Alma 53:6 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and thus he had also [built 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|builded > built 1] a strong hold to retain his prisoners

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote builded, the archaic (and perhaps dialectal) simple past-tense and past-participial form for the verb build. Virtually immediately Oliver inserted a t after buil and crossed out the final ded (there is no change in the level of ink flow for this correction). The original manuscript is extant here and reads built. Elsewhere the original text has only examples of built (69 times). This is the only place where builded has intruded into the text, and then only momentarily. Oliver may have been influenced by the language of the King James Bible, which has 51 cases of builded (including one of buildedst) and 170 of built. For other examples of variation in the Book of Mormon text for past-tense and past-participial forms, see under past tense and past participle in volume 3.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 53:6 built as the simple past-tense and past-participial form for the verb build; there are no instances of the archaic builded in the original text of the Book of Mormon.

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

References