Mormon 5:14 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
that the Father may bring about through his most Beloved his great and eternal purpose in [the >js NULL 1|the A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] restoring the Jews or all the house of Israel to the land of their inheritance

As explained under 1 Nephi 17:32, the original text (as well as the current text) has a number of examples of the mixed gerundive construction, such as “the restoring the Jews” here in Mormon 5:14 rather than the more nominal “the restoring of the Jews” or the more verbal “restoring the Jews”. In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith removed the definite article the, thus adopting the more verbal gerundive form. The critical text will restore the original reading with the the. For a general discussion of these different gerundive types, see under gerundives in volume 3.

Summary: Restore in Mormon 5:14 the original mixed gerundive “the restoring the Jews”; the original text had a number of occurrences of this construction, some of which have been retained in the current text.

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

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