Helaman 8:25 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and even at this time instead of laying up for yourselves treasures in heaven where nothing doth corrupt and where nothing can come which is unclean [NULL >+ ye are 1|ye are ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] heaping up for yourselves wrath against the day of judgment

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially omitted ye are. He later supplied the two words, perhaps when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞 (the supralinear ye are was written with slightly heavier ink flow). In any event, the sentence here definitely needs a subject and finite verb. Although 𝓞 is not extant, it probably read “ye are heaping up for yourselves wrath”.

Summary: Maintain the corrected reading in 𝓟 for Helaman 8:25: “ye are heaping up for yourselves wrath against the day of judgment”; the initial text in 𝓟 without ye are seems to be the result of a simple scribal error.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References