2 Nephi 17:1 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
the son of [Remaliah 1ABCDGHKPQRST|Remalia EFIJLMNO]

Isaiah 7:1 (King James Bible) the son of Remaliah

Here in 2 Nephi 17:1, the h at the end of Remaliah was deleted in the 1849 LDS edition. The original source for the dropping of the final h was the 1837 edition, although not here in verse 1. In the four other cases where the word Remaliah appears in 2 Nephi 17–18 (Isaiah 7–8), the 1837 edition dropped the h:

For these four cases, the 1840 edition correctly restored the final h. But because the 1841 British edition used the 1837 edition as its copy-text, it continued the spelling without the final h. When the 1849 edition was set (from a copy of the 1841 edition), Orson Pratt (the editor for the 1849 edition) made sure the spelling for the first occurrence of Remaliah (found in 2 Nephi 17:1) agreed with the spelling of the four other occurrences (that is, as Remalia). This misspelling continued throughout the LDS editions until 1911.

We should also note that in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery spelled the first occurrence of Remaliah correctly but misspelled the following four occurrences as Remeliah. The second vowel is an unstressed schwa, which may have been the reason Oliver had difficulty spelling that vowel. Frequently in the original manuscript, the first spelling of a name is correct, but subsequent occurrences of the name may be misspelled. The example here in 2 Nephi 17:1 suggests that Joseph Smith, when he dictated the original text to Oliver Cowdery (the presumed scribe here in 𝓞), may have spelled out the first occurrence of Remaliah, to make sure that Oliver got it down correctly. Although the original manuscript is not extant here, the printer’s manuscript may very well have followed the spellings for Remaliah as they were originally written down in 𝓞.

Summary: The correct spelling for Remaliah agrees with the King James spelling: the unstressed second vowel is spelled a and the name ends in an h.

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

References