Alma 60:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but behold great has been the slaughter among [the >+ our 1|our ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] people

The original manuscript is not extant here. In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “among the people”; he later corrected the the to our, probably when he was checking 𝓟 against 𝓞 (the quill was duller and the level of ink flow heavier for the supralinear our in 𝓟). In theory the text could read either way, although elsewhere “among the people” is considerably more frequent (occurring 62 times in the text); there is only one other occurrence of “among our people”, in Jacob 1:7: “wherefore we labored diligently among our people”. Clearly, there was no grammatical or semantic reason for Oliver to have edited the text from “among the people” to “among our people” here in Alma 60:5.

Summary: Accept Oliver Cowdery’s corrected reading in 𝓟, “among our people”, as the original reading of the text for Alma 60:5.

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

References