2 Nephi 23:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
behold the day of the Lord cometh cruel both with wrath and fierce anger to lay the land desolate and [he 1ABCDGHIJKLMNOPQRST|ye EF] shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it

Isaiah 13:9 (King James Bible) behold the day of the LORD cometh cruel both with wrath and fierce anger to lay the land desolate and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it

The 1849 LDS edition accidentally replaced the pronoun he with the visually similar ye. This pronoun will work within the narrow context of this passage; thus the error was not noticed when ye was copied into the subsequent LDS edition (1852). Orson Pratt, in his editing for the 1879 edition, removed this error from the LDS text.

Summary: Maintain in 2 Nephi 23:9 the pronoun he in “and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it”, which is also the King James reading.

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

References