Alma 58:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
that we might retain our cities and our lands and [NULL > our 0|our 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] possessions for the support of our people

Here in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially omitted the repeated our before possessions. Virtually immediately he caught his error and supralinearly inserted the our (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the correction). Such repetition is characteristic of the Book of Mormon text; see the general discussion under conjunctive repetition in volume 3. Nearby we have the following example of conjunctive repetition involving our:

There is some possibility that Oliver initially omitted the our before possessions in verse 12 as well. Spacing between extant fragments of 𝓞 for verse 12 indicates that one of the our ’s in “our lands and our possessions and our wives” was probably initially omitted in 𝓞 (see the transcript in volume 1 of the critical text for line 18 on page 351ªof 𝓞).

Summary: Maintain the repeated our in Alma 58:10: “that we might retain our cities and our lands and our possessions”; similar repetition occurs in Alma 58:12.

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

References