2 Nephi 16:7 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
lo this [hath 1|has ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] touched thy lips

Isaiah 6:7 (King James Bible) lo this hath touched thy lips

Here the 1830 compositor set has rather than the original hath. This change definitely appears to be a typo since the 1830 compositor virtually always left hath in the text. Most instances of the occasional replacement of the third person singular ending -(e)th with -(e)s resulted from Joseph Smith’s editing for the 1837 edition. For further discussion, see inflectional endings in volume 3.

Summary: Restore the original hath in 2 Nephi 16:7 (“this hath touched thy lips”), the reading of the earliest text (the printer’s manuscript) as well as the corresponding King James text.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 2

References