Alma 8:6 Textual Variants

The name Ammonihah shows some variation in the manuscripts, although ultimately it appears that the correct spelling is Ammonihah. But prior to Alma 49, none of the instances of Ammonihah are extant in 𝓞. For the first six times that scribe 2 of 𝓟 copied the name Ammonihah from 𝓞 into 𝓟 (from Alma 8:6 through Alma 8:16), he miswrote the name as Ammonidah. In each of these six instances, Oliver Cowdery later corrected the d to an h when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞:

Undoubtedly, 𝓞 read Ammonihah and scribe 2 misread the d as h. As he continued with his copywork, scribe 2 of 𝓟 wrote this name five more times, the first two correctly:

Scribe 2 of 𝓟 wrote his last three instances of Ammonihah as Amonihah (with only one m), but each instance has the correct -hah ending:

Oliver did not correct the misspelling Amonihah in 𝓟, but the 1830 compositor continued to set the name correctly as Ammonihah.

When Oliver Cowdery took over for scribe 2 of 𝓟 (at Alma 13:20), he continued to spell the name as Amonihah, nine times from Alma 14 through Alma 16:

After some hiatus, in Alma 25:2 Oliver returned to writing the correct spelling in 𝓟:

The name later appears six times in Alma 49; for five of these six cases, the name is extant in 𝓞 and is spelled correctly by Oliver Cowdery as Ammonihah; and in 𝓟 itself, Oliver spells all six instances correctly:

Finally, in Helaman 5:10 we have the last occurrence of the name in the text. 𝓞 is not extant there, but Oliver initially wrote the name once more as Amonihah in 𝓟; but then virtually immediately he corrected it to Ammonihah by supralinearly inserting the second m:

This variation suggests the following for how Ammonihah was spelled in 𝓞. First of all, Oliver Cowdery appears to have been the scribe for all 28 instances of Ammonihah in 𝓞. For the first eight occurrences of the name (in Alma 8:6–18), Oliver spelled it correctly as Ammonihah (with Joseph Smith probably spelling out the first occurrence of the name for him). But then in the Alma 9 preface, after a brief hiatus in the occurrence of the name, Oliver started to misspell it as Amonihah (for a total of 12 times, up through Alma 16:11). But the next gap in the use of the name was considerable (from Alma 16:11 to Alma 25:2); upon reaching Alma 25:2, Oliver seems to have asked Joseph to spell out the name once more. Thus at Alma 25:2 the name was written down correctly in 𝓞. When Oliver got to Alma 49, he continued with the correct Ammonihah, but may have reverted to writing Amonihah once more in 𝓞 when he finally got to Helaman 5:10.

When 𝓞 was copied into 𝓟, scribe 2 of 𝓟 initially misread the first six occurrences of Ammonihah as Ammonidah, which Oliver Cowdery corrected to Ammonihah. The next two instances were correctly spelled by scribe 2 (Oliver had also spelled them correctly in 𝓞); but when scribe 2 got to Amonihah in the preface to Alma 9, he copied that spelling from 𝓞 into 𝓟, as did Oliver himself when he started copying the name into 𝓟 at Alma 14:23. When the correct spelling returned to the text in Alma 25:2 and later in Alma 49, Oliver copied them correctly. His last spelling, initially Amonihah in 𝓟 (and presumably also in 𝓞), was virtually immediately corrected to Ammonihah in 𝓟.