Scribe 3 of 𝓞 initially wrote “and they did give thanks and offer burnt offerings” before realizing that he had repeated part of the previous clause (“they did give thanks unto the Lord their God”) and skipped over part of the text (“sacrifice and”). A tapering off of the ink flow for offerings (spelled as ofrings) suggests that scribe 3 quit at that point to make a messy correction of his conflated text. He first erased the repeated “give thanks” (with considerable smearing) and then overwrote it with “offer sacrifice”. The problem here is that he apparently neglected to delete the now-repeated verb offer. When Oliver Cowdery copied the text into 𝓟, he removed the second offer.
Elsewhere the text uses this same conjunctive expression but without repeating the verb offer. Each of the following is especially similar to 1 Nephi 7:22:
Both examples have the exact same conjunct “offer sacrifice and burnt offerings” after a helping verb (either did or might). In fact, both also refer to giving thanks to the Lord, although not in the same order as 1 Nephi 7:22.
There is considerable internal evidence that scribe 3’s repeated offer in “they did offer sacrifice and offer burnt offerings” is highly unexpected. To be sure, there exist examples of the past-tense auxiliary verb did followed by conjoined predicates with direct objects, but the conjoined verbs are never identical:
There are also quite a few examples in the King James Bible of offering sacrifices and burnt offerings. One example has virtually the same wording as the Book of Mormon’s “offer sacrifice and burnt offerings”:
All other scriptural expressions conjoining sacrifice(s) and burnt offerings parallel the emended text in 1 Nephi 7:22—that is, without repeating the verb offer.
There is only one King James passage in which the verb offer is repeated, but in this instance two finite verb forms (each in the simple past tense) are conjoined. Nor does any conjunct use the word sacrifice, but instead two different types of offerings are conjoined, with the result that the noun offerings is also repeated:
Yet the parallelism here is misleading. In the Hebrew, the two verbs for offered are completely different words, as are also the two nouns acting as direct objects (burnt offerings and peace offerings). The second offered corresponds to the basic Hebrew verb ‘to make’; thus the Hebrew underlying the King James reading “and offered peace offerings” can be literally translated as “and he made peace offerings”. In other words, in the Hebrew this second offered does not parallel the first offered, but instead parallels the verb made in the final clause (literally translated as “and he made a feast to all his servants”). Finally, we should note that the King James Bible translates this passage as a conjoining of five predicates, but in the Hebrew we have a conjoining of five complete sentences:
Summary: The critical text will maintain Oliver Cowdery’s emendation that removed the repeated nonfinite verb form offer in 1 Nephi 7:22; it appears that scribe 3 of 𝓞 failed to delete the second offer when he tried to correct what he had initially written down; other passages in the Book of Mormon uniformly support the reading in 𝓟 (“they did offer sacrifice and burnt offerings unto him”).