Helaman 7:8 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea if my days could have been in [my > them 1|them ABCDEFGHIJKLMP|those NOQRST] days ...

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote my days twice: “if my days could have been in my days”. Virtually immediately he caught his error, crossed out the second my and supralinearly inserted them, giving the nonstandard “in them days”. Although 𝓞 is not extant here in Helaman 7:8, it probably read “in them days”. There are other examples in the earliest text of them acting as a demonstrative modifying a noun, including one more example of “in them days”; each of these has been grammatically emended to either these or those:

The critical text will therefore accept the corrected reading in 𝓟 for Helaman 7:8, “in them days”. For further discussion of this usage, see under pronominal determiners in volume 3.

Summary: Restore the original them in Helaman 7:8: “if my days could have been in them days” (the corrected reading in 𝓟).

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

References