Ether 13:14 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and as he dwelt in the cavity of a rock he made the remainder of this record viewing the [destruction >+ destructions 1|destructions ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] which came upon the people by night

There are nine instances of the plural destructions in the Book of Mormon; each has the meaning ‘destructive events’, as here in Ether 13:14, and does not refer to the entire destruction of a people (for discussion of this point, see under 1 Nephi 15:5). In this passage, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote the singular destruction in the printer’s manuscript, but later (with somewhat heavier ink flow) he inserted the plural s (probably when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞, which is not extant here). The plural is undoubtedly correct since the previous verse uses the plural things to convey a similar idea:

The critical text will accept the corrected plural destructions in Ether 13:14 as the original reading.

Summary: Maintain the plural destructions in Ether 13:14, the corrected reading in 𝓟; usage elsewhere in the text consistently assigns the meaning ‘destructive events’ to the plural destructions.

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

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