Alma 41:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
do not risk one more offense against your God upon [those 01ABCEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|these D] points of doctrine which [ ye 01ABCDGHIJKLMNOPQRST|we E|we > ye F] [hath 0A|hath >js have 1|have BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] hitherto risked to commit sin

Here the early British editions allowed two minor typos to enter the text, these in place of those in the 1841 British edition and we instead of ye in the 1849 LDS edition. The first typo was reversed in the 1849 edition, while the 1849 typo of we rather than ye was reversed in the second printing of the 1852 edition. In the first case, either those or these will work; the critical text will follow the earliest reading, those. In the second case, we does not work at all since Corianton is the only one (at least in this discourse of Alma’s) who has “risked to commit sin”.

Interestingly, the earliest text here in Alma 41:9 reads ye hath. In the original text, hath frequently occurs with third person plural subjects, but there are also a few cases where it occurs with the second person subject pronoun ye; besides this case in Alma 41:9, we have the following examples:

In all instances of original ye hath, the hath was emended to have in the editing for the 1837 edition. For further discussion of the use of hath in the original text, see under inflectional endings in volume 3. This example of ye hath suggests that the occurrence of ye doth, found nearby in Alma 41:15, is the original reading; see the discussion under that passage.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 41:9 the occurrence of those and ye, the reading of the original manuscript; the use of hath with subject ye will be restored, despite its infrequency in the original text.

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

References