Alma 16:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for behold the armies of the Lamanites had come in on the wilderness side into the borders of the land even into the city of Ammonihah and began to slay the people and [to 1APS| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRT] destroy the city

Here the 1837 edition accidentally omitted the infinitival marker to before the verb destroy. It was restored to the RLDS text in the 1908 RLDS edition. The repeated infinitival to for conjuncts is more frequent in the Book of Mormon than the nonrepeated to. For instance, when the verb is begin, there are 34 occurrences of “begin to X and to Y” and 15 of “begin to X and Y”, as in the following contrastive pair of examples:

The clear tendency in the history of the text has been to accidentally remove the repeated to. Besides the example here in Alma 16:2, we have the following isolated examples involving the verb begin:

In each case, the critical text will follow the earliest textual sources in determining whether the infinitival to is repeated or not. For a complete discussion, see under conjunctive repetition in volume 3.

Summary: Restore in Alma 16:2 the repeated to in “and began to slay the people and to destroy the city”.

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

References