2 Nephi 1:23 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
shake off the chains [NULL >+ with 0|with 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] which ye are bound

Oliver Cowdery, as he was taking down Joseph Smith’s dictation for 2 Nephi 1:23, seems to have accidentally omitted the preposition with. Later he supralinearly inserted the with with heavier ink flow. Undoubtedly, the with is necessary, but the question here is whether the with should have been inserted at the beginning of the relative clause (“shake off the chains with which ye are bound”) or at the end of the relative clause (“shake off the chains which ye are bound with”). A relative clause can end in with, as in the following example:

However, when the relative clause refers to being bound, the preposition always appears at the beginning of the relative clause. Besides the case here in 2 Nephi 1:23, we have these three examples:

These examples support the placing of with at the beginning of the relative clause in 2 Nephi 1:23.

For this leaf of 𝓞, Oliver Cowdery’s scribal corrections were generally made with heavier ink flow, and all seem to be necessary. Although these corrections could be due to later editing, a more likely explanation is that they were made when Oliver read back the text to Joseph Smith. An earlier example is found in 2 Nephi 1:18, where Oliver supralinearly inserted are with heavier ink flow (see the discussion there). Another example is found later on near the end of this chapter when the object pronoun it was initially omitted:

All three cases of omission (of are in verse 18, with in verse 23, and it in verse 27) seem to be due to scribal error.

Summary: Maintain the corrected reading in 𝓞 for 2 Nephi 1:23 (“shake off the chains with which ye are bound”); in other relative clauses involving bound, the preposition with comes at the beginning rather than at the end of the relative clause (1 Nephi 7:17 and Alma 14:26).

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

References