Helaman 11:22 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
save it were a few contentions [NULL > concerning 1|concerning ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the points of doctrine which had been laid down by the prophets

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially skipped the word concerning. He wrote “save it were a few contentions” at the end of the line in 𝓟; then he started the next line with “the points of doctrine”. Virtually immediately Oliver caught his error and supralinearly inserted the participial preposition concerning (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the correction). The temporary loss of concerning was probably the result of the transition to a new line in 𝓟, plus the visual similarity between concerning and the previous word, contentions.

It is nonetheless possible that 𝓞 was missing the preposition here and Oliver Cowdery decided that concerning was the best candidate. For example, the original text could have had regarding as the preposition here (“save it were a few contentions regarding the points of doctrine”). But it should be noted that the participial preposition regarding never occurs in the Book of Mormon. In addition, the text otherwise uses only concerning whenever it needs to describe the issue that the noun contention refers to:

Another possible preposition for Helaman 11:22 is about (thus “a few contentions about the points of doctrine”). Although the noun phrase “contention(s) about something” is not found in the text, there is one example of the verb phrase “to contend about something”:

So in theory Helaman 11:22 could have originally read “a few contentions about the points of doctrine”. But since Helaman 11:22 has the noun contention, not the verb contend, it is more likely that the correct preposition in this case is concerning rather than about.

Summary: Maintain the participial preposition concerning in Helaman 11:22, the corrected reading in 𝓟; all other references in the text to the subject matter of a contention use the word concerning.

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

References