Alma 42:17 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
how could there be a law save there was [a 01ABCGHIJKLMNOPQRST| DEF] punishment

The 1841 British edition omitted the a before punishment. The a was restored to the LDS text in the 1879 edition. The a is expected given the contrastive parallelism in this sentence between “a law” and “a punishment”. Subsequent verses in this chapter show the same conjoining of “a law” and “a punishment”:

Summary: Maintain the indefinite article a before punishment in Alma 42:17 and elsewhere in this chapter.

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

References