Mormon 9:4 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold I say unto you that ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and [a 1| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] just God under a consciousness of your filthiness before him …

The printer’s manuscript here has the repeated a (“with a holy and a just God”), whereas the 1830 edition lacks the repeated a (“with a holy and just God”). Elsewhere in the history of the text, there have been numerous examples where a repeated a (or an) has been dropped in this same context (namely, between conjoined attributive adjectives in a noun phrase):

The first and third cases show the scribe adding the repeated a, Oliver Cowdery in 𝓟 for 1 Nephi 11:35 and scribe 2 of 𝓞 for 1 Nephi 12:23 (see under those two passages for discussion). We have no firm cases where scribe 2 of 𝓟 ever added (or omitted, for that matter) the repeated a. As we can see, in the editions the consistent tendency has been to omit the repeated a; and 1 Nephi 11:35 shows one case where the 1830 typesetter made this error. Here in Mormon 9:4 we apparently have a second case. The critical text will therefore restore the repeated a in this case (thus “with a holy and a just God”).

Summary: Restore the repeated a in Mormon 9:4 (“with a holy and a just God”), the reading in 𝓟; the repeated a has been frequently omitted in the transmission of the Book of Mormon text, especially in the printed editions.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

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