Helaman 7:4 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
having usurped the power and authority of the land laying aside the [commands > commandments 1|commandments ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of God ...

As noted under Alma 30:7, the Book of Mormon scribes sometimes wrote commands instead of the correct commandments. Here in Helaman 7:4, the correction was immediate since Oliver Cowdery, after initially writing commands, overwrote the plural s with an m and then continued inline with the rest of the word, ents. For a general list of cases where the scribes miswrote commandments as commands, sometimes only initially, see under Alma 30:7. Here in Helaman 7:4 the corrected text in 𝓟 undoubtedly agreed with the reading in 𝓞, no longer extant for this part of the text.

Summary: Accept in Helaman 7:4 Oliver Cowdery’s immediate correction in 𝓟 of commands to commandments.

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

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