Mosiah 13:18 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
but the seventh day [ 1|, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the sabbath of the Lord thy God [ 1|, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] thou shalt not do any work

Exodus 20:10 (King James Bible) but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God / in it thou shalt not do any work

In this verse, the Book of Mormon text omits two instances of italicized text found in the King James Bible (is and in it). Beginning with the 1830 edition, the phrase “the sabbath of the Lord thy God” has been set off from the rest of the text by commas, with the result that this parenthetical phrase is interpreted as a nonrestrictive appositive. In the Septuagint and Vulgate versions (and even in a few of the Hebrew manuscripts), the difficulty of the Masoretic Hebrew text has been alleviated by supplying the grammatical equivalent of the preposition on to “the seventh day” (although it is also possible that the on was original to the Hebrew text). For this passage the Book of Mormon translation literally follows the Masoretic Hebrew text. The critical text will maintain the earliest text here in Mosiah 13:18, despite its difficulty when compared with the King James version.

Summary: Retain the literal translation of the Masoretic Hebrew in Mosiah 13:18, with its nonrestrictive appositive interpretation of “the sabbath of the Lord thy God” and the lack of a preposition for the sentence-initial adverbial phrase “the seventh day”.

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

References