2 Nephi 17:23 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and it shall come to pass in that day every place shall be where there were a thousand vines [that >jg at 1|at ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] a thousand silverlings

Isaiah 7:23 (King James Bible) and it shall come to pass in that day that every place shall be where there were a thousand vines at a thousand silverlings

The original reading of the printer’s manuscript (“that a thousand silverlings”) seems impossible. The 1830 compositor corrected the printer’s manuscript to agree with the King James text. The original manuscript is not extant here, but a very likely possibility is that Oliver Cowdery (the presumed scribe here for 𝓞) misheard Joseph Smith’s dictation of “vines at” /vainz æt/ as /vainz dæt/. The extra /d/ could have been introduced because of its phonetic similarity to the /z/ at the end of vines (both /d/ and /z/ are voiced fricatives in the dental area of the mouth). For other examples of phonetic misinterpretation in 𝓞, especially across word boundaries, see the discussion under 2 Nephi 16:9.

Summary: Follow the 1830 typesetter’s emendation that replaced that with at; this change agrees with the King James Bible and removes an impossible reading that was probably the result of the scribe mishearing Joseph Smith’s dictation of vines at.

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

References