2 Nephi 15:12 Textual Variants

Isaiah 5:12 (King James Bible) but they regard not the work of the LORD neither consider the operation of his hands

There has been a sporadic tendency to change the number of the nouns in this verse. For instance, the 1953 RLDS edition has works rather than work. This particular change may be intentional since this edition has a footnote for this verse referring the reader to Psalm 28:5, which has the plural works instead of the singular work: “because they regard not the works of the LORD nor the operation of his hands”. It seems rather strange to let a minor difference in a parallel biblical passage dictate a change in an Isaiah quotation in the Book of Mormon. One other possibility is that the plural works was accidentally created in the copy-text for the 1953 edition, which then led the RLDS editors to subsequently find the Psalms passage that agreed with this mistaken plural. In any event, the correct Book of Mormon reading is the singular work.

The second change, which replaced the singular operation with the plural operations, appeared first in the 1874 RLDS edition. This change appears to be a typo and was removed in the third RLDS edition (1908).

Finally, we have an example from the printer’s manuscript. While copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery first wrote hand at the end of the line in the printer’s manuscript. He then inserted the s with slightly heavier ink flow after hand. (Oliver probably redipped his quill before inserting the plural s.) There is a natural tendency to write the singular hand in this context since in the Book of Mormon there are 25 occurrences of “the hand of the Lord” but only one of “the hands of the Lord” (in Alma 26:7, “they are in the hands of the Lord of the harvest”). In 2 Nephi 15:12, it seems reasonable to assume that the original manuscript (which is no longer extant here) read hands, identically to the King James reading.