Alma 44:7 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold ye are in our [hand > hands 1|hands ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you

The original manuscript is not extant here. In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote hand at the end of a line, then inserted inline the plural s with no change in the level of ink flow. It is possible that the inserted s at the end of the line isn’t actually a correction; instead, Oliver may have simply written hand and then directly added the s to hand after deciding he didn’t want to hyphenate the word and write a single s at the beginning of the next line. But under either interpretation, the nature of the correction argues that here the original manuscript probably read in the plural as hands.

As discussed under Alma 5:4, the Book of Mormon text definitely prefers the plural hands in the phrase “in someone’s hand(s)” when referring to either physical control or violence; nonetheless, in accord with biblical usage, the singular hand is possible, as in “therefore leftest thou them in the hand of their enemies” (Nehemiah 9:28). For the specific phrase when the main verb is be, the Book of Mormon has only the plural hands (when referring to either physical control or violence); although there are only two other examples, both are in this same chapter:

𝓞 is extant for both these examples, thus providing direct support in Alma 44:7 for “in our hands”, the corrected reading in 𝓟.

Summary: Accept in Alma 44:7 the corrected plural reading in 𝓟, “ye are in our hands” (the reading of the earliest extant source).

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

References