Mosiah 22:12 Textual Variants

Here Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “unto the wilderness”, but then almost immediately he corrected this to “into the wilderness” by overwriting the un with in (there is no change in the level of ink flow). The original text has exactly 100 instances of “into the wilderness”, including six here in Mosiah 22. (In the total count, I include the variants “into some strange wilderness”, “into the south wilderness”, and “into the east wilderness”.) On the other hand, there are no occurrences of “unto the wilderness”. Further, there are two other cases where Oliver initially wrote in 𝓟 “unto the wilderness” instead of the correct “into the wilderness”; in both cases (as here in Mosiah 22:12), he caught his error almost immediately:

• 1 Nephi 4:36
  • that the Jews might not know concerning our flight [into 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|unto > into 1] the wilderness
• 1 Nephi 5:8
  • the Lord hath commanded my husband to flee [into 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|unto > into 1] the wilderness

For a more general list of cases where scribes accidentally wrote unto rather than into, see the discussion under 2 Nephi 8:23. For discussion regarding “into the wilderness” versus “in the wilderness”, see under 1 Nephi 4:33.