Mosiah 9:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for father fought against father and brother against brother until the greatest number of our army was [slain > NULL 1| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] [destroid 1|destroyed ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] in the wilderness

Here in Mosiah 9:2, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote that “the greatest number of our army was slain”. He immediately corrected his error, crossing out the word slain and writing the correct destroyed (spelled by him as destroid ) immediately afterwards (that is, inline). As expected, the correction shows no change in the level of ink flow. Oliver’s initial error was probably due to the occurrence of slain earlier in the verse (“but he being an austere and a bloodthirsty man commanded that I should be slain”).

Elsewhere the Book of Mormon text uses slain rather than destroyed in collocations with the word number:

But with the word army, we can have either destroyed or slew (slain in the standard text):

Thus the use of destroyed in Mosiah 9:2 (which has both number and army) is perfectly acceptable.

Summary: Retain in Mosiah 9:2 the corrected reading in 𝓟, with its use of destroyed rather than slain (“until the greatest number of our army was destroyed”).

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

References