2 Nephi 22:2 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for the Lord [Jehovah >jg JEHOVAH 1|JEHOVAH ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] is my strength and my song

Isaiah 12:2 (King James Bible) for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song

In the King James Bible for this passage, not only is the word Jehovah printed in all capitals, but the capitals are even larger than the capitals used to set the previous Lord. In general, all capitals were used in some of the early English Bible translations to represent the occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of the name YHWH (written without vowels in the original, pre-Masoretic Hebrew). In the Masoretic Hebrew text, YHWH (which stands for the name Yahweh, according to scholarly interpretation) is normally assigned the vowels of the word √adfflonfflay ‘Lord’, which ends up as Jehovah in English translations (the consonantal form JHVH is an alternative way to transliterate YHWH). The King James translators typically translated YHWH as LORD but sometimes as JEHOVAH. In the Hebrew for Isaiah 12:2, Yah (a variant of Yahweh) corresponds to LORD, while YHWH corresponds to JEHOVAH. The entire name was translated in the King James Bible as LORD JEHOVAH, with extra-large all capitals for Jehovah.

In the Book of Mormon manuscripts, there is no original use of all capitals. The 1830 compositor, on the basis of his King James Bible, decided here in 2 Nephi 22:2 to set Jehovah in all capitals. In 𝓟 itself, he underlined Jehovah with three wavy lines (the standard proofreaders’ mark for setting a word in all capitals). But the compositor never set in all capitals any example of Lord that was set as LORD in the King James Bible. There is one other example of Jehovah in the Book of Mormon, and it has never been set in all capitals: “the great Jehovah the eternal judge of both quick and dead” (Moroni 10:34). Of course, this second example is not a biblical quote. The only other time when all capitals were introduced into the text occurred when the 1830 compositor set the words referring to deity on the title page of the Book of Mormon, as in the following phrases:

In the 1849 LDS edition (the second British edition, with editing by Orson Pratt), the all capitals were removed from the title page for all those words that refer to deity except for the four words that were set in all capitals in the single clause “JESUS is the CHRIST the ETERNAL GOD”. The use of all capitals for those four words has continued in the LDS text. The RLDS text, beginning with the 1874 edition, systematically removed the all capitals for every one of the words on the title page that refer to deity (including the four in that one clause).

Summary: Remove the all capitals for Jehovah in 2 Nephi 22:2 since this typesetting distinction derives directly from printing conventions in the King James Bible and not from the Book of Mormon manuscripts or from the original (pre-Masoretic) Hebrew; such use of all capitals for the names of deity has appeared elsewhere only on the printed title page of the Book of Mormon.

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

References