There are two references in the text, one positive and one negative, that refer to sealing people as either the Lord’s or Satan’s in advance of the day of judgment:
On the other hand, the use of the verb seal in 𝓞 for Alma 39:4 seems very much to be a scribal error, especially given the oddity of the expression “seal away the hearts of many” with its use of the adverb away.
Summary: Maintain in Alma 39:4 the corrected reading, “yea she did steal away the hearts of many”; Oliver Cowdery twice wrote steal as seal in 𝓞; the scribal slip is definitely seal, not lead; in theory, either lead or steal will work in this passage, while seal itself seems quite impossible.