Isaiah 50:1 (King James Bible) and for your transgressions is your mother put away
Although 𝓞 is not fully extant here, the part that remains suggests that Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “for your transgressions your mother put away”—that is, without the verb is. The transcript of 𝓞 for this portion reads as follows (lines 18–19 on page 59 of 𝓞):
( )r your iniqu(i e)s have ye sold yourselves & fo(r ) BEHOLD FO TI YOUR TRANSGRESSIONS
( )IS
( ) Mother ^ put away wherefore when I came there was n(o )
^ YOUR MAN WHEN I CALLED
At this point in taking down Joseph Smith’s dictation, Oliver finished writing one line of text and started writing a new line. This shift may have distracted him so that he ended up omitting the is. Somewhat later Oliver first corrected his error by supralinearly inserting the is after the subject your mother: “for your transgressions your mother is put away”. This first correction is in heavier ink flow but appears to be based on Oliver’s own idea of where the is belongs (which is the expected word order in modern English). Later, with very heavy ink flow (marked in the variant specification as ++), he crossed out this first is and (presumably) inserted the is in the correct place, before the your that would have been at the beginning of the line. (The different levels of ink flow for the first is and its subsequent crossout can be clearly viewed in color photographs of this fragment of 𝓞; the black-and-white ultraviolet photographs show little difference in the level of ink flow.) As can be seen from the transcript, the first part of the line is no longer extant. Presumably the second is was supralinearly inserted before the your or perhaps in the margin (directly in front of the your). Based on the heavy crossout of the first is, the second inserted is would have been written with the same heavy ink flow.
Several alternatives to this explanation are possible. One is that in the original Book of Mormon text the is was actually missing. Elsewhere in the Isaiah quotations, the italicized is of the King James Bible is sometimes missing in the earliest Book of Mormon text (for examples and discussion, see 2 Nephi 13:14). Of all the examples where the is is omitted in the original Book of Mormon text, the corresponding King James is is italicized. (Of course, not all italicized is’s are omitted in the Book of Mormon text.) For this particular example (2 Nephi 7:1), the corresponding is in the King James text (Isaiah 50:1) is not italicized. Thus the original (apparent) loss of the is here in 2 Nephi 7:1 seems to be accidental rather than intended.
Another possibility is that the first correction represents the original text but that the second correction was the result of consulting a King James Bible, which would have shown that the is should come before the subject your mother. The problem with this proposal is that there is no clear manuscript evidence elsewhere that an actual copy of the King James Bible was consulted in producing 𝓞 or in copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Here in 2 Nephi 7:1, the second correction in 𝓞 clearly occurred before 𝓞 was copied into 𝓟 since 𝓟 itself has the final reading of 𝓞 (the same reading as the King James text) and without any correction. The first time we can see evidence of anyone actually consulting a King James Bible is when the printer’s manuscript was in the hands of the 1830 compositor. (For the first possible example of the compositor using his Bible to correct the text, see 1 Nephi 20:8; for a clear example of such usage, see the insertion of did excel in 2 Nephi 20:10.) The most reasonable explanation for the corrections in 𝓞 is that Oliver Cowdery’s first correction was based on his own idea of where the is should go, while the second correction occurred when Oliver checked the text with Joseph Smith to make sure the verb was in the right place. On one other occasion, Oliver made, it would seem, another independent attempt at correcting an Isaiah quotation—and there he put the verb in the wrong place:
The level of ink flow for the correction here looks much like Oliver’s first correction in 2 Nephi 7:1. For evidence that Oliver inserted the say in the wrong place in 1 Nephi 21:20, see the discussion there.
Summary: Maintain the placement of is right before your mother in 2 Nephi 7:1; Oliver Cowdery’s final corrected reading in 𝓞 was copied into 𝓟 without further alteration and is identical to the word order found in Isaiah 50:1 of the King James Bible.