Alma 62:45 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
therefore Helaman and his brethren went forth and did declare the word of [God 0BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|Gid 1A] with much power

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery accidentally wrote “the word of Gid” in place of the obviously correct “the word of God”. His scribal slip was influenced by the preceding occurrences of the personal name Gid in Alma 57–58; interestingly, there is one instance of “these words of Gid” (in Alma 57:36). What makes this scribal error in Alma 62:45 especially striking is that the 1830 compositor did not catch the error and ended up setting Gid instead of the correct God. We should add that even in proofing this error was not caught. The 1837 edition, undoubtedly without much effort, restored the correct God (which happens to be extant in 𝓞, as if that would have made any difference).

Summary: Maintain the obviously correct reading “the word of God” in Alma 62:45; scribal slips like “the word of Gid” will occur and are sometimes copied.

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

References