3 Nephi 22:4 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth NULL 1APS and shalt not remember BCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRT the reproach of thy youth and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more

Isaiah 54:4 (King James Bible) for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more

The typesetter for the 1837 edition accidentally repeated part of the text here in 3 Nephi 22:4. After setting “the reproach of thy”, the typesetter, in looking for of thy, skipped upwards and found the of thy before youth. Thus his typeset text ended up repeating the words “and shalt not remember the reproach of thy youth”. This dittography was definitely not intended. The Book of Mormon quotation of Isaiah 54 here in 3 Nephi 22 is quite exact, with only minor variation (the only significant difference is the omission of the King James phrase “nor rebuke thee” at the end of 3 Nephi 22:9). This 1837 error here in verse 4 changed an original pair of parallel lines (the single most common device in Hebrew poetry) into an excessively redundant triplet of parallelism. The RLDS 1908 edition restored the correct reading to the RLDS text, but the LDS text has retained the 1837 dittography.

Summary: Remove in 3 Nephi 22:4 the extra predicate (“and shalt not remember the reproach of thy youth”) that the 1837 typesetter accidentally added to the text, the result of his eye skipping backwards from the second of thy to the first of thy in this verse.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

References