1 Nephi 20:1 Textual Variants

Isaiah 48:1 (King James Bible) hear ye this O house of Jacob which are called by the name of Israel and are come forth out of the waters of Judah which swear by the name of the LORD

Joseph Smith’s addition in the 1840 edition of the phrase “or out of the waters of baptism” can be considered a marginal note since it appears within parentheses in that edition. This parenthetical phrase continued in the early RLDS textual tradition, but was removed from the 1908 RLDS edition since the phrase does not appear in the printer’s manuscript.

On 16 January 1883, Ebenezer Robinson, who helped Joseph Smith prepare the 1840 edition for publication, described the printing of that edition to Joseph Smith III (Joseph Smith’s oldest son and president of the RLDS Church at that time). As part of a long statement, Robinson described in some detail the editing for the 1840 edition:

Your father and I sat down; we took the Palmyra edition and the Kirtland edition, of which latter I helped to set the type, (those were the only two editions that had been printed then), and we compared them, reading the book entirely through, and there is only just one sentence in that book that is not in the other, in what is called the Nauvoo edition, and all the editions since. That is the only one that is not in the Palmyra edition. It is in Nephi’s second book I believe. He put a few words there in parenthesis, when he refers to the waters of Judah or the waters of Baptism, he put a few words there in parenthesis. That is the only thing, excepting some little ungrammatical expressions that were altered.

Of course, the addition is found near the end of 1 Nephi rather than in 2 Nephi. (This quote is found on page 146 of Joseph Smith III, “A Historical Reminiscence”, The Saints’ Herald, 30/3 [10 March 1883]: 146–147.)

The LDS text, on the other hand, did not adopt this extra phrase until the 1920 edition, but in that edition the parentheses were replaced by commas. Originally the parentheses, written in red ink along with the added words, were written in the 1920 committee copy (a copy of the 1911 large-print Chicago edition used by the committee to indicate the textual changes for the 1920 edition). Later the parentheses were crossed out with red penciling; thus the extra phrase in the actual 1920 edition is set off by commas. This change can mislead the reader into thinking that this parenthetical comment was actually part of the original text, even perhaps concluding not only that this extra phrase is the original biblical text, but also that some scribe deliberately edited it out of the Hebrew text because of its reference to baptism, assumed to be a strictly Christian practice. Joseph Smith’s probable intention was to provide an interpretative reading. There is no evidence to suggest in any way that he was restoring the original text of the Book of Mormon, especially since the original manuscript is here extant and it agrees with the reading of the King James Bible (which follows the traditional Hebrew text) and is also in agreement with all other ancient versions of the text insofar as they all lack this extra phrase mentioning baptism.

Hugh Nibley, on page 151 of Since Cumorah (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1967), has made several provocative claims regarding this change in the text:

The very first Isaiah passage cited in the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 20:1) differs radically as we have seen, from both the Masoretic [standard Hebrew] and the LXX [Septuagint] versions, which by their own disagreements show that the original text had been corrupted. But that is not all, for the second edition of the Book of Mormon contains an addition not found in the first: “ ... out of the waters of Judah, or out of the waters of baptism.” It is said that Parley P. Pratt suggested the phrase, and certainly Joseph Smith approved it, for it stands in all the early editions after the first. Those added words are not only permissible—they are necessary. If a translation is, as Wilamowitz-Moellendorff defined it, “a statement in the translator’s own words of what he thinks the author had in mind,” then surely that phrase about baptism cannot be omitted. Isaiah did not have to tell his ancient hearers that he had the waters of baptism in mind, but it is necessary to tell it to the modern reader who without such an explanation would miss the point—for him the translation would be a misleading one without that specification. Where continued revelation is accepted and where all the prophets are speaking the same piece, this sort of thing makes no difficulty at all.

Unfortunately, this statement provides no documentation for the offhand remark that “it is said that Parley P. Pratt suggested the phrase”. Despite the wide circulation of this claim of Nibley’s, I have not been able to find any evidence to substantiate it. One wonders about the scholarship in this passage since all its details are wrong. The change first appeared in the third (1840) edition, not the second (1837) edition. The text quoted is actually from the 1920 edition—that is, the parentheses are missing, thus obscuring the marginal nature of the phrase in the 1840 edition. It is not true that the phrase “stands in all the early editions after the first”. Presumably, Nibley is referring to all early editions from 1840 on. Yet even this interpretation is wrong: the phrase appears only in the early RLDS textual tradition (the 1858 Wright edition and the first two RLDS editions, 1874 and 1892). It appears in none of the immediately following LDS editions: the 1841, 1849, and 1852 British editions or the 1879 Orson Pratt edition. And finally, contrary to Nibley’s claim, the phrase is definitely not necessary. There is no convincing evidence that Joseph’s parenthetical phrase was intended to revise the original text. The parentheses imply that Joseph viewed this additional phrase as a marginal explanation. The critical text will, of course, remove this secondary phrase from the text proper and relegate it to the apparatus.