2 Nephi 8:10 Textual Variants

Isaiah 51:10 (King James Bible) art thou not it which hath dried the sea the waters of the great deep

When referring to the drying up of bodies of water (including seas, brooks, rivers, floods, pools, and fountains), the King James Bible almost always translates the corresponding Hebrew verb for “to dry (up)” with the preposition up (25 times). Only once is the word translated without the up —namely, here in Isaiah 51:10.

Except for here in 2 Nephi 8:10, the Book of Mormon also consistently uses “to dry up” rather than “to dry”:

• 2 Nephi 7:2 (see Isaiah 50:2)
  • behold at my rebuke I dry up the sea I make the rivers a wilderness and their fish to stink because the waters are dried up
• 2 Nephi 15:13 (Isaiah 5:13)
  • and their honorable men are famished and their multitude dried up with thirst
• Helaman 12:16
  • and behold also if he saith unto the waters of the great deep be thou dried up and it is done

Even though the second example of “to dry up” in 2 Nephi 7:2 is within an Isaiah passage, the actual wording is not an Isaiah quotation since here the King James “there is no water” is replaced by “the waters are dried up”.

All of this textual evidence suggests that “hath dried up” is what Oliver Cowdery would have expected in 2 Nephi 8:10, not simply “hath dried” (that is, without the up). Thus Oliver initially wrote “dried up the sea” in the original manuscript, then immediately erased the up. The final text shows once more the close connection between the Isaiah quotations in the Book of Mormon and the King James text itself.