1 Nephi 19:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
to be lifted up according to the words of Zenock

Here in 1 Nephi 19:10 all the textual sources (including 𝓞, which is extant here) read Zenock. But when we consider the textual variation for all five spellings of this name, we get considerable variation between Zenock and Zenoch:

In the example from Alma 33:15, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote Zenock, then crossed out the whole name and rewrote it inline as Zenoch (that is, immediately after the crossed-out Zenock ).

If we place the spellings of the name in the probable order of their dictation (that is, with the translation of the small plates coming last for the original manuscript), we get the following spelling variation in the earliest textual sources:

Alma 33:15 Zenock > Zenoch
Alma 34:7 Zenoch
Helaman 8:20
3 Nephi 10:16
1 Nephi 19:10 Zenock
  𝓟 1830
1 Nephi 19:10 Zenock Zenock
Alma 33:15 Zenock Zenock
Alma 34:7 Zenock Zenock
Helaman 8:20 Zenoc[k|h] Zenoch
3 Nephi 10:16 Zenock Zenock

In other words, the first occurrence of this name in 𝓞 was apparently in Alma 33:15, where Oliver Cowdery initially wrote Zenoch as Zenock (that is, ending in -ck). This first spelling was a phonetic one. Most probably, Joseph Smith spelled out the name for Oliver, who then corrected his spelling by crossing out all of Zenock and writing Zenoch inline, which means that the correction was an immediate one. Soon thereafter, in Alma 34:7, Oliver met the name a second time and spelled it correctly in 𝓞 as Zenoch.

Yet after these two first occurrences in 𝓞 of the name Zenoch, Oliver Cowdery eventually reverted to his original phonetic misspelling of the name as Zenock. In Helaman 8:20, 𝓞 is not extant, so we can’t be sure how Oliver spelled it there. But in 3 Nephi 10:16, where both the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of 𝓞, they both read Zenock, which suggests that 𝓞 itself read Zenock in 3 Nephi 10:16. This misspelling continued when Oliver wrote down the text in 𝓞 for 1 Nephi 19:10, which was apparently dictated after the book of Moroni was completed.

When Oliver Cowdery came to copying all these examples from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he consistently misspelled the name as Zenock. Nonetheless, in one case (Helaman 8:20), his word-final k in 𝓟 almost looks like an h, which led the 1830 typesetter to accidentally spell this one occurrence as Zenoch. But all the other occurrences are incorrectly spelled as Zenock in the 1830 edition.

The spelling with -ch is undoubtedly correct. First of all, the name is spelled just like the biblical name Enoch; except for the initial z of Zenoch, both names are identical. In fact, no biblical name or any other Book of Mormon name ends in the English spelling -ck, but there are dozens of biblical names ending in -c, -k, and -ch (such as Isaac, Melchizedek, and Melech), plus a number of Book of Mormon names (Amulek, Melek, Mulek, and Muloch ).

For two of the spellings for this name, Zenoch has alternated with Zenock several times in the publishing history of the text:

For the three other spellings, the incorrect Zenock has persisted in all the printed editions.

Ultimately the incorrect Zenock has completely replaced the correct Zenoch within the text proper. But one surprising finding is that the “Pronouncing Vocabulary” at the end of the 1920 edition and the “Pronouncing Guide” at the end of the 1981 edition list the name as Zenoch, not Zenock (the consistent spelling in those two LDS editions).

Summary: Restore the correct spelling Zenoch everywhere it occurs in the text (1 Nephi 19:10, Alma 33:15, Alma 34:7, Helaman 8:20, and 3 Nephi 10:16); Zenoch is spelled like Enoch.

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

References