Ether 10:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea he did tax them with [the >? NULL 0| 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] heavy taxes and with the taxes he did build many spacious buildings

The original manuscript has a minor lacuna between with and heavy, enough for a word of the length the. However, the actual text is undoubtedly “with heavy taxes” and not “with the heavy taxes”. I would surmise that in the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “with the heavy taxes” in anticipation of the following “with the taxes”, then crossed out the intrusive the.

Summary: Maintain in Ether 10:5 the phrase “with heavy taxes”, the reading of the earliest extant source, the printer’s manuscript; although Oliver Cowdery seems to have initially written “with the heavy taxes” in the original manuscript, he very likely deleted the extra the.

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

References