Helaman 3:17–18 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and now I return again to mine account therefore what I have spoken had passed after there had been great contentions and disturbances and wars and dissensions among the people of Nephi [ 0|NULL >jg . 1|. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the forty and sixth year of the reign of the judges ended

There is a problem here with the punctuation. There should be some kind of stop after “what I have spoken had passed”, such as a semicolon or a period. The following after- clause belongs with the statement that “the forty and sixth year of the reign of the judges ended”. The things Mormon is speaking about (“what I have spoken had passed”) are represented by these contentions, disturbances, wars, and dissensions. These events did not occur after these contentions, disturbances, wars, and dissensions; they were a part of them (as stated earlier in verse 3: “and it came to pass in the forty and sixth year there were much contentions and many dissensions”).

Moreover, in verse 18 the current punctuation means that there is no connector for the clause “the forty and sixth year of the reign of the judges ended”. But for all other instances of this kind of clause (ones that declare the end of a year) there is always some kind of link to the preceding text (48 times), such as in these different types:

Among these examples is one that follows the same general syntactic structure that I am proposing here in Helaman 3:17–18, namely, an after- clause followed by the main clause referring to the end of the year:

The critical text will therefore revise the syntactic structure here in Helaman 3:17–18 so that the preceding after- clause is connected to the following main clause referring to the end of the year.

Summary: Restructure the phraseology in Helaman 3:17–18 so that there is a semicolon or period after the clause “therefore what I have spoken had passed”; the current stop between verses 17 and 18 should be removed, thus allowing a comma to separate the after- clause from its following main clause, “the forty and sixth year of the reign of the judges ended”.

Helaman 5:30, page 2952, line –1

At the end of the summary, I should also note that the indefinite article a needs to be maintained before “great tumultuous noise”.

Helaman 6:39, page 2988, line –1

At the end of the summary, I should add that the definite article the rather than their needs to be maintained before the word poor, with the result that the entire prepositional phrase reads “upon the poor and the meek and humble followers of God”.

Helaman 7:15, page 3001, line 13

The verb sound should not be set in bold; the second line of the citation for Ether 14:28 should read “and did sound a trumpet unto the armies of Shiz”.

Helaman 8:16, page 3019, lines 16–17

The summary misquotes the phrases and should therefore be revised as follows:

Restore in Helaman 8:16 the singular day in the phrase “from his day”; the singular is possible even though the text generally prefers the plural noun phrase his days over the singular his day.

Helaman 14:3, page 3112, line 13

The word edition is missing after 1830 in the summary; the correct phraseology is “both 𝓟 and the 1830 edition”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References