1 Nephi 20:13 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
mine hand hath also laid the foundation of the earth and my right hand hath spanned the heavens and I [called 0A|called >js call 1|call BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] unto them and they stand up together

Isaiah 48:13 (King James Bible)

mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth and my right hand hath spanned the heavens when I call unto them they stand up together

In order to remove the tense inconsistency (the past-tense called versus the present-tense stand ), Joseph Smith deleted the past-tense -ed ending for the 1837 edition, thus making the text conform to the King James Bible (at least with respect to the tense). It is quite possible that the adding of the -ed to the verb call was an error due to the two immediately preceding past participial verb forms (“hath also laid” and “hath spanned”).

This chapter has one other case of tense mixture (namely, in 1 Nephi 20:4). Another example is found in the next chapter (1 Nephi 21:21). The Book of Mormon text seems to allow such, more so than the King James Bible does. The critical text will maintain the mixtures except in those cases where there is specific evidence that the mixture is due to error in transmission.

Summary: Restore the original past-tense called in 1 Nephi 20:13, even though it does result in a mixture in tense; such mixtures seem to be intended in the Book of Mormon quotations from Isaiah (for other examples, see 1 Nephi 20:4 and 1 Nephi 21:21).

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

References