Alma 4:13 Textual Variants

Here the typesetter introduced an odd error into the 1841 British edition. He dropped the expected the before hungry but inserted an unnecessary the before prophecy later on in the verse. Here is how these lines appear as finally printed in that edition:

ing their substance to the poor and the needy ; feeding hungry ; and suffering all manner of afflictions, for Christ’s sake, who should come according to the spirit of the prophecy, looking forward to that day, thus retaining

The extra word spacing in the second line seems to indicate the loss of the word the at the beginning of the line and a concomitant increase in the word spacing for that line. Yet the missing the shows up at the beginning of the fourth line. What seems to have happened here is that the type had been set up through the third line, but that the beginning of lines two and three became loose, with the word the falling out. In correcting the type, the the was accidentally put at the beginning of the fourth line rather than at the beginning of the second line, where it belonged. Then the typesetter readjusted the word spacing in the second line. Note that the initial word in line three, Christ’s, remained slightly indented, a sign that the type had become loose.

The 1849 LDS edition was set from the 1841 British edition. The reading “feeding hungry” was clearly defective, so Orson Pratt (the editor of the 1849 edition) supplied the the there, giving “feeding the hungry”. But he did not recognize that the extra the in “according to the spirit of the prophecy” was an error; thus the intrusive the was not removed from the LDS text until the next LDS edition (in 1852). Pratt may have interpreted the text here as referring to the spirit of some particular prophecy, with the result that he left the extra the in the text.