Helaman 3:19 Textual Variants

Here in the original manuscript, the word eighth was written as eight. One wonders if this eight might actually be correct. Under Alma 52:15, I discussed two examples, “the twentieth and seventh year” and “the thirtieth and seventh year” (that is, where all the conjoined numbers are ordinals) and showed that this kind of compound ordinal number may actually represent the original text. Under Alma 56:7, 9, on the other hand, I argued that examples like “the twenty and six year” are probably errors for “the twenty and sixth year”; in cases like that, the final /h/ sound in sixth was apparently omitted as Joseph Smith read off the text to Oliver Cowdery.

In contrast to these two types, the word eighth was orthographically difficult—that is, scribes and typesetters had difficulty with the complex sequence ghth and tended to omit one of the h’s, either the h before the t (thus eigth) or the h after the t (thus eight). Even though eighth appears as eight here in 𝓞 for Helaman 3:19, this is most likely Oliver’s scribal error for the ordinal number, not the cardinal number itself. We can see this orthographic difficulty when we list all the variant forms in the manuscripts and the printed editions for the ordinal number eighth:

Also note the typo eighty for two of the editions in Helaman 11:22. Overall, eighth appears 19 times in the text, yet 11 of these show at least one textual source, seldom the same one, where eighth was not correctly written or set in type.

I tally here the number of times each manuscript or edition had these various errors for eighth:

In various editions from 1841 through 1906, the tendency was to accidentally set eight for eighth, not eigth. In the manuscripts, the tendency was to miswrite either eigth or eight for eighth (with eigth more frequent than eight). There is only one case where the earliest manuscript evidence supports eight instead of the expected eighth, namely, here in 𝓞 for Helaman 3:19. The critical text will consider this eight as a scribal error for eighth. In Helaman 4:8 (where 𝓞 is not extant but probably read eighth), Oliver Cowdery initially wrote eigth in 𝓟, which he then supralinearly corrected to eight rather than the intended eighth. For this example, see either the list of errors for eighth under Alma 52:15 or the transcript of 𝓟 in volume 2 of the critical text (lines 5–6 on page 337 of 𝓟).