Helaman 13:31 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and in the days of your [poverity 1|poverty ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] ye cannot retain them

Here in ๐“Ÿ, Oliver Cowdery wrote poverty as poverity. Although normally Oliver wrote the word correctly (five times in ๐“ž and six times in ๐“Ÿ), he occasionally miswrote it (but only in ๐“Ÿ) as a word ending in -ity, here in Helaman 13:31 and two times earlier in the text:

For these other two instances, ๐“ž is extant and correctly reads as poverty. Thus Oliver is the one responsible for poverity; it does not represent some kind of archaic or dialectal form for the word poverty (nor is this form of the word found in the Oxford English Dictionary).

Summary: Maintain the word poverty throughout the text; in a few places, Oliver Cowdery wrote the word as poverity in ๐“Ÿ, but that form of the word is clearly innovative and not original to the Book of Mormon text.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References