Paul Huntzinger (personal communication, 6 February 2004) points out that the last sentence in this passage does not make sense. One possible emendation he considers is to replace the verb form preserved with observed: “and the Lord had observed unto himself that the trees had become again the natural fruit”, but Huntzinger recognizes that in the Book of Mormon text the verb observe is never used reflexively as in “one observes (un)to oneself ”.
Another possibility Huntzinger suggests is that during the early transmission of the text there was a switch in word order such that an original “the trees that” was altered to “that the trees”; in other words, the original text might have read: “and the Lord had preserved unto himself the trees that had become again the natural fruit”. One major problem with this suggestion is that there are no examples of such an odd kind of metathesis anywhere in the history of the text.
I would suggest a third possibility here, one that would propose that during the early transmission of the text a short noun phrase—namely, the words “the good”—was lost from the beginning of the main clause. Such an emendation would work well within the larger passage:
This emendation proposes that the original text for this passage had a contrastive pair of clauses, the first one referring to “the bad” and the second to “the good”. And for each clause, the contrasting noun phrase comes at the beginning of the clause. One possible explanation for the loss of “the good” is that it was immediately followed by “the Lord”; in copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery’s eye might have skipped over “the good” to “the Lord”. Not only do both phrases have the definite article the, but in each case the noun has an o vowel and ends in d.
The manuscripts provide a few examples of where Oliver Cowdery momentarily omitted a noun phrase, showing that the loss of a noun phrase like “the good” is possible:
Here I list only examples where the incorrect initial reading is clearly unacceptable.
There are several nearby passages that support the contrastive pairing up of “the good” with “the bad”:
The second contrastive pair in Jacob 5:77 is strikingly similar to the proposed emendation for verse 74. Not only do both have “the good” and “the bad” at the beginning of parallel clauses, but the very same verbs are found associated with “the good” and with “the bad” (namely, preserve and cast away):
Summary: Emend the current text in Jacob 5:74 so that it reads “and the good the Lord had preserved unto himself ”; the parallel language in Jacob 5:77 supports adding “the good” to this clause in verse 74.