Alma 42:26 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and thus cometh about the salvation [NULL > & 01|and ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the redemption of men

Here in both manuscripts, Oliver Cowdery initially omitted the second occurrence of and but then virtually immediately inserted the & (in neither case is there any difference in the level of ink flow for the supralinear &). Elsewhere, collocates of salvation and redemption are connected by and:

David Calabro points out (personal communication) that there are asyndetic noun phrase conjuncts in the Book of Mormon, as in Mosiah 7:27: “Christ was the God / the Father of all things”. A similar example, also referring to deity, is the phrase “the Son / the Only Begotten of the Father”, the emended text in Alma 5:48 and Alma 13:9 (see the discussion under Alma 5:48). But an asyndetic construction of the form “the salvation / the redemption of men” seems unlikely.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 42:26 the and between the salvation and the redemption, the virtually immediately corrected reading in both manuscripts.

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

References