2 Nephi 7:11 Textual Variants

Isaiah 50:11 (King James Bible) behold all ye that kindle a fire

Here the earliest textual source (the printer’s manuscript) reads “all ye that kindleth fire”. The original manuscript is not extant for this verse. The Book of Mormon text varies in two ways from the corresponding Isaiah passage in the King James Bible. First, the verb kindle takes the ending -eth. The Book of Mormon text allows the biblical inflectional ending -(e)th to be used for plural subjects; thus there is nothing inherently wrong with “all ye that kindleth fire”. In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith removed the -eth here in 2 Nephi 7:11. (For a complete discussion of this kind of editing, see under infl al endings in volume 3.) Nonetheless, when quoting the King James Bible, the tendency in the Book of Mormon is to follow the inflectional ending of the King James text, even in cases of textual differences that end up creating nonstandard usage. Thus in the original text for 2 Nephi 7:2, we have “they dieth because of thirst”, which agrees with the dieth in Isaiah 50:2 (“and dieth for thirst”). A similar example involving a different nonstandard inflectional ending is found in 3 Nephi 12:23:

Here the Book of Mormon text has the subject pronoun ye instead of the singular thou, yet the Book of Mormon retains the rememberest of the King James text, despite the ungrammaticality of “ye rememberest”.

The second change here in 2 Nephi 7:11 involves the indefinite article a, which is found in the King James text but is missing in the Book of Mormon text. The corresponding Hebrew text has no indefinite article (since Hebrew has no indefinite article at all). So either translation (a fire or fire) is possible. Nonetheless, since Oliver Cowdery made so many copying errors in 2 Nephi 7, one wonders if he didn’t also accidentally drop out the indefinite article a here as well.

In the manuscripts there are a few clear examples where Oliver Cowdery neglected to write (at least initially) the indefinite article a:

• Jacob 4:1 (𝓞 not extant)
  • and I cannot write but [NULL > a 1|a ABCDEFIJLMNOQRT| GHKPS] little of my words
• Alma 11:15 (𝓞 not extant)
  • therefore a shiblon for [NULL > a 1| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] half a measure of barley
• Alma 42:2 (a is weakly inserted in 𝓞 but dropped in 𝓟)
  • and he placed at the east end of the garden of Eden cherubims and [NULL >– a 0| 1|a ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] flaming sword

Thus we have scribal evidence that Oliver could have dropped the indefinite article a before fire when he copied the text of 2 Nephi 7:11 into the printer’s manuscript. (For each of the three other examples listed above, there has been some persistent textual difficulty in maintaining the a. For discussion, see each passage.)

Although there are two changes in 2 Nephi 7:11 (the addition of the inflectional ending -eth and the loss of the indefinite article a), the most reasonable explanation for the different readings is that the Book of Mormon text involves a single misinterpretation: namely, when Joseph Smith dictated “kindle a fire”, Oliver Cowdery misinterpreted this phrase as the phonetically similar “kindleth fire”. Both readings have a schwa vowel /ß/, and the interdental voiceless fricative /h/ is phonetically very close to the following labiodental voiceless fricative /f /:

These are identical except for the intrusive (but acoustically weak) /h/ that Oliver may have perceived before the phonetically similar /f /, especially since he was so used to hearing the biblical -(e)th ending as Joseph dictated. Under this interpretation, there is no need to separately account for two differences in the text (the adding of -eth and the loss of the a); both result from a single mishearing. Further, this error would have occurred as Oliver wrote down Joseph’s dictation, not when he copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Even though 𝓞 is not extant here, it probably read identically to 𝓟. It is more difficult to imagine how Oliver, when copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, could have misread “kindle a fire” as “kindleth fire”.