2 Nephi 24:23 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and I will sweep it with the [bosom 0|bosom >jg besom 1|besom ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of destruction

Isaiah 14:23 (King James Bible) and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction

The word besom, meaning ‘broom’, was obviously unknown to Oliver Cowdery, the scribe here. It is quite probable that Joseph Smith himself did not know the word. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that besom retains the general meaning of ‘broom’ only in Scottish dialects and that in literary English broom has now taken the place of besom. Since Oliver did not know the word, he wrote it as bosom in both 𝓞 and 𝓟 (and perhaps Joseph himself misread besom as bosom). The 1830 compositor undoubtedly noticed that bosom just couldn’t be right and therefore decided to consult his King James Bible to see how it read. In the printer’s manuscript, he corrected bosom to besom by overwriting the first o of bosom with an e. The correction is in the same heavy, dark ink that he used to make the punctuation marks on these pages of 𝓟.

Summary: Maintain in 2 Nephi 24:23 the obsolete word besom (the King James reading), which Oliver Cowdery (and perhaps Joseph Smith) mistook as bosom.

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

References