Alma 11:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and the judge executed authority and sent forth officers that the man should be brought before him and [𝓒① NULL > 𝓒⑑ he 1|he ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] judgeth the man according to the law

Here scribe 2 of π“Ÿ seems to have omitted the subject pronoun he, which Oliver Cowdery supplied when he proofed π“Ÿ against π“ž. Clearly, the text here reads better with the he, so Oliver’s correction could have been due to conscious editing on his part. Although π“ž is not extant here, there is enough room between nearby surviving fragments for the he.

There is considerable evidence that scribe 2 of π“Ÿ sometimes omitted the subject pronoun he; except for the last example listed below, Oliver Cowdery was the one who supplied the he in π“Ÿ (as here in Alma 11:2):

For the last two examples, the 1830 edition was set from π“ž, thus arguing that π“ž itself had the pronoun and that scribe 2 was responsible for omitting it in π“Ÿ.

Summary: Accept Oliver Cowdery’s inserted he in Alma 11:2 as the reading of the original manuscript.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References