Alma 19:23 Textual Variants

In modern English we expect the verb entrust for this passage rather than trust, yet the textual evidence is firm here for trusted rather than entrusted: in the original manuscript, sufficiently extant here, the word clearly begins with tr, not entr. In earlier English, we have examples of trust with the modern meaning of entrust, as exemplified by citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (under definition 5 for the verb trust ) dating from 1340 to 1908, including the following examples (with accidentals regularized):

• Fynes Moryson (1617)
  • neither would I advise Angelica if she were alive in these days to trust her self alone and in desert places to the protection of wandering knights
• Edward Gibbon (1781)
  • he trusted the event to valor and to fortune

Here are some additional uses in the Book of Mormon of the verb trust with the meaning ‘entrust’:

• Mosiah 21:19
  • and the king himself did not trust his person without the walls of the city unless he took his guards with him
• Alma 37:32
  • and now my son / remember the words which I have spoken unto you trust not those secret plans unto this people but teach them an everlasting hatred against sin and iniquity

The critical text will, of course, retain these unusual examples in the text of the verb trust with the meaning ‘entrust’. There is no evidence in the textual history of the Book of Mormon for mix-ups of trust and entrust, nor is there any evidence that the verb trust as used in Alma 19:23 and elsewhere in the text should be emended to entrust.