Alma 60:34 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and now behold I Moroni am constrained according to the covenant which I have made to keep the commandments of [NULL > my 1|my ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] God

The expected phrase is “the commandments of God”, which occurs 70 times in the text. There are no other occurrences in the text of “the commandments of my God”. Thus there would have been no motivation here in Alma 60:34 to edit the text by adding my. Oliver Cowdery virtually immediately corrected what he had initially written here in 𝓟 by supralinearly inserting the my without any change in the level of ink flow.

As might be expected, the postmodifying phrase “of my God” does occur in the text (seven more times), as in the following examples:

Note that the last example occurs just two verses after Alma 60:34.

Summary: Accept in Alma 60:34 the corrected reading in 𝓟, “the commandments of my God”; this unique reading is undoubtedly the original reading.

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

References