Helaman 13:31 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and in the days of your [poverity 1|poverty ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] ye cannot retain them

Here in 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery wrote poverty as poverity. Although normally Oliver wrote the word correctly (five times in 𝓞 and six times in 𝓟), he occasionally miswrote it (but only in 𝓟) as a word ending in -ity, here in Helaman 13:31 and two times earlier in the text:

For these other two instances, 𝓞 is extant and correctly reads as poverty. Thus Oliver is the one responsible for poverity; it does not represent some kind of archaic or dialectal form for the word poverty (nor is this form of the word found in the Oxford English Dictionary).

Summary: Maintain the word poverty throughout the text; in a few places, Oliver Cowdery wrote the word as poverity in 𝓟, but that form of the word is clearly innovative and not original to the Book of Mormon text.

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

References