Here in 1 Nephi 4:33, the original manuscript (as well as the printer’s manuscript and all printed editions) reads “if he would go down in the wilderness with us”. The preposition in sounds odd here; although in is not impossible, the preposition into definitely seems more appropriate.
Shortly after this verse, in verses 34 and 38, scribe 3 of 𝓞 initially wrote “in the wilderness”, but in these two instances he almost immediately corrected the phrase to read “into the wilderness”. (Both corrections involve inserting the to into the already-written text, but there is no change in the level of ink flow.) And in both cases, like in verse 33, there is a verb of motion:
Besides these two corrected examples, we have the same use of into in verses 35 and 36:
The two scribal corrections plus the consistent reference in the text to “going into the wilderness” in 1 Nephi 4:34–38 suggest that the original text in verse 33 also had the preposition into (“if he would go down into the wilderness with us”).
In English the preposition in can be used to mean ‘into’ as well as ‘within or inside of ’. But the Book of Mormon tends to avoid using in for the meaning ‘into’. Excluding the case of 1 Nephi 4:33, we find that the text is completely consistent with respect to the word wilderness: whenever someone crosses from inhabited territory into a wilderness, the preposition is into (100 times), while if there is motion within a wilderness, the preposition is in (36 times). For most verbs and nouns that show motion, we consistently get only one of the two prepositions:
| into the wilderness | in the wilderness | |
| depart | 24 | 0 |
| flee/flight | 18 | 0 |
| carry | 6 | 0 |
| come | 5 | 0 |
| retreat | 4 | 0 |
| send | 4 | 0 |
| drive | 3 | 0 |
| take | 3 | 0 |
| bring | 2 | 0 |
| follow | 2 | 0 |
| return | 1 | 0 |
| travel | 0 | 8 |
| wander | 0 | 5 |
| course | 0 | 2 |
| move | 0 | 1 |
Thus verbs like depart and flee (along with its nominal form flight) consistently take “into the wilderness”. On the other hand, there are verbs of motion such as travel and wander that typically take place only within a wilderness and therefore avoid the preposition into. For a few verbs, either preposition is possible. We have the following statistics from the earliest textual sources (excluding once more the case of 1 Nephi 4:33):
| into the wilderness | in the wilderness | |
| journey | 8 | 15 |
| go | 12 | 2 |
| march | 5 | 1 |
| lead | 3 | 2 |
The motion verb and noun journey can take either in or into, depending on whether one is journeying within a wilderness (15 times) or journeying into a wilderness (8 times). One nice contrastive example is found in 1 Nephi 16–17, where Lehi and his people start their journey “into the wilderness”, then continue their journey “in the wilderness”. The use of again in the second case supports this interpretation:
Since 1 Nephi 4:33 involves the verb go, we list all 15 examples of “going in(to) the wilderness”:
Notice once more that when Lehi and his party resume their travel (the second example in 1 Nephi 16:14), they “go forth again in the wilderness”. And in Mosiah 22:11, the text explains that the people of Limhi went around the land of Shilom by staying in the wilderness. (Earlier, Mosiah 22:8 describes Gideon’s plan that “we will depart with our women and our children our flocks and our herds into the wilderness and we will travel around the land of Shilom”. By this time in the history of the people of Limhi, the land of Shilom had probably been repossessed by the Lamanites and was therefore to be avoided.)
In one other instance of an original “into the wilderness”, the preposition into was accidentally changed to in (in this case, by the 1837 typesetter). The motion verb in this example is march:
For a complete list of all the cases of “march in(to) the wilderness”, of which only one correctly takes in, see Alma 52:22.
There have continually been problems with in and into in the transmission of the text. The following additional cases (none of which involve scribe 3 of 𝓞) are each discussed separately in their own place:
Summary: Emend 1 Nephi 4:33 so that the preposition is into (“if he would go down into the wilderness with us”); nearby, in verses 34 and 38, scribe 3 of 𝓞 initially wrote “in the wilderness” but then immediately corrected the manuscript to read “into the wilderness”; thus we have clear evidence of scribe 3’s tendency to miswrite “into the wilderness” as “in the wilderness”; all other occurrences of wilderness suggest that the original text consistently uses into whenever people leave an inhabited area and go into a wilderness.