1 Nephi 17:14 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
yea and the Lord said also that after ye have [ariven 0|ariven >js arived 1|arrived ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] [to 01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|in RT] the promised land …

In the original text, the past participle for arrive is typically arriven (five out of six times), an analogical form derived from the verb drive and its past participle driven. In the simple past, however, we do not find arrove (based on drove), only the standard arrived (in Mosiah 22:13, Mosiah 24:25, and Alma 56:15). Eventually all occurrences of arriven were replaced by the standard arrived in both the LDS and RLDS texts:

The example in Alma 17:13 shows the tendency of Oliver Cowdery, when copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, to initially write the standard arrived. One then wonders if the example of arrived in Mosiah 21:26 might have actually been arriven in the original text (and perhaps in 𝓞 itself, which is not extant here). In the critical text, we follow the earliest textual sources, thus restoring five occurrences of arriven but leaving arrived in Mosiah 21:26. For further discussion, see past participle in volume 3.

Another aspect of the editing has been to change the preposition that occurs with the verb arrive. Out of a total of 17 examples, 12 have prepositional phrase complements, and of these 7 had their preposition changed from to to either in or at in the 1920 LDS edition:

It is immediately obvious that this 1920 editing was inconsistent. When the original text refers to arriving “to a land”, the 1920 edition usually changed the preposition to to in (four times), which is what we expect in modern English (and which is actually found in the earliest text at Mosiah 22:13). But in two cases (1 Nephi 18:23 and Alma 52:18), the preposition to was changed to at, which seems strange when referring to lands. Normally, we get at when referring to cities (originally in Alma 56:15 and in the 1920 editing of Alma 58:27). Of course, the original text itself is not consistent with respect to the choice of preposition since one can arrive “at a city” (Alma 56:15) as well as “to a city” (Alma 58:27) or one can arrive “in a land” (Mosiah 22:13) as well as “to a land” (six times). The critical text will in each case follow the reading of the earliest textual sources.

Summary: Maintain the past participial form arriven in the five places where the earliest textual sources support it; also maintain the original phraseology “arrive to” in the seven places where it is found in the earliest text.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 1

References