Mosiah 18:14 Textual Variants

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery mistakenly wrote the much more frequent name Helaman in place of the less frequent Helam. Of course, by the time he came to making the printer’s manuscript, Oliver would have been very familiar with the name Helaman because earlier in his scribal work for 𝓞 he had taken down all of Joseph Smith’s dictation that deals with the life of Helaman, not only in the book of Alma (Alma 31, 36–38, 45–46, 48–50, 53, 56–60, 62–63) but also in the book of Helaman itself (Helaman 1–6). 𝓞 is extant for most of these portions of the text, and every extant instance in 𝓞 of the name Helaman is in Oliver’s hand.

Here in Mosiah 18:12–14, we have three corrections of Helaman to Helam, and they all appear to be virtually immediate: each crossout was done with multiple strokes, but the actual ink flow for each stroke seems to have involved no change in the level of ink flow. This immediacy in the corrections would mean that here in Mosiah 18 Oliver Cowdery, the scribe in 𝓟, kept accidentally writing Helaman and then almost immediately correcting it to Helam. (I should point out here that quite a few times in writing this analysis, I initially typed out Helam as Helaman and then each time immediately deleted the extra an.)

Later in the book of Mosiah, as he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery once more consistently wrote Helaman instead of the correct Helam. All of these later cases of Helam refer to the land or the city of Helam, apparently named after the Helam that Alma baptized in Mosiah 18. But for this part of the text, Oliver’s crossouts of the final an’s were all done later: the level of ink flow for each stroke of the crossout is always heavier than the originally written text. In all, we have 11 instances in Mosiah 23 where Helam was originally written in 𝓟 as Helaman:

These crossouts were made prior to the addition of the 1830 compositor’s penciled-in punctuation marks for these pages of 𝓟. Note, in particular, the placement of the punctuation marks immediately after Helam but in front of the crossed out an in lines 12, 13, and 20 (two times) on page 154 and in line 8 on page 155.

The original manuscript is not extant for any portion of the book of Mosiah. One could argue that for Mosiah 23 the original manuscript actually read Helaman in all 11 cases and that this is why Oliver Cowdery originally copied it consistently as Helaman into 𝓟 and did not immediately correct it to Helam. This interpretation would imply that Oliver later decided that Helaman, both in 𝓞 and 𝓟 for Mosiah 23, was a mistake for Helam and that he therefore systematically emended the text. But such an innovative decision on Oliver’s part seems unlikely. A more plausible explanation, in my view, is that when Oliver got to copying Mosiah 23, he read Helam in 𝓞 but decided it was an error for Helaman, not realizing that the land and city of Helam had been named after the Helam that Alma had baptized in Mosiah 18.

There are actually a number of names that Oliver Cowdery, for some reason, decided were incorrect in 𝓞, and so he changed their spelling when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟. In fact, for two of these names, the first occurrence in 𝓞 is extant and every subsequent extant spelling of that name in 𝓞 reads the same:

For both of these cases, Oliver is clearly responsible for the change in the spelling of the name.

An especially relevant example for this discussion is the name Amlicite. In Alma 2–3, Oliver copied this name into 𝓟 as either Amlicite or Amlikite, but later in the book of Alma he consistently copied the name as Amalekite (Alma 21–24, 27, 43), not recognizing that there was only one name for the followers of Amlici. (For details, see the discussion under Alma 2:11.) I would suggest that Oliver made the same kind of error in Mosiah 23: he initially thought Helam in 𝓞 was a mistake for Helaman, and so he consistently copied it as Helaman into 𝓟; but later he must have decided that the name of the land and city in Mosiah 23 was the same as the name of the person in Mosiah 18 and therefore the consistent use of Helam in 𝓞 was indeed correct, so he restored in 𝓟 all 11 cases of Helam in Mosiah 23.

Given the evidence from Oliver Cowdery’s emendation of names elsewhere in the manuscripts, the critical text will accept the corrected spelling Helam in both Mosiah 18 and 23 as the original name for this individual and for the land and city named apparently after him. Of particular relevance here is the one instance where scribe 2 of 𝓟 copied the name into 𝓟. Although he wrote the name as Helem, the name is still recognizable as Helam, not Helaman:

• Mosiah 27:16
  • go and remember the captivity of thy fathers in the land of [Helim >% Helem 1|Helam ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] and in the land of Nephi

For the spelling Helem rather than Helam, see the discussion under Mosiah 27:16.