In nearly all instances, the Book of Mormon text uses above when comparing one member of a set to all the other members of that set, thus “most desirable above”, “most abominable above”, “most precious above”, and so on. In two examples, the earliest textual source (the original manuscript) actually reads of rather than above. Besides the one here in 1 Nephi 13:26, we have this other example later in this section of the text:
In both of these examples, when copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery replaced the of with above, perhaps because he perceived a logical contradiction: the one member being compared cannot belong to the set of all other members. Such an interpretation assumes that of here is being used in its current set-inclusive sense. But another possibility is that of here retains some of its original English meaning of ‘from’.
Another possibility is that scribe 2 of 𝓞 misheard Joseph Smith’s dictated above /ßbßv/ as of /ßv/ (the pronunciation of each word ends with the same /ßv/, at least in American English). However, there is no independent evidence that scribe 2 ever made this mistake—that is, there are no scribal corrections or obvious errors that show scribe 2 (or any other scribe in 𝓞) accidentally writing down of in place of above.
In her December 1997 paper for my class on textual criticism, Claryce Sherwood thoroughly analyzed the variation in the phrase type “mostabove/of all (other) X”. Based on the earliest textual sources, we have examples for all four of the possible types:
most above all X
most above all other X
most of all X
most of all other X
Sherwood pointed out in her paper that one of the remaining types is also logically inconsistent— namely, the first one listed above: “most above all X”. (The example in 1 Nephi 8:11
will work because the all is restrictively modified.) She also included the following passage as one having the same logical difficulty:
One may ask with respect to Alma 32:42, how can something be “sweet above all that is sweet”? Except for the case of 1 Nephi 8:11, all the examples listed under 1 above (“most above all X”) could be edited by adding other (as in “most abominable above all other sins” for Alma 39:5). Or in the case of Alma 32:42, we could add else (thus “sweet above all else that is sweet”, “white above all else that is white”, and “pure above all else that is pure”), even though this would obviously mar the poetic simplicity of the original text.
Of course, no one really has any problem in interpreting the meaning of the two problematic cases (“most above all X” and “most of all other X”. The most consistent solution would be to follow the original manuscript in 1 Nephi 13:26 and 1 Nephi 15:36 and not worry about the supposed logical inconsistency of these two examples.
Summary: Restore the two original examples of “most of all other X” in 1 Nephi 13:26 and 1 Nephi 15:36; Oliver Cowdery’s editing that changed the of to above (“most above all other X”) was apparently based on what seemed illogical, yet corresponding examples in the text having the phraseology “most above all X” (which could also be considered illogical) have never been edited.