Alma 8:5 Textual Variants

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery supplied the preposition throughout, probably because the original manuscript had throughout. It is possible that 𝓞 itself was missing the preposition and that Oliver himself decided that the missing preposition was throughout. Elsewhere there are 50 instances of “throughout … the land”, including two more in the larger passage here:

• Alma 8:4–5 (the corrected reading in 𝓟)
  • and he began to teach the people throughout all the land of Melek and it came to pass that the people came to him throughout all the borders of the land which was by the wilderness side and it came to pass that they were baptized throughout all the land

Perhaps Oliver decided on his own to insert throughout because of the preceding and following occurrences of that preposition.

In Alma 8:5, the term borders refers to bordering regions, not boundaries separating different lands. Such usage is found elsewhere in the text, as in Alma 5:3: “he began to establish a church in the land which was in the borders of Nephi / yea the land was called the land of Mormon”. Since borders in Alma 8:5 seems to mean ‘bordering regions’, other possible prepositions in lieu of throughout include through, in, within, among, and out of (each of which occurs elsewhere in the text with the noun borders). Since there is no clear alternative to throughout, the critical text will maintain Oliver’s correction, under the assumption that throughout was the reading of the original manuscript.