Enos 1:10 Textual Variants

In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “upon their heads”, but then he corrected the text by supralinearly inserting own (and without any change in the level of ink flow). Nearby fragments of the original manuscript indicate that there was room for own in the original manuscript.

Elsewhere in the text, we have a fairly equal number of occurrences of “upon one’s own head” (seven times) and “upon one’s head” (six times). Since either reading seems possible, Oliver Cowdery was probably correcting to the reading of the original manuscript here in Enos 1:10.

There is also evidence elsewhere in the manuscripts that Oliver Cowdery sometimes omitted the premodifier own:

• Mosiah 10:11
  • therefore they depended upon their [NULL > own 1|own ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] strength
• Alma 38:11
  • yea see that ye do not boast in your [NULL >– own 0|own 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] wisdom
• Alma 52:1
  • Amalickiah was dead in his [NULL >– own 0|own 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] tent

In these examples from the manuscripts, Oliver caught his initial error and corrected it by supralinearly inserting the own.