1 Nephi 11:1 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for it came to pass that after I had desired to know the things that my father had seen and believing that the Lord was able to make them known unto me [wherefor 0|wherefore >js NULL 1|wherefore A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] [as 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRT|as >js NULL >js as 1|As PS] I sat pondering in mine heart I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord

For this complex passage, Joseph Smith deleted the word wherefore in his editing for the 1837 edition. He also experimented with deleting the following as, but he ended up restoring it. Elsewhere, the text typically retains the wherefore since it is used to make the reader understand that the following main clause is resultive (that is, a direct result of conditions just stated). In a few other cases, when the initial dependent clause or phrase was complex, Joseph deleted the wherefore:

In two of these examples, part of the motivation for the deletion seems to have been the repetition of the wherefore. In any case, all of these examples of editing are found in the small plates of Nephi. (I count the Words of Mormon as textually part of the small plates, although they may have been physically written on other plates.) For further analysis, see the discussion under these passages.

Yet there are cases where the resultive wherefore has been retained in complex passages. Here are two that start out with “it came to pass” (just as in 1 Nephi 11:1):

Note also that in these two examples the repeated subject (occurring after wherefore) is not deleted, as it was in the Words of Mormon 1:18.

Joseph Smith’s editing in 1 Nephi 11:1 appears to be one more example of his attempts at clarifying the text; as noted before, this type of editing occurred chiefly in the first part of the Book of Mormon. The critical text will restore the wherefore in all these cases.

Summary: Restore the resultive wherefore in 1 Nephi 11:1; its removal from the text was not necessary from a grammatical point of view.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 1

References