2 Nephi 24:25 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
that I will [break 0|bring 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the Assyrian in my [land 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|hand > land 1] and upon my mountains tread him under foot

Isaiah 14:25 (King James Bible) that I will break the Assyrian in my land and upon my mountains tread him under foot

The original manuscript apparently read the same as did the King James text. We have a fragment from the Wilford Wood collection which reads brea at the end of a line, with the a only partially visible. (Apparently, the next line began with -k, but that part is not extant.) The e of brea is quite clear and the partially visible a is definitely not an n. In his copying, Oliver Cowdery sometimes misread a word at the end of the line, as in this case. The parallelism in the Isaiah text supports the reading break, with both lines repeating the same idea (namely, that the Assyrian armies will be thoroughly defeated in the land of Israel).

This example clearly shows how the copying process from 𝓞 to 𝓟 introduced visually similar variants into the Book of Mormon text. In this particular instance, bring will work, even though it does upset the parallelism of the original text. But given the larger context, break is clearly correct, and indeed 𝓞 reads as such.

We also see that Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “in my hand” in 𝓟. Having misread break as bring, he was therefore inclined to read hand rather than land, especially given the fairly frequent occurrence of the expression “to bring by the hand of the Lord”:

Summary: Restore the word break in 2 Nephi 24:25, which is the reading of the original manuscript as well as the King James Bible.

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

References