Helaman 13:15 Textual Variants

Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “this city of Gideon”; then he overwrote the i with an e but finally decided not to cross out the s. Instead, he crossed out the whole word and supralinearly inserted the correct the, giving “the city of Gideon”. The correction does not have any change in the level of ink flow, so it appears to have been virtually immediate. The original manuscript probably read “the city of Gideon”, and the probable source for “this city of Gideon” is the preceding five occurrences of “this great city” in verses 12–14:

• Helaman 13:12–14
  • yea woe unto this great city of Zarahemla … yea woe unto this great city for I perceive saith the Lord that there are many
    —yea even the more part of this great city—that will harden their hearts against me saith the Lord …
    but behold if it were not for the righteous which are in this great city behold I would cause that fire should come down out of heaven and destroy it … yea woe be unto this great city because of the wickedness and abominations which is in her

Elsewhere in the text, there are no examples of “this city of X”, only “the city of X”. For a list of other cases where Oliver Cowdery accidentally wrote this instead of the, see under 2 Nephi 10:23.