Alma 44:11 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
or ye shall submit to the conditions [to 01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS| RT] which I have proposed

Here the earliest extant sources (including 𝓞) read quite strangely; the to at the beginning of the relative clause seems unacceptable: “ye shall submit to the conditions to which I have proposed”. One expects the text to say “ye shall submit to the conditions which I have proposed”, which is what the editors for the 1920 LDS edition emended the text to. Thus far I have not found any examples in any of the English language databases, both the historical ones and the general ones like , to suggest that a reading like “conditions to which I have proposed” is possible.

What is possible is that this extra to was accidentally introduced into the text during dictation; the to might have been triggered by the preceding to in “submit to the conditions”. In fact, there are a number of examples where a preceding preposition has accidentally been repeated by the scribe. Most examples involve the preposition of, but other prepositions are also repeated. In the following sampling from the manuscripts, Oliver Cowdery caught and removed his repeated preposition:

The example in Helaman 5:41 shows the repetition of the preposition before a relative clause, just as I am proposing happened here in Alma 44:11 (but without correction). For an example of repeated of that has persisted for most of the history of the text, see the discussion regarding “the people of the king of Jacob” in 3 Nephi 9:9.

Thus there is some evidence that “ye shall submit to the conditions to which I have proposed” may be the result of scribal error on Oliver Cowdery’s part. Since the occurrence of the extra to seems impossible, the critical text will accept the 1920 emendation that removed the to from before the relative pronoun which.

Summary: Accept in Alma 44:11 the 1920 LDS emendation that removed the extra to in “ye shall submit to the conditions to which I have proposed”, giving “ye shall submit to the conditions which I have proposed”; the extra to appears to be the result of perseverance of the preceding to (in “submit to the conditions”).

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

References