Mosiah 29:45–46 Textual Variants

Here in verse 46, the 1830 typesetter added the word old after “sixty and three years”, which is consistent with the age specification in the previous verse: “being eighty and two years old”. In the Book of Mormon text, a specification of age is always followed by either the word old or the phrase of age (I exclude from the following list the one case here in Mosiah 29:46 where old was added in the 1830 edition):

• Mosiah 29:45 his father died being eighty and two years old
• Alma 43:17 and he was only twenty and five years old
• 3 Nephi 28:3 after that ye are seventy and two years old
• Mormon 1:2 I being about ten years of age
• Mormon 1:3 when ye are about twenty and four years old
• Mormon 1:6 I being eleven years old
• Mormon 1:15 and I being fifteen years of age
• Ether 7:4 and when Corihor was thirty and two years old
• Ether 9:24 his wife died being an hundred and two years old
• Ether 9:24 until he was an hundred and forty and two years old

The verb in all these cases is be. Whenever the be verb is finite (was or are), the form is “X years old” (five times), but when the be verb is the present participial being, we can get either old or of age (three times for old and two times for of age). This last finding suggests the possibility that the original text for Mosiah 29:46 could have read as either “being sixty and three years old” or “being sixty and three years of age”. Further, the four examples in Mormon 1 show that of age and old can occur in close proximity. Ultimately, it is difficult to tell which reading was the original one in Mosiah 29:46. But “X years old” is clearly more frequent in the text, and “X years of age” otherwise appears only in Mormon 1. Moreover, skipping one word (old) is more probable than skipping two (of age). For instance, in those parts of 𝓟 for which scribe 2 of 𝓟 acted as the scribe (from Mosiah 25:14 through Alma 13:20, excluding those few pages where Hyrum Smith acted as scribe), we get the following statistics for the number of words interlinearly supplied and their frequencies. I distinguish here between scribe 2’s own corrections versus Oliver Cowdery’s corrections (when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞):

Thus the odds are considerably greater that scribe 2 of 𝓟 would have accidentally dropped one word rather than two or more words (76 times versus 5 times).

These factors support the 1830 typesetter’s emendation to “sixty and three years old” in Mosiah 29:46. Of course, it is also possible that the missing word or words here could have occurred as the dictation of the text was written down in 𝓞. This would explain why Oliver missed inserting old or of age when he proofed Mosiah 29:46. Ultimately, the critical text will follow the 1830 emendation, chiefly because there does seem to be something missing when describing someone as being “X years”. The use of old or of age would be lacking if the clause read something like “his age was X years”, but that kind of expression is never found in the Book of Mormon. Statistically, the odds are higher that the single word old was lost here rather than the two-word phrase of age (at least if scribe 2 of 𝓟 was responsible for the loss).