Isaiah 8:22 (King James Bible) and they shall look unto the earth and behold trouble and darkness / dimness of anguish and they shall be driven to darkness
The text here at the end of 2 Nephi 18:22 is difficult to process since the second (italicized) they of the King James text is omitted in the Book of Mormon text. There are quite a few cases where italicized words in the King James Isaiah have been purposely omitted in the Book of Mormon version, even some that have ended up creating non-English language. (For a list of 11 examples involving the present-tense be verb, see 2 Nephi 13:14.)
There are several possible ways of dealing with this difficult reading here in 2 Nephi 18:22. One minimal solution would be to place dashes before and after the intervening behold-clause:
In this way, the omitted they could be viewed as being parallel to the preceding verse, where the they is not repeated for two following conjoined predicates:
However, this parallel usage is not complete: the shall is repeated in 2 Nephi 18:22 (“shall look … and shall be driven to darkness”) but not in 2 Nephi 18:21 (“shall fret … and curse … and look”).
Alternatively, one could treat behold in 2 Nephi 18:22 as a nonfinite verb form (an infinitive form) that is conjoined with the preceding “they shall look”, as if the passage read as follows:
and they shall look unto the earth
and shall behold trouble and darkness / dimness of anguish
and shall be driven to darkness
Of course, the actual text does not have shall before behold; in the original Hebrew, the form for behold is an interjection and is not used like a regular verb.
A third possibility is that the subject they was accidentally omitted during the early transmission of the text, either as Joseph Smith dictated the text or as Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟. The original manuscript is not extant here, so it is difficult to know if this happened. We do have evidence elsewhere of they being accidentally dropped by Oliver after a connective and:
In other contexts, we have more examples of Oliver dropping the subject pronoun they; in some cases, he caught his error and supplied the they:
The occasional loss of the subject pronoun they in the manuscripts, plus the difficulty of the reading in 2 Nephi 18:22 without the repeated they, argues that the they may have been accidentally deleted from “and they shall be driven to darkness” (the King James reading) in the early transmission of the text.
Since dashes can be used to separate off the intervening behold-clause, the critical text will accept this minimal solution and thus follow the reading of the earliest textual source (the printer’s manuscript). Even so, there is a distinct possibility that the they was accidentally lost during the early transmission of the text.
Summary: Accept in 2 Nephi 18:22 the earliest reading “and shall be driven to darkness”—that is, without the italicized they of the corresponding King James text, although it is possible that the they was lost early on in the transmission of the Book of Mormon text; placing dashes around the preceding behold-clause will help the reader comprehend this difficult passage.