Alma 60:22 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea will ye sit in idleness while ye are surrounded with thousands of those yea and tens of thousands [of those > which do 1|which do ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] also sit in idleness while there are thousands round about in the borders of the land which are falling by the sword / yea wounded and bleeding

𝓞 is not extant here for 11 lines of text, including the last line on page 356ªof 𝓞 (where this part of the text would have originally occurred). When copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “yea & tens of thousands of those” (he seems to have been prompted by the of those in the immediately preceding “while ye are surrounded with thousands of those”). Virtually immediately Oliver crossed out the extra of those in 𝓟 and supralinearly inserted which do (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the correction).

The question here is whether the do was actually in the original text (and in 𝓞). The reading without the do (“yea and tens of thousands which also sit in idleness”) seems more natural than the one with the do (“yea and tens of thousands which do also sit in idleness”). Even so, there are 21 additional instances of “do also ” in the text (all take the past-tense form did), including this one occurring in a relative clause:

In contrast, there are ten cases in the text where also immediately follows the relative pronoun (which, who, or whom), as in Alma 51:7: “which also put the kingmen to silence”. But since “which do also sit” is possible, the critical text will maintain the occurrence of the helping verb do in Alma 60:22.

Summary: Maintain the auxiliary verb do in Alma 60:22: “which do also sit in idleness”; do is found in the corrected reading in 𝓟, the earliest extant source for this passage.

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

References