Alma 41:14 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
therefore my [Sons > Son > Sons 0|Son 1|son ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] see that ye are merciful unto your brethren

Here in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery started to write Sons, but he aborted the plural s, thus initially rejecting the plural sons. But then he apparently decided to accept the plural since he added inline a complete s. Obviously, Alma is speaking here to only one son, Corianton. The initial s of the following word, see, made it difficult for Oliver to hear the difference between “my son see” and “my sons see”. When he came to copying the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he decided that “my son see” must be the correct reading, so he wrote down Son in 𝓟. The error in 𝓞 is an excellent example showing that 𝓞 was a dictated manuscript and not visually copied from some other text. See volume 3 for an extensive listing of errors in 𝓞 that show 𝓞 was dictated.

Summary: Accept in Alma 41:14 the occurrence of the singular my son, the reading in 𝓟; the reading in 𝓞, my sons, is a mishearing caused by the following word, see (which begins with an s).

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

References