Jacob 1:14 Textual Variants

The 1830 typesetter misinterpreted the syntax in this passage. He placed a period after “but I shall call them Lamanites” and then conjoined the following two noun phrases to produce the following single sentence: “They that seek to destroy the people of Nephi, and they which are friendly to Nephi, I shall call Nephites” (cited here using the 1830 accidentals). Obviously, the Nephites did not seek to destroy the people of Nephi! The original text for this passage clearly intends the first noun phrase to act as an appositive for the preceding Lamanites:

• Jacob 1:14
  • but I shall call them Lamanites 
    they that seek to destroy the people of Nephi
    and they which are friendly to Nephi I shall call Nephites

The correct interpretation thus forms a chiastic structure. Note, in particular, the parallelism of the second and third lines: each relative clause is headed by the pronoun they.

David Calabro points out (personal communication) that this incorrect 1830 interpretation of the syntax may have been the motivation for Joseph Smith’s decision to edit Jacob 1:14 for the 1837 edition. In the printer’s manuscript, Joseph deleted the redundant pronoun they from the appositive clause “they that seek to destroy the people of Nephi”, thus forcing the relative pronoun that to directly refer to the preceding Lamanites. The 1837 typesetter also placed a semicolon after the relative clause “that seek to destroy the people of Nephi”, thus clearly separating that relative clause from the following “and they which are friendly to Nephi”. The 1849 LDS edition replaced the semicolon with a comma, which by then had become permissible since the preceding they had been earlier deleted (in the 1837 edition).

The original reading is perfectly understandable, providing the punctuation is appropriate. The use of the they seems quite acceptable; in fact, the parallelism with the following line seems to require it. The critical text will therefore restore the they to the text in Jacob 1:14.

Other examples of Joseph Smith editing out a redundant pronoun they include the following:

• Mosiah 18:17
  • and it came to pass that whosoever was baptized by the power and authority of God [they >js NULL 1|they A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] was added to his church
• Alma 25:6
  • for many of them after having suffered much loss and so many afflictions [they 0A|they >js NULL 1| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] began to be stirred up in remembrance of the words which Aaron and his brethren had preached to them in their land

In these two examples, the redundant they is some distance away from its earlier (pronominal) referent.