While copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote these things, probably because the same phraseology occurs in the following relative clause (“upon which these things are engraven”). Oliver crossed out the word things and supralinearly inserted the word small. The correction appears to be immediate since there is no change in the level of ink flow and the following word, plates, is written inline. However, the 1830 typesetter replaced the determiner these with the defi- nite article the. This second change was a typo on his part. Yet it is difficult to know whether Oliver Cowdery’s original these was itself part of his original scribal error and should have been replaced by some other word, such as the the of the 1830 edition. The 1908 RLDS edition restored the original these here in Jacob 1:1, undoubtedly by reference to the printer’s manuscript.
There is considerable evidence in the manuscripts that the scribes occasionally mixed up these and the. There are examples of an original the being momentarily replaced by these:
And there are examples of errors in the other direction, where an original these was momentarily replaced by the:
Thus there is clear evidence that Oliver Cowdery sometimes had difficulty with these versus the. There is also additional evidence that the 1830 compositor would sometimes incorrectly set the in place of these:
In the small plates of Nephi (including the Words of Mormon), the text normally refers to the small plates as these plates (37 times). Near the end of the small plates, the text twice refers to those plates as simply the plates rather than these plates:
These two cases of the plates could perhaps be errors for these plates, but there is no substantive evidence for changing the plates to these plates in these two cases. Theoretically, either “these small plates” or “the small plates” could be correct in Jacob 1:1.
There are no other occurrences of “small plates” in the text, although there are a couple of cases where small occurs as the subject complement for plates:
A demonstrative determiner can occur before plates with an intervening modifier:
Thus “these small plates” in Jacob 1:1 is clearly possible.
It appears that the original Book of Mormon text never had the specific phraseology “the small plates”, neither in Jacob 1:1 nor elsewhere. Of course, this is the terminology that church members systematically use to refer to this first portion of the Book of Mormon. But Book of Mormon writers seem to have used the adjective small to characterize only the smallness of Nephi’s second set of plates, not as the name for those plates. The phrase “these small plates” is quite appropriate in Jacob 1:1 and should therefore be restored.
Summary: Assume in Jacob 1:1 that Oliver Cowdery corrected the printer’s manuscript as intended, which means that the 1830 reading, “the small plates”, should be removed in favor of the earlier, corrected reading in 𝓟, “these small plates”.