their territory. One person present even attempts to kill Ammon while he is unconscious, and others suggest that Ammon is not a human Nephite, but instead somehow a kind of monster. Realizing that the people are angry at the sight of the scene, rather than finding joy in the miracle as she had, Abish despairs and becomes "exceedingly sorrowful, even unto tears". Amid the people's argument about the condition of the king, queen, and their household, Abish goes to the queen and tries to lift her from the ground. As soon as Abish touches her, the queen wakes, joyfully proclaims her conversion to Christ, and speaks in tongues. The queen then takes Lamoni's hand, waking him in a similar manner, and he calms the crowd, tells them what he has experienced, and begins to teach them about God. As a result, many more people are converted, and this begins a chain of conversions among the Lamanites. Abish's and the Lamanite queen's actions thereby become fundamental to the fulfillment of the Book of Mormon story's earlier promise that Lamanites would adopt Christianity and fulfill God's covenant with Lehi. After raising the Lamanite queen, Abish vanishes from the narrative, and she never reappears in the Book of Mormon. Textual history In the officially-published Latter-day Saint edition of the Book of Mormon, when Abish raises the Lamanite queen from the ground, the queen is described as having "clasped her hands" after proclaiming her conversion. However, in the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon (a transcribed copy of the original transcription, used by the typesetter for the 1830 edition), the same passage states that the queen "clapped her hands". The textual variant was introduced with the 1830 edition. In the manuscript, Oliver Cowdery misspelled "clapped" as "claped", with a single p, and Royal Skousen hypothesizes the typesetter misread this as "clasped", leading to the variant. The 1908 edition published by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now called Community of Christ) restored "clapped her hands" to the text. Interpretation Women and gender Nicholas Frederick and Joseph Spencer write that the narrative Abish appears in "arguably contain[s] the only strong female characters of any substance in the whole" Book of Mormon. Outside of biblical quotations, the affirmative singular woman only appears four times in the Book of Mormon, all within the interaction between Abish and the Lamanite queen; this highlights