Mosiah 3:1 Textual Variants

In today’s English, we expect “call one’s attention to something”. The use here without any prepositional phrase seems to be intended since it is found a second time later on in king Benjamin’s discourse:

• Mosiah 4:4
  • I would again call your attention that ye may hear and understand the remainder of my words

One possibility is that king Benjamin’s phrase “I would call your attention” means ‘I would have you pay attention’.

The online Oxford English Dictionary has 69 occurrences of “call one’s attention”, of which all but two are complemented by a prepositional phrase headed by to. One of these two exceptions (found under robustness) has the meaning ‘to be noticed’:

• George James (1838)
  His arms were not such as would have called attention from their robustness.

In the other example (see definition 2b under silentiary), the phrase is equivalent to “call to attention” and means ‘to command silence’:

• Frederic Seebohm (1883)
  • The columns ... are sometimes cased in metal, and the silentiary, to call attention, strikes one of them with his staff.

King Benjamin’s use of “call one’s attention” appears to be different from either of these two examples.