1 Nephi 1:1 Textual Variants

This minor example demonstrates a very common tendency in the history of the text—namely, the tendency in nominal conjuncts to eliminate the repeated article, either the definite article the or the indefinite article a. Of course, the repeated article is unexpected in English, thus the tendency to accidentally drop it. Moreover, there is no example in the text where the repeated article has been consciously edited out. Instead, the loss is sporadic and unsystematic and not restricted to any one period in the history of the text. Sometimes a particular loss persists in the textual history. Other times the error is caught, as in this case from the 1911 LDS edition when the lost article was restored in the following LDS edition (1920). Although the original text does have examples of the nonrepeated article, the original text favors the repeated article and the textual tendency has been to reduce the level of repetition. In fact, the opposite tendency, to add repetition, hardly ever occurs in the text. So one important purpose of a critical text is to restore such repetition whenever the earliest textual sources support it.