Moroni 9:25 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and may his sufferings and death and the shewing his body unto our fathers and his mercy and long-suffering and the hope of his glory and [of 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMOPQRST| N] eternal life rest in your mind forever

Here the 1906 LDS large-print edition accidentally dropped the preposition of before the noun phrase eternal life. The result (“the hope of his glory and eternal life”) doesn’t make much sense since the phrase “the hope of Christ’s eternal life” is quite irrelevant for this passage. The repeated of makes sure that the correct reading for the second conjunct is equivalent to “the hope of eternal life”. This idea is expressed elsewhere in the text, in Alma 13:29: “having a hope that ye shall receive eternal life”.

This 1906 typo was never transferred into any subsequent LDS edition since the 1906 edition never served as a copytext. As noted above, for this part of Moroni 9 the 1907 LDS vest-pocket edition adopted some of the 1906 readings (namely, the words then and should in verse 24 and part of the punctuation in verse 23) but not this reading here in Moroni 9:25, probably because the result was unacceptable. The critical text will, of course, retain the original repeated of here in “the hope of his glory and of eternal life”. For other cases where the repeated of has been omitted in the transmission of the text, see under 3 Nephi 9:5.

Summary: Accept in Moroni 9:25 the original text where the of is repeated in “the hope of his glory and of eternal life”, thus guaranteeing the correct meaning (‘the hope of eternal life’) for this passage.

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

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