Alma 50:32 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
now behold the people which were in the land [or > of >%? NULL 0| 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] Bountiful or rather Moroni ...

Here at the beginning of a line in 𝓞, Oliver Cowdery wrote or prematurely, initially skipping the prepositional phrase of Bountiful. Virtually immediately he corrected the or to of by overwriting the r with an f. However, he also made some erasure right before the capital B of the following Bountiful, which partially interfered with the of and made it look like the f had been erased, at least at first glance. In two other places in this chapter, nearby erasures made it look like the word and had been erased; see the discussion under Alma 50:19–20 and Alma 50:21 for the accidental erasure of an ampersand, thus leading to the loss of and when copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Similarly, here in Alma 50:32, the small word of, partially erased (but unintentionally), was accidentally omitted when Oliver copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, giving “the land Bountiful”. The fact that the of was at the beginning of a line in 𝓞 may have also contributed to its loss in the copying process. As discussed under 1 Nephi 17:7, the earliest text clearly prefers “the land Bountiful” over “the land of Bountiful”, but the phrase with the of still occurs. Here in Alma 50:32 the critical text will restore this instance of “the land of Bountiful”.

Summary: Restore in Alma 50:32 the original of in “the land of Bountiful”; its occurrence in 𝓞 appears to be intended, but the f was partially erased, which led Oliver Cowdery to accidentally omit the of when he copied the text into 𝓟.

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

References