Alma 25:13 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and it came to pass that when the Lamanites saw that they could not overpower the Nephites they [returneth > returned 0|returned 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] again to their own land

Here in the original manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote the present-tense returneth (“they returneth again to their own land”), but he immediately caught his error and overwrote the th with a d (the original crossing for the t in the -eth ending is incomplete, which seems to indicate that the correction to the d was immediate). In any event, we end up with the obviously correct past-tense reading “they returned again to their own land”.

Summary: Accept in Alma 25:13 the past-tense returned (the immediately corrected reading in 𝓞) instead of the present-tense returneth.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

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