For the 1840 edition, Joseph Smith (presumably) edited the present participle knowing to the past-tense knew. This change eliminates what appears to be a dependent participial clause. If one accepts this urge to remove the dependency, another possible revision would be to replace knowing with the present-tense knoweth or knows rather than the past-tense knew since the immediately surrounding sentences are in the present tense:
This passage is a direct quote of Nephi’s words to Laman and Lemuel. Jerusalem has not yet been destroyed; thus the use of the past-tense knew seems strange within the larger quote. Note that Nephi does use the past-tense left when he says that his father “left gold and silver and all manner of riches”. Of course, this event has already happened; thus the past-tense left is correct, but the past-tense knew would be incorrect.
In my earlier work on the text, I suggested that the knowing in 1 Nephi 3:17 is a Hebraism in the text and that the reader must rely on the context to determine whether “he knowing” represents ‘he knows’ or ‘he knew’. The Hebraic equivalent is ‘he is knowing’ or ‘he was knowing’, where the be verb is unexpressed and the reader must determine whether the participial clause is in the present or past tense. See the discussion on pages 43–44 in Royal Skousen, “Towards a Critical Edition of the Book of Mormon”, Brigham Young University Studies 30 (1990): 41–69.
Greg Wright has suggested (personal communication, 8 November 2002) that the problem here is that the larger passage should be punctuated differently. He argues that the clause beginning with “for behold” should be considered parenthetical, so that the following wherefore-clause actually serves as the complement to the earlier clause beginning with “for he knowing”:
Elsewhere in the original (and even current) text, there are quite a few examples of this kind of construction. In each case there is first a long participial clause headed by a subject noun phrase, then the complement clause follows, usually beginning with a sentential connector such as wherefore, therefore, or behold followed by a form of the original subject:
The example from 3 Nephi 3:4–5 is particularly relevant for 1 Nephi 3:17–18 since it too contains a parenthetical clause just before the complement clause. From Mormon 5:8–9, we also notice that the initial participial clause can be quite long.
There is one example involving knowing where the participial clause was disrupted by so many parenthetical clauses that the writer ended up creating a fragment:
And finally there is one case involving knowing where a change in the punctuation might help deal with a long conjoined participial clause plus a long intervening parenthetical clause. Here, however, there is no subject agreement, only a repeated reference to things (that is, the content of the plates):
Summary: In 1 Nephi 3:17, restore the original participial clause involving knowing since its usage is consistent with other participial clauses in the text; the passage will need to be punctuated so that the participial clause “for behold they have rejected the words of the prophets” is parenthetical; if knowing were to be changed to the indicative, the context (involving a direct quote) suggests replacing knowing with the present-tense form knoweth or knows rather than the past-tense form knew.