2 Nephi 24:19 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch and the remnant of those that are slain thrust through with a sword that go down to the stones of the pit as a carcass trodden under feet

Isaiah 14:19 (King James Bible) but thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch and as the raiment of those that are slain thrust through with a sword that go down to the stones of the pit as a carcass trodden under feet

The Book of Mormon reading remnant does not work very well in this context, which refers to the dead, not those left alive. The phrase “the remnant of those that are slain” basically means nobody. The actual Hebrew word translated as raiment refers to being clothed, so that the phrase could have been more literally translated as “clothed like the slain”.

The English word raiment occurs only three (other) times in the Book of Mormon text (in Mosiah 4:19 and twice in the Sermon on the Mount quoted in 3 Nephi 13:25, 28). But in the Isaiah passages, remnant occurs fairly frequently. For instance, elsewhere in the Book of Mormon quotation of Isaiah 2–14, remnant occurs eight times (including six times nearby in 2 Nephi 20–21). Thus it is very plausible that remnant here in 2 Nephi 24:19 is an error for raiment, primed by the preceding occurrences of remnant in 2 Nephi 20–21. The original manuscript is not extant for 2 Nephi 24:19, but it could have read raiment. Another possibility is that the mistake could have occurred as Joseph Smith dictated the text to Oliver Cowdery, the scribe here in 𝓞. The two words raiment and remnant are both visually and phonetically similar.

This emendation was first explicitly suggested by Stan Larson; see pages 565–566 of his article “Conjectural Emendation and the Text of the Book of Mormon”, Brigham Young University Studies 18 (1978): 563–569.

Summary: Emend 2 Nephi 24:19 by replacing remnant with the King James Bible raiment; the word remnant (although frequent in the book of Isaiah) makes no sense in this context, but it is both phonetically and visually similar to raiment.

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

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