Helaman 16:13 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but [behold 1| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] it came to pass in the ninetieth year of the reign of the judges there were great signs given unto the people and wonders

The printer’s manuscript has the word behold, but the 1830 edition lacks it. The original manuscript is not extant here for over five lines of text, so it is difficult to determine whether 𝓞 had the behold. Either reading is theoretically possible, but the occurrence of behold seems reasonable because in this year something new happened (“there were great signs given unto the people and wonders”). Elsewhere in the original text, there are 24 occurrences of “but it came to pass” and 4 of “but behold it came to pass” (Mosiah 18:32, Alma 52:15, Alma 53:16, and Helaman 11:29). So the occurrence of behold is quite possible here in Helaman 16:13. In the history of the text, there are no clear examples where behold was ever added to the text. There are, on the other hand, numerous examples in the manuscripts where the scribes initially omitted behold:

In the two last cases, Oliver Cowdery supplied the behold when he proofed scribe 2’s work in 𝓟 against 𝓞.

There is one case in the printed editions where a compositor omitted behold:

Although by a different compositor, this error supports the possibility that the 1830 compositor could have omitted behold in Helaman 16:13. On the other hand, there are no examples where behold has ever been accidentally added to the text (except possibly in 𝓟 for Helaman 16:13). There are two manuscript cases, both in Oliver’s hand, that superficially appear to involve adding behold, but in both these cases the nature of the error is different:

Thus all the evidence argues for accidentally omitting behold, not adding it, which means that the original text (and 𝓞) probably had behold in Helaman 16:13. The critical text will assume as much.

Summary: Restore behold in Helaman 16:13 (“but behold it came to pass”), the reading in 𝓟; the 1830 compositor appears to have accidentally omitted the behold when he set the type here from 𝓞.

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

References