Mosiah 3:4 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and that thou mayest declare unto thy people that they [also may > may also 1|may also ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] be filled with joy

Oliver Cowdery initially wrote also may; then almost immediately he corrected the word order to may also by crossing out the original also and supralinearly inserting it after the modal may (there is no difference in the level of ink flow). The original manuscript undoubtedly read may also. For a list of examples where the placement of also has varied in the history of the text, see under 2 Nephi 21:13.

Elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, there are three occurrences of may also and one of also may:

Theoretically, the also in each of these cases could refer to the following main verb, which would mean that there is a contrast with some preceding but different verb. But in fact, the also actually refers in each case to the immediately preceding subject pronoun. For each passage, the preceding text refers to some different individual(s) for which the same verb (or a semantically equivalent verb) is stated or, in one case, implied:

These examples show that the placement of also either before or after the modal verb may does not crucially determine whether the also refers to the preceding subject or to the following verb. Furthermore, since either order is possible, we let the earliest textual sources determine the placement of the also.

Summary: Maintain in Mosiah 3:4 Oliver Cowdery’s corrected reading which placed also after the modal verb may (“that they may also be filled with joy”); the also here refers to the preceding subject pronoun they.

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

References