Helaman 3:22–23 Textual Variants

The original manuscript is not extant for the manuscript pages from Helaman 3:21 to Helaman 13:36, so for this part of the text we are unable to make any conjectures regarding the reading in 𝓞 based on spacing between extant fragments. Here in the printer’s manuscript for Helaman 3:22, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “among the people of Nephi &”. Virtually immediately, he crossed out the ampersand and inserted supralinearly the word the as well as tes to the end of Nephi (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the correction). Thus 𝓟 ends up reading “among the people of the Nephites”. As explained under Alma 45:13, the corrected reading here in Helaman 3:22 is the unexpected reading and is undoubtedly the original reading. One could explain the initial reading here in 𝓟 as Oliver’s tendency to write the more frequent “the people of Nephi”. But in this case what seems to have happened is that Oliver’s eye skipped down one line since what he wrote also includes the ampersand that occurs at the juncture of verses 22 and 23 (“the people of Nephi &”). We can see this in the transcript for 𝓟 or in the following reconstructed reading for 𝓞 (with bolding added to show where Oliver’s eye would have skipped down):

• Helaman 3:22–23 (reconstructed 𝓞)
  • the people of the Nephites in the latter end of the forty & eighth year of the reign of the Judges over the people of Nephi & it came to pass in the forty & ninth year of the reign of

In any event, the correct reading in the middle of verse 22 is “the people of the Nephites”—and without any and before “in the latter end of the forty and eighth year”.