Alma 46:10 Textual Variants

Oliver Cowdery had some difficulty here in 𝓞 with or and of. After the word foundation, Oliver supralinearly inserted an or, then crossed it out. His decision to insert the or could have been caused by him having just heard Joseph Smith’s dictation of the or that comes later on, just before which blessing. And when Oliver got to that or, he started to write of but then erased the partially written f and overwrote the word with or.

This second difficulty with or and of shows up later in the printing history of the Book of Mormon. When the 1879 stereotyped plates located in Salt Lake City started to deteriorate, portions of some pages were reset, including parts of Alma 46. Unfortunately, in the resetting for this verse, the correct or was set as of, and this reading was accidentally followed by some of the early 20th-century Book of Mormon editions (the 1905 Chicago edition, the 1907 vest-pocket edition, and the 1911 large-print Chicago edition). The editors for the 1920 LDS edition restored the correct or in this passage. (Adam Davis, a research assistant of mine from 1995–1997, did the basic research on these turn-of-the-century editions of the Book of Mormon, including the specific research on the reset portions of these 1879 stereotyped plates.)

The reading with or clearly makes better sense since the following relative clause (“which blessing God had sent upon the face of the land for the righteous’ sake”) is used to explain that God had not granted the foundation of liberty to the wicked, but he did it for the sake of the righteous (note the preceding relative clause, “which God had granted unto them”, where the pronoun them could be misinterpreted as referring to those who were misled by Amalickiah, thus the need for the or-clause to explain who the them is referring to).

The construction “of which X”, where X is a noun, occurs only once in the Book of Mormon text, and in that instance the prepositional phrase postmodifies many, which means that the “of which X” phrase does not begin the relative clause (instead, many does):

• 2 Nephi 4:14
  • for I had spake many things unto them
    —and also my father before his death—
    many of which sayings are written upon mine other plates

On the other hand, there are 66 examples of the phrase “of which” in the original text, some of which do begin a relative clause:

• 1 Nephi 1:16
  • and he also hath written many things which he prophesied and spake unto his children of which I shall not make a full account

But there is no example of a prepositional phrase construction of the form “of which X” initiating a relative clause (except in the incorrect form of Alma 46:10). Thus the incorrect phraseology “of which blessing” would be distinctly out of place in terms of Book of Mormon usage.