Here the earliest textual sources create a stranded subordinate clause (“as I followed him”). In order to correct the resulting fragment, Joseph Smith (in his editing for the 1837 edition) deleted the following “and after I had followed him”. A more simple revision would have been to delete the subordinate conjunction as, thus giving:
and it came to pass that I followed him and after I had followed him I beheld myself that I was in a dark and dreary waste
By deleting a single word (as), the following after-clause works perfectly well. Of course, this revision suggests that perhaps the as was not in the original text but instead was mistakenly added by Joseph Smith as he dictated the text or by scribe 3 of 𝓞 as he wrote down the text.
In a number of places the original text has an as-clause that is either too long or seems incomplete; in these cases the printed editions have typically removed the subordinate conjunction as, thus creating an independent clause and eliminating the fragment:
In these examples, the subordinate conjunction as has two possible meanings, either ‘as a result of ’ (equivalent to because or since ) or ‘at some time or during some time’ (equivalent to when or while). In our original example in 1 Nephi 8:7, the as has the meaning of while, as do the two uses of as in Helaman 7:10–11.
In a couple of places in the manuscripts, Oliver Cowdery himself edited out an extra as:
In the second of these two cases (Alma 57:3), the as actually works (with the meaning of the word since), and so Oliver Cowdery’s deletion was unnecessary. But in the first case (Alma 44:12), the as seems completely extraneous. Note in particular that the passage begins with an as-clause (“but as he raised his sword”), which may have been the source for accidentally adding a second as, yet this second as doesn’t have the meaning of either since or when. The awkwardness of this extra as was probably the reason Oliver Cowdery deleted it from both manuscripts. (For further discussion, see under Alma 44:12.)
We find considerable evidence that an as-clause can follow “it came to pass (that)”, as in the following example:
There are 26 other examples of this construction in the original text. In nearly all these cases, the as has the meaning of while or when because “it came to pass” deals with time.
We also have various examples like 1 Nephi 8:7 that immediately restate the previous clause within a subsequent after-clause, as in these examples from 1 Nephi:
All these examples strongly suggest that if the text in 1 Nephi 8:7 is to be emended, the simplest solution would be to remove the extraneous as, especially since it is possible that the as was accidentally added. But unlike the example in Alma 44:12, the as in 1 Nephi 8:7 does refer to time and cannot be explained away as the accidental repetition of a previous as. It could well be that the as in 1 Nephi 8:7 is a primitive error in Nephi’s syntax: perhaps he first intended to write that as (or while) Lehi was following the angel, he (Lehi) noticed he was in a wasteland, but then Nephi changed his mind and decided to write that after Lehi had followed the angel for some time, he (Lehi) noticed he was in a wasteland. Obviously, the only difference in meaning deals with the question of how long Lehi followed the angel before he noticed the wasteland. Semantically, either Joseph Smith’s removal of the after-clause or the proposed deletion of the as will work. The critical text will assume that the as is an error in the early transmission of the text. Without the as, the text in 1 Nephi 8:7 reads just like other passages (such as 1 Nephi 7:22).
Summary: Restore the original after-clause in 1 Nephi 8:7; in addition, emend the text by removing the extraneous as in the previous clause; this as was probably added early on in the transmission of the text, although it may actually represent an infelicity in Nephi’s original syntax.