1 Nephi 20:16 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
I have not spoken in secret [ 01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|; RT] from the beginning [ 01|; ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|, RT] from the time that it was declared have I spoken

Isaiah 48:16 (King James Bible, current punctuation included)

I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I:

The 1920 LDS edition changed the punctuation in this verse so that the phrase “from the beginning” would be directly associated with the phrase “from the time that it was declared” in the following clause. But this change in punctuation works only in terms of the word order in the King James translation. In the original Hebrew, the two prepositional phrases “from the beginning” and “from the time” are not adjacent. A literal word-for-word translation of the Hebrew (but using the words of the King James Bible) shows that “from the beginning” must belong in the first clause. In the following, hyphens are used to connect groups of English words that represent single words in Hebrew:

not from–the–beginning in–secret have–I–spoken from–the–time that–it–was there I

Thus the punctuation found in the King James Bible accurately represents the clausal break between the two clauses.

Summary: Restore in 1 Nephi 20:16 the original punctuation, a semicolon after “from the beginning” (as found in pre-1920 LDS editions, all RLDS editions, and the King James Bible).

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

References