Alma 5:24–25 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
do ye suppose that such an one can have a place to sit down in the kingdom of God … or also ye cannot suppose that such an one can have [ 1ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPQRST|a G] place in the kingdom of heaven

Here the text has a place in verse 24 but only place in verse 25, when otherwise the passages are quite parallel. It is, of course, possible that in verse 25 the original manuscript had a place and the indefinite article a was accidentally dropped in the early transmission of the text. The 1858 Wright edition, however, made both passages agree by replacing place in verse 25 with a place, but this reading was not continued in the RLDS textual tradition.

Elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, when referring to the next life in God’s presence, all passages use a place rather than place, as in these examples where a choice between a place and place is possible:

But in a revelation given to Joseph Smith in June 1829 (near the end of the translation of the Book of Mormon), there is an example where place rather than a place is used with kingdom (just as in Alma 5:25):

More generally, we have instances of both place and a place in the expression “to have (a) place”. As already noted, there are two examples of “to have a place” (here in Alma 5:24 as well as in Mosiah 26:24); all the other instances are of the form “to have place”:

Because of the variation between place and a place, it is probably best to leave place unchanged in Alma 5:25 even though the previous verse has a place.

Summary: Accept in Alma 5:25 place (the earliest extant reading) rather than a place; there is support elsewhere in the text for using place without the indefinite article in the expression “to have (a) place”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References