Mosiah 27:29 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
my soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and [ 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMOPQRST|the N] bonds of iniquity

Here the earliest text is missing the repeated definite article the before the second conjunct in “from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity”. The 1906 LDS large-print edition supplied the the; but since this edition never served as a copytext, the repeated the in this conjunct was not copied into any subsequent LDS edition. Elsewhere, references to “the gall of bitterness and (the) bonds of iniquity” repeat the definite article the:

All three of these examples also repeat the preposition in, which means that these three cases are not exactly equivalent to Mosiah 27:29, which repeats neither the definite article the nor the preposition from (“from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity”). The three other examples also more closely follow the biblical parallel:

The repeated preposition in is in italics in the King James text, which means that the translators recognized that the repeated preposition is not in the original Greek of Acts 8:23. (In addition, the biblical text here has the singular bond rather than the plural bonds. The Book of Mormon consistently uses the plural phrases “the bonds of iniquity” and “the bands of iniquity” rather than the singular “the bond of iniquity” or “the band of iniquity”. See the discussion under Mosiah 23:12–13.) In any event, the preposition in and the definite article the are repeated in the biblical text and in the three Book of Mormon passages that follow it closely. The fact that both the preposition from and the article the are not repeated in Mosiah 27:29 suggests that the reading there is more paraphrastic. Although it is possible that a repeated the could have been lost in the early transmission of the text, the reading without the repetition will work and the critical text will therefore accept it. For additional discussion, see under conjunctive repetition in volume 3.

Summary: Accept in Mosiah 27:29 the earliest reading “my soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity”—that is, without any repetition of either the preposition from or the definite article the before “bonds of iniquity”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References