2 Nephi 7:6 Textual Variants

Isaiah 50:6 (King James Bible)
I gave my back to the smiters
and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair

All the extant Book of Mormon textual sources read smiter, but unfortunately the word smiter (or smiters, the reading of the King James Bible) is no longer extant in what remains of the original manuscript for 2 Nephi 7. Nearby extant portions of this page of 𝓞 show that Oliver Cowdery made quite a few copying errors in this part of the text (in fact, five accidental changes in the preceding four verses), so it is quite possible that the original manuscript here in verse 6 read smiters and that Oliver accidentally copied it into 𝓟 as smiter.

One of Oliver Cowdery’s most common errors was to add or delete the plural s. We have, for instance, the following examples from the long Isaiah quotation later on in 2 Nephi where Oliver initially copied an original plural as a singular but then caught his error and corrected the manuscript. In two cases, the initial error was in 𝓟; in one case, it was in 𝓞:

• 2 Nephi 13:14 (Isaiah 3:14 has ancients)
  • the Lord will enter into judgment with the [ancient > ancients 1|ancients ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of his people
• 2 Nephi 15:12 (Isaiah 5:12 has hands)
  • but they regard not the work of the Lord neither consider the operation of his [hand >+ hands 1|hands ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST]
• 2 Nephi 23:3 (Isaiah 13:3 has ones)
  • I have commanded my sanctified [one > ones 0|ones 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] I have also called my mighty ones

In certain cases, the Book of Mormon quotations of Isaiah seem to intentionally differ in number from the King James text. For an example of where the difference in number seems to be intentional, see the discussion regarding captive versus captives in 1 Nephi 21:24–25 (which quotes Isaiah 49:24–25). Here in 2 Nephi 7:6, on the other hand, there seems to be no motivation for changing smiters to smiter. Thus the chances are high that this change in number is accidental rather than intentional. In fact, the Hebrew text for Isaiah 50:6 definitely supports the plural smiters, which parallels the plural in the immediately following phrase, and can be more literally translated as follows:

my back I gave to ones smiting
and my cheeks to ones pulling out [hair]

Thus we may assume that in 2 Nephi 7:6 the original text (and probably the original manuscript) read smiters and that the change to the singular occurred as Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 to 𝓟.