Alma 57:33 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and the remainder of them [brake 0|broke 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] through and fled from us

𝓞 is sufficiently extant here that we can read all but the initial b of the verb form brake. The vowel is definitely an a; although there is an extra stroke closing off the top of the a, the vowel is an a and not an o. When Oliver Cowdery copied this verb into 𝓟, he replaced brake with broke. As discussed under Alma 14:26, the original text had a number of instances of brake that have been changed to the modern broke. Whenever the earliest extant sources support an original brake, as here in Alma 57:33, the critical text will restore that archaic verb form.

Summary: Restore in Alma 57:33 the archaic past-tense verb form brake, the reading in 𝓞.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References