Mormon 8:30 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and there shall [also be 1ABCDFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|be also E] heard of wars [& 1|and ABCDGHKPS| EFIJLMNOQRT] rumors of wars and earthquakes in divers places

Here we have a couple mistakes that were made in the 1849 LDS edition. First, the word also was accidentally moved to after the be verb. Elsewhere in the history of the text there have been a number of cases where also was moved to somewhere else in the verb phrase (for a list, see under 2 Nephi 21:13). Here in Mormon 8:30, this error was corrected in the subsequent LDS edition (1852). The text has five other instances of the word order “shall also be”, as well as three of “also shall be”. But there are none with the word order “shall be also”.

The second 1849 error in this verse, the accidental omission of the and in “wars and rumors of wars”, was not caught; thus the LDS text has maintained a conjunctive structure that we might expect in modern English (“wars, rumors of wars, and earthquakes”). Yet elsewhere in the Book of Mormon text, we consistently get “wars and rumors of wars”, including one (marked below with an asterisk) where there is a third conjunct introduced by and (just like originally in Mormon 8:30):

The full form with the and (“wars and rumors of wars”) is also found in the King James Bible (in Matthew 24:6 and Mark 13:7). The and should definitely be restored here in Mormon 8:30.

Summary: Restore in Mormon 8:30 the and in the expected phraseology “wars and rumors of wars”; also maintain the original word order where also occurs between shall and be (“and there shall also be heard of wars”).

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

References