Words of Mormon 1:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and I cannot write [a 1A|the BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] hundredth part of the things of my people

The 1837 edition replaced the indefinite article a with the definite article the. This change was not marked by Joseph Smith in the printer’s manuscript, and it could well be a typo in the 1837 edition since elsewhere “a(n) hundredth part” is the normal phrase in the Book of Mormon, although there is one occurrence of “the hundredth part”:

Summary: Restore “a hundredth part” in the Words of Mormon 1:5 since this phrase represents the earliest reading; “a(n) hundredth part” is considerably more frequent in the text than “the hundredth part”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 2

References