Moroni 8:27 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold the pride of this nation or the [ pride >+ people 1|people ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of the Nephites hath proved their destruction except they should repent

Here in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “or the pride of the Nephites”; then later with somewhat heavier ink flow he crossed out pride and sublinearly wrote people (the correction occurs in the last line of text on the manuscript page). This correction probably occurred when Oliver proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞.

From a semantic point of view, either reading works. But the corrected text is characteristic of the Book of Mormon. Elsewhere in the text, we find similar uses of the corrective or involving the names of peoples:

While none of these other correcting or ’s use the phrase “the people of the Nephites”, this noun phrase occurs fairly often in the text, although not as often as “the people of Nephi” (for some statistics, see under Alma 45:13). The critical text will follow the corrected reading in 𝓟 for Moroni 8:27, “the pride of this nation or the people of the Nephites”.

Summary: Accept in Moroni 8:27 Oliver Cowdery’s correction in 𝓟 of pride to people (thus “the pride of this nation or the people of the Nephites”).

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

References