Alma 33:13 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for behold he saith [that > thou 0|thou 1BCDEFG|Thou AHIJKLMNOPQRST] hast turned away thy judgments because of thy Son

Here Oliver Cowdery started to write “for behold he saith that … ” , but he aborted writing the that (he did not cross the final t ) and overwrote the at with ou, thus immediately replacing the subordinate conjunction that with the subject pronoun thou; then he wrote the rest of the clause inline, giving “for behold he saith : thou hast turned away thy judgments because of thy Son”. Oliver was expecting the verb say to introduce an indirect quote, thus his initial that. But the following quote is a direct quote. Undoubtedly the original text had the direct quote. For some discussion of the optionality of that after the verb say, see under 2 Nephi 30:2. Also see the general discussion under that in volume 3.

Summary: Accept in Alma 33:13 the corrected reading in 𝓞, namely, without that before the direct quote “thou hast turned away thy judgments because of thy Son”.

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

References