Heather Hardy suggests (personal communication, 9 February 2009) that the language here should read “the Messiah will set his hand again the second time to recover them”, not “the Messiah will set himself the second time to recover them”. The prophet being referred to here in 2 Nephi 6:14 is Isaiah, and the language is a paraphrase of Isaiah 11:11, which is directly quoted in 2 Nephi 21:11 and paraphrased three more times in the Book of Mormon. And in each of the other instances, the phraseology is “set his hand” (or “set my hand”), not “set himself ” (or “set myself ”):
Hardy argues that his hand is visually similar to himself, especially if his hand was separated at the end of a manuscript line in 𝓞 (that is, with his ending the line and hand beginning the next line). 𝓞 is not extant here. If himself is an error, it looks like a visual misreading, which also allows for the possibility that Joseph Smith himself misread his hand as himself when he dictated the text.
Yet there are no examples of visual misreading quite like this one. The his and him are, of course, very similar, but hand and self are less so. Moreover, the current reading will work, although there are no other instances in the Book of Mormon of the phraseology “to set one’s self to do something”. As noted by Hardy, it should be kept in mind that the citation here in 2 Nephi 6:14 is paraphrastic, thus permitting himself rather than the expected his hand. And there are examples of the phrase “to set oneself to do something” in the King James Bible:
The Oxford English Dictionary, to be sure, recognizes the phrase “to set oneself to do something” (listed under definition 113b for the verb set ). The critical text will therefore retain the reading here in 2 Nephi 6:14, but with the understanding that himself could be an error for his hand.
Summary: Maintain in 2 Nephi 6:14 the word himself in “the Messiah will set himself again the second time to recover them”, the reading of the earliest text; nonetheless, this reading could be an error for “the Messiah will set his hand again the second time to recover them”, the reading in Isaiah 11:11 and the four times when it is cited or paraphrased in the Book of Mormon.
2 Nephi 8:16, page 601
In comparing the Book of Mormon text against the King James text, one sometimes finds evidence that the Book of Mormon agrees more closely with the original 1611 version of the King James Bible than with the current King James version. For instance, here in 2 Nephi 8:16, the original Book of Mormon version reads without a repeated I:
For the second line, the current King James version (in Isaiah 51:16) reads “and I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand”, but the original 1611 version read “and have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand”. Although the finite verb form in the original Book of Mormon text differs (reading hath rather than have), the Book of Mormon agrees with the 1611 version by lacking the subject pronoun I. Here in volume 4, I will not take up this important question of whether the original Book of Mormon text is closer to the actual 1611 King James text or to the current King James version. But it will be considered in detail in volume 3 in the section that deals with the differences between the Book of Mormon and the King James texts. In certain instances, this comparative analysis will result in some minor revision in the textual analyses I have made of biblical quotations here in volume 4 (but without revising the original reading of the Book of Mormon text).
2 Nephi 9:2, page 609, line –6
At the end of this write-up (near the bottom of page 609), in referring to 3 Nephi 20:33 and 3 Nephi 20:46, I note that the reference to the Jews returning to their land of inheritance (in the singular) is appropriate. The reason for this is because Jerusalem occurs in the same clause as land. In 2 Nephi 25:11, cited at the bottom of the previous page, Jerusalem occurs with the singular land in the first part of the citation (“possess the land of Jerusalem”), but then later, in a separate clause, the text refers to the Jews as being “restored to the lands of their inheritance”.