Alma 51:25 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but it came to pass that Amalickiah would not suffer the Lamanites to go against the city of Nephihah to battle but [he 0| 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] kept them down by the seashore

The original manuscript has the subject pronoun he after the conjunction but. While copying into the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery accidentally dropped the pronoun. As noted under Mosiah 24:11, either reading will work here in Alma 51:25. More specifically, we note that elsewhere in the original text, in three cases of an initial clause beginning with “it came to pass” followed later by a but-clause, the subject is explicitly repeated (as a pronoun), but in four cases the potentially repeatable subject is ellipted:

repeated subject

ellipted subject

In these examples, the subject can be explicitly repeated as a pronoun or ellipted. In the case of Alma 51:25, the critical text will therefore follow the reading in 𝓞, the earliest textual source.

Summary: Restore the subject pronoun he in Alma 51:25 (“but he kept them down by the seashore”).

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

References