Isaiah 9:14 (King James Bible) therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail
In earlier English, when a declarative sentence began with an adverbial, the finite verb frequently came immediately after the adverbial. Here in 2 Nephi 19:14, the Book of Mormon text has this archaic word order, with will immediately following the adverbial therefore and before the subject of the sentence, the Lord. But the corresponding King James passage has the order of modern English, with will following the subject (“therefore the LORD will”). The switch in word order for the Book of Mormon passage almost implies a question except that the therefore sounds rather more like the beginning of a declarative statement. Other Book of Mormon examples in the Isaiah quotations show that therefore can be immediately followed by the modal auxiliary shall or will:
Even so, in 2 Nephi 12–24 (quoting Isaiah 2–14 of the King James Bible) there are five occurrences of initial therefore for which the grammatical subject precedes the helping verb shall or will:
In 2 Nephi 19:14, the change in word order could also be the result of a copying error. In fact, there is evidence that Oliver Cowdery had difficulty with the word order after a sentence-initial adverbial. In the following example, as he took down Joseph Smith’s dictation, Oliver originally wrote the text using the archaic word order in English—that is, with the modal auxiliary will immediately following an adverbial (“at that time”). Later, with somewhat heavier ink flow, Oliver corrected the text, probably when he read the text back to Joseph:
For 2 Nephi 19:14, on the other hand, we do not have the original manuscript, so there is no specific evidence of an error in word order for that passage. Since the order in the earliest textual source (the printer’s manuscript) will work, the critical text will accept the different word order, even though this variation could be due to an early transmission error.
Summary: Retain in 2 Nephi 19:14 the word order in 𝓟, where the auxiliary verb will comes immediately after the adverbial (“therefore will the Lord cut off from Israel head and tail”); since this word order does occur in the King James text, the critical text will follow the reading of the earliest textual source (𝓟) even though here the King James Bible has a different word order.