Helaman 14:7 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and it shall come to pass that ye shall [all 1ABDEFIJLMNOPQRST| CGHK] be amazed and wonder

The 1840 edition dropped the quantifier all. The error persisted in the RLDS textual tradition until the 1908 RLDS edition restored the all. This omission of all was probably the 1840 typesetter’s error and not the result of Joseph Smith’s editing for that edition, simply because there is no motivation for making such a change. The error probably occurred because shall ends in all, which allowed the typesetter’s eye to accidentally skip over the second sequence of the letters all. For a second case where shall all was reduced to shall in the 1840 edition, see under 3 Nephi 29:2. For another case where an earlier shall all was replaced with simply shall (this time by the 1830 typesetter), see under 2 Nephi 13:24. And in Ether 4:3 the 1840 typesetter omitted the all in “they have all dwindled in unbelief”. All of these instances where all was omitted in the 1840 edition were typos; the 1830 omission, on the other hand, may have been intentional.

Summary: Both the 1830 edition and the printer’s manuscript have all in Helaman 14:7; the 1840 change is undoubtedly a typo rather than due to editing.

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

References