Alma 60:14 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea even the slothfulness of our government and their exceeding great neglect towards their brethren yea [NULL > towards 1|towards ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] those which have been slain

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially omitted the towards that occurs after the yea. Virtually immediately he supralinearly inserted the towards (there is no change in the level of ink flow). He was probably correcting to 𝓞 since either reading, with or without the towards, is theoretically possible (although in my speech I would prefer the repetition of the towards). There are no other examples in the text where a towards phrase is amplified upon by a following yea- clause. Nor will spacing between extant fragments of 𝓞 help here since the lacuna in 𝓞 is too long (a full seven manuscript lines are missing).

Summary: Accept in Alma 60:14 the corrected reading in 𝓟, which repeats the towards: “and their exceeding great neglect towards their brethren yea towards those which have been slain”.

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

References