\n| 3 Nephi 19 \u2013 Moroni 10<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n | 27<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n For the first and the fourth book, about 75 percent of the original manuscript is extant, and we get almost 100 new changes for both of these books. For the fifth book, about 25 percent of the original manuscript is extant, and we get a proportional amount of new changes. For the three other books of volume 4, we have hardly anything of the original manuscript, and it shows. What this really means is that by human endeavor we aren\u2019t going to recover as much of the original text for these parts of the text. It makes a real difference when we don\u2019t have the original manuscript.<\/p>\n A second numerical count that is quite important is that the Yale edition introduces 241 new readings that make a difference in meaning. By the phrase \u201cdifference in meaning\u201d I mean that if we translate the reading into another language there will be a change in the words \u2013 that is, there will be some word difference, no matter what the language. For each of these 241 readings, the change makes a difference in meaning, not just in phraseology.<\/p>\n A good example of this kind of meaning change is found in 1 Nephi 12:18, which reads as follows in the original manuscript: \u201cand a great and a terrible gulf divideth them \/ yea even the sword<\/strong> of the justice of the Eternal God\u201d. But Oliver Cowdery miscopied this into the printer\u2019s manuscript as \u201cyea even the word<\/strong> of the justice of the Eternal God\u201d. In other words, Oliver replaced sword <\/em>with word. <\/em>And that\u2019s the reading that\u2019s been retained in the text ever since. Yet when we look at the rest of the Book of Mormon, we discover that there are seven references to \u201cthe sword of God\u2019s justice\u201d but no examples of \u201cthe word of God\u2019s justice\u201d:<\/p>\nAlma 26:19\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the sword of his justice<\/p>\n Alma 60:29\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the sword of justice<\/p>\n Helaman 13:5\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the sword of justice (2 times)<\/p>\n 3 Nephi 20:20\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the sword of my justice<\/p>\n 3 Nephi 29:4\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the sword of his justice<\/p>\n Ether 8:23\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the sword of the justice of the Eternal God<\/p>\n In particular, note that the example in Ether 8:23 (\u201cthe sword of the justice of the Eternal God\u201d) is identical to the original reading in 1 Nephi 12:18. In considering the translation of this change in words, I know of no language where sword <\/em>and word <\/em>are the same word. Every translation is going to end up making the change here. This is what I mean then by a change in meaning. Of course, this change doesn\u2019t make a huge difference in meaning. To be sure, one can accept a reference to God\u2019s justice being enacted by his word. But that isn\u2019t what the text originally read in 1 Nephi 12:18. It read sword<\/em>.<\/p>\nSome people have asked whether any textual restoration ever alters doctrine \u2013 and the answer is, no. Whenever a change involves doctrine, we find that the original reading has the correct doctrine. An example of this is found in Alma 39:13, where Alma is talking to his son Corianton and tells him to go back to the Zoramites and, in the original manuscript, \u201cacknowledge your faults and repair<\/strong> that wrong which ye have done\u201d. When Oliver Cowdery finished writing this page in the original manuscript, he accidentally dropped some ink on the page. And on the letter p<\/em> in repair <\/em>a drop of ink fell right on top of the ascender for the p, <\/em>which ended up making the p <\/em>look like it\u2019s been crossed. In fact, the p<\/em> ends up looking like a t<\/em>. Moreover, Oliver\u2019s r<\/em>\u2019s and n<\/em>\u2019s often look alike, so when Oliver came to copy this part of the text into the printer\u2019s manuscript, he copied it as \u201cacknowledge your faults and retain<\/strong> that wrong which ye have done\u201d. That reading doesn\u2019t quite work, and so the 1920 LDS committee decided to just remove the word retain <\/em>because it didn\u2019t make any sense. Thus they ended up having Alma say to Corianton that he should go back and \u201cacknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done\u201d. In other words, \u201cgo back and say you\u2019re sorry\u201d. But the need for Corianton to repair his wrong had now been removed from this passage.<\/p>\nWhen we look at other parts of the Book of Mormon text, we indeed find that when people confess their sins, they do everything they can to repair the wrongs or the injuries they have done. Here\u2019s one from Mosiah 27:35: \u201czealously striving to repair<\/strong> all the injuries which they had done to the church \/ confessing<\/strong> all their sins\u201d. And here\u2019s one from Helaman 5:17: \u201cthey came forth and did confess<\/strong> their sins … and immediately returned to the Nephites to endeavor to repair<\/strong> unto them the wrongs which they had done\u201d. So by putting back the word repair<\/em> in Alma 39:13, the correct doctrine of repentance is restored. The doctrine hasn\u2019t been changed.<\/p>\nIn the Yale edition you will also find 15 new readings for Book of Mormon names. For me, the most interesting one is that the actual name for the surviving son of king Zedekiah was Muloch, <\/em>not Mulek, <\/em>the implication being that Zedekiah named this son after the pagan god Moloch that they sacrificed children to, thus suggesting a rather ominous aspect to king Zedekiah\u2019s character.<\/p>\nConjectural Emendations in the Text<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI pointed out above that the Yale edition has 113 new conjectural emendations, and some people have been critical of this. But I think it\u2019s worth noting that in every printed edition of the Book of Mormon there are numerous readings that are the result of conjectural emendation. A conjecture is introduced into the text whenever a typesetter, a scribe, or an editor doesn\u2019t like the particular reading of his copytext and doesn\u2019t like any of the other readings that might have appeared in earlier editions or in the manuscripts, and so he decides on a new reading. That\u2019s a conjecture. (Here I exclude emendations involving grammatical editing.)<\/p>\n What we find in the history of the Book of Mormon text is that conjectures have been quite common, and in many instances they are necessary. Sometimes the original manuscript has such a bad reading that no one is going to accept it. Consider, for instance, the reading of the original manuscript in 1 Nephi 7:5: \u201cthe Lord did soften the heart of Ishmael and also his hole hole<\/strong>\u201d. That\u2019s the way the original manuscript reads, hole hole. <\/em>In fact, this is the corrected reading in the original manuscript, which means that that is what that scribe, probably one of the Whitmers, finally decided on. When Oliver Cowdery copied this passage into the printer\u2019s manuscript, he just couldn\u2019t accept the reading of the original manuscript. He decided that hole hole <\/em>was household<\/em>, thus writing in the printer\u2019s manuscript \u201cthe Lord did soften the heart of Ishmael and also his household<\/strong>\u201d. My conjecture, on the other hand, is that the original text here actually read \u201cthe Lord did soften the heart of Ishmael and also his whole household<\/strong>\u201d. That would explain why the original manuscript ended up having two instances of hole, <\/em>one standing for whole<\/em>, the other for the hold<\/em> of household.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>In support of this reading, consider the rest of the text of the Book of Mormon: whenever a passage refers to a patriarch and his household, the text always refers to his entire household. In corresponding contexts, we have either \u201call his household\u201d or \u201chis whole household\u201d (the latter reading occurs in Alma 22:23). The ultimate point here is that in 1 Nephi 7:5 one can\u2019t accept the reading of the original manuscript, hole hole.<\/em> There must be a conjecture here, either household<\/em> or whole household <\/em>(or perhaps some other possibility). <\/em>For that phrase, \u00a0every text of the Book of Mormon is going to have to read as some kind of conjecture.<\/p>\nWhen we look at the current standard text, we find that there are 654 conjectured readings. On the other hand, there are 354 in the Yale edition. It turns out that the Yale edition accepts a lot of difficult readings that have otherwise been removed over time from the standard text. In volume 4 of the critical text, I considered 1,346 cases of conjectural emendation. About one fourth of them (26 percent) were accepted. It\u2019s also worth noting that when we compare the Yale edition with the current standard text there are 187 conjectures that both texts agree on. So there is considerable agreement in conjectures between the two texts in addition to the differences.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also instructive to consider the individuals who have had the most influence in introducing conjectural emendations into the text. Oliver Cowdery, the main scribe for both manuscripts, made 131 conjectures, of which the Yale edition accepts about 30 percent. For instance, in 1 Nephi 7:1 the original manuscript reads: \u201cthat his sons should take daughters to wife that might raise up seed\u201d. When Oliver copied this into the printer\u2019s manuscript, he added the pronoun they, <\/em>thus \u201cthat his sons should take daughters to wife that they<\/strong> might raise up seed\u201d. In volume 4 of the critical text, I provide the arguments for why I think the pronoun they<\/em> was in the original text. By the way, you won\u2019t find that discussion in the Yale edition, although the change is listed in the appendix. The arguments are all in volume 4 of the critical text.<\/p>\nOn the other hand, here is one of Oliver Cowdery\u2019s conjectural emendations that I think he got wrong. In 1 Nephi 13:24 the original manuscript reads \u201cit contained the fullness of the gospel of the Land<\/strong>\u201d, which seems impossible. When Oliver copied this passage into the printer\u2019s manuscript, he changed \u201cthe gospel of the Land<\/strong>\u201d to \u201cthe gospel of the Lord<\/strong>\u201d. He obviously couldn\u2019t accept the word land <\/em>here, and he thought Land <\/em>looked like Lord<\/em>. In actuality, the reading of the original text was very likely \u201cthe gospel of the Lamb<\/strong>\u201d. The original scribe apparently misheard lamb <\/em>as land <\/em>but without the d <\/em>at the end being pronounced, which he then wrote as Land<\/em> in the original manuscript. At every other place in the Book of Mormon (namely, in four places in 1 Nephi 13), the text consistently reads \u201cthe gospel of the Lamb<\/strong>\u201d, never \u201cthe gospel of the Lord<\/strong>\u201d. Of course, \u201cthe gospel of the Lord\u201d is possible, but that isn\u2019t the way the Book of Mormon expresses it.<\/p>\nJohn Gilbert, the typesetter for the 1830 edition, made a total of 167 conjectures, of which a large percentage, 47 percent, are accepted in the Yale edition. The reason so many are accepted is that in many cases Gilbert was confronted with a manuscript reading that was unacceptable yet it was easy enough to figure out the correct reading. That\u2019s why the percentage of acceptance is so high for him. Here\u2019s an example from 1 Nephi 17:48 where I think he was right. His manuscript copy read \u201cand whoso shall lay their hands upon me shall wither even as a dried weed<\/strong>\u201d. Gilbert interpreted the word weed <\/em>as an error for reed, <\/em>and thus he set the text as \u201ceven as a dried reed<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\nOn the other hand, in Alma 5:35 Gilbert replaced the verb put <\/em>with hewn, <\/em>giving \u201cand ye shall not be hewn<\/strong> down and cast into the fire\u201d rather than \u201cand ye shall not be put<\/strong> down and cast into the fire\u201d, the reading of the printer\u2019s manuscript. Normally the Book of Mormon text refers to people being hewn down and cast into the fire. Even so, the occurrence of put down<\/em> was more likely an error for the visually similar cut down<\/em>, so that the original text (and original manuscript, not extant here) probably read \u201cand ye shall not be cut<\/strong> down and cast into the fire\u201d. The word cut <\/em>was likely written with a capital C <\/em>in the original manuscript, with the result that the scribe who copied the text into the printer\u2019s manuscript misread the capital C <\/em>as a capital P, <\/em>thus introducing put <\/em>as the verb.<\/p>\nJoseph Smith made a large number of conjectures (198 of them) in his editing for the second edition of the Book of Mormon (published in 1837). For the third edition (published in 1840), he made 19 more conjectures. In most of these cases, Joseph was simply trying to remove difficult readings from the text. Many of these original, difficult readings are, nonetheless, acceptable. (Only about 16 percent of Joseph Smith\u2019s 1837 conjectures are accepted \u2013 and even less for the 1840 conjectures, about 11 percent.) I suspect Joseph often thought \u201cThat reading is difficult for people to understand, so let\u2019s change it to this.\u201d For instance, in Ether 3:9 there is a change in the 1837 edition where Joseph correctly inserted the word not, <\/em>changing \u201cfor were it so \/ ye could not have seen my finger\u201d to \u201cfor were it not<\/strong> so \/ ye could not have seen my finger\u201d. On the other hand, in Mosiah 21:28 Joseph Smith replaced king Benjamin <\/em>with king Mosiah <\/em>in order to deal with a perceived problem in chronology. I think, in this case, Joseph\u2019s emendation was unnecessary. You can read the arguments in volume 4.<\/p>\nWe can also consider the number of conjectures in the more significant editions since 1840 and identify how many of them are accepted in the Yale edition:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| 1849<\/td>\n | Orson Pratt<\/td>\n | 8<\/td>\n | 2<\/td>\n | 25%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| 1852<\/td>\n | Franklin and Samuel Richards<\/td>\n | 17<\/td>\n | 5<\/td>\n | 29%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| 1879<\/td>\n | Orson Pratt<\/td>\n | 9<\/td>\n | 4<\/td>\n | 44%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| 1905-11<\/td>\n | German Ellsworth<\/td>\n | 8<\/td>\n | 2<\/td>\n | 25%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| 1920<\/td>\n | James E. Talmage<\/td>\n | 130<\/td>\n | 22<\/td>\n | 17%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| 1981<\/td>\n | scriptures committee<\/td>\n | 10<\/td>\n | 4<\/td>\n | 40%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Note in particular the high number of conjectural emendations in the 1920 LDS edition, largely the result of James E. Talmage\u2019s determination to emend difficult readings in the text. The large majority of these emendations were unnecessary, although they made the text easier to read. Only about one conjectured reading out of six in the 1920 edition is accepted in the Yale edition.<\/p>\n A number of LDS scriptural scholars have independently made suggested emendations prior to the critical text project. In many respects, these are good suggestions, and a rather high percentage, 48 percent, have been accepted:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| Paul Cheesman<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Stan Larson<\/td>\n | 7<\/td>\n | 3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Hugh Nibley<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| W. Cleon Skousen<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n | 1<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Sidney B. Sperry<\/td>\n | 3<\/td>\n | 3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| John Tvedtnes<\/td>\n | 10<\/td>\n | 2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n In my work as editor of the critical text project, I have proposed 401 conjectures, 103 of which I have accepted \u2013 or 26 percent (about one reading out of four).<\/p>\n Of particular help in this project have been people who have independently sent me suggestions for change or identified readings that seemed strange in some way. In all, 42 individuals have corresponded with me and have recommended 173 changes, of which 36 \u2013 or 21 percent (about one out of five) \u2013 have been accepted. Thus the Yale edition reflects a tremendous amount of input from careful readers of the text. Here I list eight people who basically went through the whole text of the Book of Mormon looking for readings that seemed problematic: David Calabro, Joanne Case, Lyle Fletcher, Ross Geddes, Heather Hardy, Paul Huntzinger, Brent Kerby, and Greg Wright. You will find their suggestions discussed in volume 4, and in many instances their suggested changes made it into the Yale text.<\/p>\n Next<\/strong><\/em>: Word for Word Control over the Original Text<\/em><\/p>\nRoyal Skousen is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project and professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University. The first two parts of this series are here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now let us turn to the actual list of the 719 significant textual changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":14661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/skousen23.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/136"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14660"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14672,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14660\/revisions\/14672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} | | |
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