2 Nephi 7:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold at my rebuke I dry up the sea I make [the 0|their 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] rivers a wilderness and their fish to stink

Isaiah 50:2 (King James Bible)
behold at my rebuke I dry up the sea I make the rivers a wilderness their fish stinketh

While copying from 𝓞 to 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery replaced the determiner the with their, probably because of the proximity of the following “their fish”. A large fragment from 𝓞 (found in the Wilford Wood collection) shows that the original text read “the rivers”, in agreement with the King James text.

Sidney B. Sperry in Our Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, Utah: Stevens and Wallis, 1947), pages 174–175, explains this textual difference as the result of losing a final m consonant in the original Hebrew written text (where the m stands for the third person plural pronominal ending -fflam), thus leading to the standard (Masoretic) reading “the rivers” (and consequently the King James reading). Of course, given that 𝓞 is extant for this portion of the text and reads “the rivers”, there is no need for this argument. Other minor differences between the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon quotations (especially in this part of the text) are often due to scribal errors that occurred while copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟.

Summary: Restore “the rivers” in 2 Nephi 7:2, the reading of the original manuscript (and the King James Bible for Isaiah 50:2).

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

References