Alma 41:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
the one restored to happiness according to his desires of happiness or [to 0| 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] good according to his desires of good and the other to evil according to his desires of evil

Once more we have a small word, the preposition to, at the end of a line in 𝓞 that Oliver Cowdery accidentally dropped when he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟. The to was obscured because of the narrow gutters for this gathering of sheets. (For another example of such an omission at the end of a line on this page of 𝓞, see under Alma 41:2–3.) Nearby we have a similar example of to being repeated in a prepositional phrase conjoined by or with a previous prepositional phrase:

The critical text will restore the repeated to in Alma 41:5.

Summary: Restore in Alma 41:5 the repeated preposition to in “or to good according to his desires of good”; Oliver Cowdery accidentally omitted this to when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟.

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

References