Here the 1830 typesetter replaced put down with hewn down, which is what we expect in the context of “cast into the fire”. Elsewhere in the text there are 14 occurrences of “to hew down” occurring with “to cast into the fire”, and all figuratively refer to God’s judgment:
Note that two of these also occur in Alma 5 (in verses 52 and 56), thus supporting the 1830 emendation to hewn down in verse 35.
Further evidence that hewn down may be the correct reading in Alma 5:35 is that for most of the other examples, the passage deals with the acceptability of one’s fruit. This association can be seen in Alma 5:35, where the immediately following verse refers to one’s fruit:
This same collocation with fruit is found in the New Testament: “every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire” (Matthew 3:10; similarly in Matthew 7:19 and Luke 3:9).
The phrase hewn down is also found in the Book of Mormon text when speaking of cutting down men in battle; here, of course, there is no reference to being “cast into the fire” nor, of course, to fruit:
Elsewhere in the text, there are four occurrences of put down. None of these have anything to do with eternal judgment; instead, they refer to reducing or destroying someone’s power or position:
Thus the 1830 typesetter’s emendation hewn down is consistent with the rest of the text. It is quite possible that the reading in 𝓟, put down, represents an error that entered the text early on in its transmission. One problem, however, is that put and hewn are neither visually nor aurally similar. One wonders how hewn could have been mistakenly replaced by put (assuming that put is an error in 𝓟). This problem leads one to consider the possibility that the original manuscript for Alma 5:35 may have actually read cut, not put, and that cut was miscopied as put when scribe 2 of 𝓟 copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Although there are no instances in the Book of Mormon that refer to being “cut down and cast into the fire”, the King James Bible has the following relevant passage:
Here the verb is cut rather than the expected hew. And clearly, the reference is to trees. When the Hebrew for this passage was translated into the Septuagint, the Greek verb chosen was ekkopto¯ ‘to cut down or to cut off ’. This is the same Greek verb that is used in the New Testament passages listed above (Matthew 3:10, Matthew 7:19, and Luke 3:9) but is translated there as hewn down in the King James Bible. The point is that in English cut down is an appropriate substitute for hewn down. And the Book of Mormon does have examples of “to cut down” where “to hew down” would be an alternative translation:
The first three are quotations from Isaiah and, like Jeremiah 22:7, use cut rather than hew. Just as with “to hew down”, these six examples of “to cut down” deal either with cutting down trees as a symbolic representation of destroying people or with cutting down men in battle. The majority of instances in the Book of Mormon use “to hew down”, but there are also instances of “to cut down”. Thus it is quite possible that Alma 5:35 may have originally read “and ye shall not be cut down and cast into the fire” (which parallels more the King James text in Jeremiah 22:7 than in Matthew 3:10).
Such an error of replacing cut with put would have been facilitated if cut had been written in 𝓞 with a capital C. In the manuscripts, such capital C ’s were almost always written with a large upper loop, which means that the C could potentially be misread as a capital P and then copied as p. There are three examples of the specific word cut being written as Cut, all in the printer’s manuscript: for 1 Nephi 22:20, Oliver Cowdery was the scribe; for Alma 9:14 and 3 Nephi 21:11, scribe 2 of 𝓟 was the scribe. In opposition to this suggested emendation, there are no examples anywhere in the manuscripts (or in the printed editions, for that matter) where a word-initial c /C has been mistakenly misread as a p/P (or vice versa). But this lack of independent evidence may be the consequence of there being very few words in the Book of Mormon that could have been potentially mixed up in this way. Even so, put and cut, both verbs, are indeed candidates for being mixed up, especially in the context of down.
Summary: Emend Alma 5:35 to read cut down instead of put down (the reading in 𝓟) and hewn down (the 1830 typesetter’s emended reading); put does not work well in this passage, nor does it seem to be an error for the visually and aurally dissimilar hewn; on the other hand, cut will work in this context and could have been misread as put when scribe 2 of 𝓟 copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟, especially if the c of cut had been spelled as a capital C in 𝓞.