Alma 60:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
ye have been appointed to gather together men and arm them with swords and with scimitars and all manner of weapons of war [& > of 1|of ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] every kind and send forth against the Lamanites

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote and (as an ampersand) instead of the correct of. Extant portions of 𝓞 indicates that page 354ªof 𝓞 ended with the phrase “& all manner of weopons of war”, which apparently led Oliver as he was copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟 to assume that this was the end of the phrase and that the following word was and. Oliver’s correction in 𝓟 of the ampersand to of was virtually immediate: he crossed out the ampersand and supralinearly inserted the of without any change in the level of ink flow.

Elsewhere the text has 13 examples of “all manner of X of every kind”, including two more instances of “all manner of weapons of war of every kind” (in Alma 2:12, 14). More generally, there are 98 examples of “all manner of X” without any postmodifying “of every kind”, including three examples of “all manner of weapons of war” (in Alma 43:18, Mormon 6:9, and Ether 10:27). Thus it is not surprising that Oliver Cowdery could have assumed that “all manner of weapons of war” in Alma 60:2 was not followed by “of every kind”. For each case of “all manner of X (of every kind)”, the critical text will follow the earliest textual sources, thus “all manner of weapons of war of every kind” here in Alma 60:2.

Summary: Maintain in Alma 60:2 the phraseology “all manner of weapons of war of every kind”, the corrected reading in 𝓟.

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

References