1 Nephi 15:3 Textual Variants

In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith edited 16 of the 29 examples of “had ought” and its negative “had not ought”. For the ones he changed, the had was deleted; if there was a not, it was placed after the ought (giving “ought not”). For the remaining cases of “had (not) ought”, LDS editions in the first part of the 20th century are responsible for completing this editing. The 1953 RLDS edition has followed some of these later changes, but only in the second half of the Book of Mormon. In the first half of the text, the 1953 RLDS edition has retained the examples that Joseph Smith did not remove in his editing. For a complete listing and analysis, see ought in volume 3.

Joseph Smith himself occasionally taught grammar in Kirtland, Ohio, in the School of the Prophets (also known as the Elders’ School) during the winter of 1835–36 (Documentary History of the Church [DHC] 2:301). The grammar book used in the school was Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, first published in 1829 (see the list of books in DHC 2:200). On page 206 of Kirkham’s grammar, sentence examples using “had ought” are listed under “NewEngland or New-York provincialisms” and then in a parallel column are corrected by removing the had and placing not (when it occurs) after ought. Undoubtedly, Joseph was familiar with this prescriptive warning about the use of “had (not) ought”, so it is not surprising that he removed over half of its occurrences in his editing for the 1837 edition.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains (under had ought and ought) that the use of had with ought is still found in American dialectal speech, with citations of hadn’t ought from H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Hodding Carter, and Harry S. Truman. The critical text of the Book of Mormon will restore this older dialectal usage wherever it is supported by the earliest textual sources. There are six examples of ought without the had in the earliest text, which shows that originally there was some variation between “had (not) ought” and the standard “ought (not)”.