Alma 6:7 Textual Variants

he departed from them yea from the church which was in the city of Zarahemla and went over upon the east [ 1ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRST|side K] of the river Sidon into the valley of Gideon there having been a city built 1ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRST which was called the city of Gideon NULL K which was in the valley that was called Gideon

In this verse, the 1892 RLDS edition made two errors. The first involved the addition of the word side after east in the phrase “upon the east of the river Sidon”. This addition may have been intentional, although in no similar construction in the text did the 1892 typesetter add the word side. The 1908 RLDS edition restored the original text here in Alma 6:7 by removing the intrusive side.

Elsewhere in the text, when describing position with respect to the river Sidon, there are two cases where side occurs:

Alma 2:34 and contend with the Lamanites and the Amlicites on the west side of the river Sidon
Alma 16:7 the south wilderness which was on the east side of the river Sidon

But normally, the word side is not used (nine times, including Alma 6:7):

Alma 2:34 the bank which was on the west of the river Sidon
Alma 6:7 and went over upon the east of the river Sidon
Alma 8:3 the land of Melek on the west of the river Sidon
Alma 16:6 there shall ye meet them on the east of the river Sidon
Alma 43:27 the valley ... which was on the west of the river Sidon
Alma 43:32 the west valley on the west of the river Sidon
Alma 43:53 the men of Lehi on the east of the river Sidon
Alma 43:53 the armies of Moroni on the west of the river Sidon
Alma 49:16 the valley on the east of the river Sidon

In each case we therefore follow the earliest textual sources in determining whether side occurs after the directions east and west.

For this passage, the typesetter for the 1892 RLDS edition also allowed a whole line of text to be accidentally omitted when his eye skipped from the first of Gideon to the second one (thus omitting “there having been a city built which was called the city of Gideon”). The copytext for the 1892 edition was the first RLDS edition (1874); there the first of Gideon occurred almost exactly above the second one on the printed page, thus facilitating the visual skip. This omission was restored in the following RLDS edition (1908). Without the original line, we get an egregious redundancy: “into the valley of Gideon which was in the valley that was called Gideon”.

Summary: In Alma 6:7 the critical text will retain the earliest text, thus ignoring two errors in the 1892 RLDS edition (namely, the intrusive side after east in the phrase “upon the east of the river Sidon” and the visual skip that omitted the line “there having been a city built which was called the city of Gideon”).

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

References