Mosiah 28:2 Textual Variants

In standard English we expect the past-tense subjunctive form had following conditional modals like might and should, which are historically past-tense subjunctive forms. Joseph Smith, in his editing for the 1837 edition for this passage, made the change from the original present-tense hath to the past-tense had. Elsewhere the text uses only present-tense forms of the perfect auxiliary have when referring to the Lord’s having given the land as a land of inheritance:

• Enos 1:10
  • I will visit thy brethren according to their diligence in keeping my commandments I have given unto them this land and it is a holy land
• 3 Nephi 15:13
  • and behold this is the land of your inheritance and the Father hath given it unto you
• 3 Nephi 21:22
  • and they shall come in unto the covenant and be numbered among this the remnant of Jacob unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance
• Mormon 5:14
  • that the Father may bring about through his most Beloved his great and eternal purpose in the restoring the Jews or all the house of Israel to the land of their inheritance which the Lord their God hath given them

Of course, all of these examples are found in present-tense contexts, not past-tense conditional contexts. It is possible that in Mosiah 28:2 the hath in 𝓟 is an error for had. But since hath is strange yet not impossible, it seems more reasonable to assume that it is the original reading here in Mosiah 28:2. The critical text will assume as much and restore the difficult but earliest extant reading, “all the land which the Lord their God hath given them”. There is another example where the original text used the present-tense hath in a conditional context; in this instance, the hath was initially changed to had when Oliver Cowdery copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟:

• 1 Nephi 3:18
  • wherefore if my father should dwell in the land after that he [hath 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|had >+ hath 1] been commanded to flee out of the land behold he would also perish