Unique Textual Parallelsfrom the Oberlin Spalding Ms.and the Book of Mormon Part 4: (Textual Samples) Excerpts from the book of Alma in the 1830 Book of Mormon and from the 1885 RLDS edition of the Oberlin Solomon Spalding Manuscript |
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In the previous three parts of this presentation Bill A. Williams, jr.'s "Master Index" and an extract of its "non-biblical"words were examined. In Part 2: (Textual Parallels) the non-biblical words which are relatively unique to Spalding and the Book of Mormon were listed, along with their immediate contextual phraseology. Identification of further parallels in phraseology is determined by locating a certain shared word in both Spalding's work and in the Mormon text, and then examining the surrounding vocabulary for more instances of word-sharing between the two texts. After instances of exactly the same vocabulary and phraseology (or very similar, related words) have been located in both works, these occurrences can be underlined or highlighted in color to mark their locations in the two texts. The first graphic (above) shows page 403 of the 1830 
Book of Mormon. Bill Williams' extract of relatively unique words indicates that the words "burthen" and "encircled" are found on
this page, and that "regulations" is found a page and a half further into the same chapter. The fact that three of the relatively unique words
can be found clustered together in such a short textual block indicates the probability that pages 403-405 of the 1830 Book of Mormon
will contain more "Spaldingish" textual parallels.
Consulting Mr. Williams' word-lists, printed concordances, and searchable e-texts for the two works enables the researcher to quickly locate any other linguistic commonalities shared by this section of the Alma text and Spalding's story. An example of the results of such a search and page mark-up is shown in the graphic displayed on the left. Here that same page 403 has been marked with underlining and various colors to show its word overlap/similarities with Spalding. This mark-up was created electronically in an html editing program, but the same results could be obtained manually by using pens and the 1830 Alma text in hard-copy. The marked-up text serves as a visual demonstration of the vocabulary and phraseology parallels this part of the Book of Mormon shares with Spalding's preserved writings. As can be seen, even in this much reduced picture, page 403 of Alma shares a considerable amount of identical vocabulary (brown text) and phraseology (underlined brown text) with the Oberlin manuscript. Not every part of the Book of Mormon text is so densely packed with Spaldingish words and phrases as is page 403 in the 1830 Book of Alma, but those parts where the relatively unique words occur frequently, generally exhibit similar patterns of language parallels. Also, where Spaldingish words occur with this degree of density, thematic parallels with the Oberlin story will typically be found in abundance. The original html mark-ups created for this comparision of the 1830 Alma (Chapter XXIX) and the Oberlin Spalding Manuscript are available for closer examination. The Alma Sample is complete. A similar Spalding Sample (from Ms. Chapter XIV) is currently under construction. |