2 Nephi 8:24 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for henceforth there shall no [more 1ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRST|harm J] come into thee the uncircumcised and [the 1ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRST| J] unclean

Isaiah 52:1 (King James Bible) for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean

The typesetter for the 1888 LDS large-print edition made two typos here as he set the type. When he tried to set “there shall no more come into thee”, he seems to have been distracted by the expression “may no harm come unto us” (common in prayer language), and thus he ended up setting “there shall no harm come into thee”. In addition, he removed the repeated the in the following conjunct of nouns, thus producing “the uncircumcised and unclean”. For additional examples of the tendency to drop the repeated the in conjuncts, see the discussion under 1 Nephi 17:22 and, more generally, under conjunctive repetition in volume 3.

The 1888 large-print edition was never used as a copy-text for any subsequent LDS edition; thus these two errors are limited to that edition. The last two verses here in 2 Nephi 8 (verses 24 and 25) are also quoted in 3 Nephi 20:36–37, but there without any significant variation from the King James reading.

Summary: Ignore in 2 Nephi 8:24 the two typos that appear in the 1888 LDS edition (“there shall no harm come into thee” and “the uncircumcised and unclean”); the earliest Book of Mormon text for this verse agrees fully with the corresponding King James text (in Isaiah 52:1).

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

References