Alma 54:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but as the Lord [lives > liveeth 0|liveth 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] ...

Here in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “as the Lord lives”. Oliver immediately corrected lives by overwriting the s with an e, then writing th inline, giving liveeth. He copied this correctly into 𝓟 as liveth. The Book of Mormon text has only the form liveth in as-clauses:

Similar as-clauses are common in the King James Bible:

But there are no instances of the verb form lives for these expressions in either the Book of Mormon or the King James Bible. For further discussion regarding the competition in the Book of Mormon text between the inflectional endings -(e)th and -(e)s, see under infl al endings in volume 3.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 54:10 the immediately corrected reading in 𝓞, “as the Lord liveth”, the consistent reading elsewhere in the Book of Mormon for this familiar biblically styled oath.

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

References