Alma 28:3 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea and also there was a tremendious slaughter among the people of Nephi nevertheless the Lamanites were driven and scattered and the people of Nephi returned again to their [lands 0|land 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST]

The original manuscript has the plural their lands, which Oliver Cowdery accidentally miscopied from 𝓞 into 𝓟 as a singular, their land. Elsewhere in the text, after wars and battles, the people typically “return to their lands”:

In each of these cases, the text refers to people returning after war to what appears to be their individual plots of land that they farm.

Summary: Restore in Alma 28:3 the plural their lands, the reading in 𝓞; the text here refers to the individual lands that the people farmed, not the whole land in which they lived.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 4

References