2 Nephi 32:1 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
I suppose that ye ponder somewhat in your [minds > hearts 1|hearts ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] [somewhat > NULL 1| ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] concerning that which ye should do after that ye have entered in by the way

Here Oliver Cowdery made a couple of scribal slips that he corrected almost immediately. His first error was to initially write “ye ponder somewhat in your minds”, which he corrected by crossing out the word minds and supralinearly inserting the correct hearts (the probable reading of the original manuscript, no longer extant here). The level of ink flow for the supralinear hearts is no different from the preceding writing, including the word minds that was crossed out. The second error occurred when he wrote somewhat as the next word. This word was written inline but with a sharper quill, which means that after correcting minds to hearts, Oliver must have either sharpened his quill or switched to a sharper one. When he resumed his copy work, he apparently had the word somewhat still in his mind (having recently written down “ye ponder somewhat in your hearts”), and thus he accidentally repeated the somewhat. Oliver quickly caught this dittography and crossed out the repeated somewhat.

Oliver Cowdery’s initial writing of minds rather than hearts probably resulted because English readers expect “to ponder in one’s mind” more than “to ponder in one’s heart”. Interestingly, however, the Book of Mormon text has only collocations of ponder and heart, never ponder and mind:

Note that three of these eight examples occur in chapter 32 of 2 Nephi (twice here in verse 1 and another in verse 8).

Summary: For 2 Nephi 32:1, follow Oliver Cowdery’s corrected text in 𝓟 (“ye ponder somewhat in your hearts concerning that which ye should do”).

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

References