Isaiah 48:11 (King James Bible) for how should my name be polluted and I will not give my glory unto another
Oliver Cowdery’s emendation in the original manuscript is with heavier ink flow and removes a difficult syntactic structure (a question followed by a declarative statement). The emended clause “I will not suffer my name to be polluted” creates a parallelism with the following declarative clause (“I will not give my glory unto another”), which is undoubtedly the source of the emendation. Of course, the original text itself does not fully follow the King James reading: the Book of Mormon text adds the words I, suffer, and to, but is otherwise substantially closer to the Isaiah of the King James Bible (“for how should I suffer my name to be polluted” versus “for how should my name be polluted”).
There definitely appears to be editing here in the original manuscript. The heavier level of ink flow suggests that the correction is secondary and not a part of the original text. We have already seen examples of how Oliver Cowdery later emended the original manuscript in an attempt to clarify what he felt was difficult language:
In the original manuscript, corrections written with differing ink or by a different scribe represent editing, providing the change removes a difficult (but not totally impossible) reading. Impossible readings, of course, can be altered at any time. (For complete discussion, see 1 Nephi 3:16, 1 Nephi 7:17, and 1 Nephi 12:4.)
Stan Larson has argued that the change in 1 Nephi 20:11 shows that Joseph Smith revised his translation as he dictated the text (see pages 10–11 of “Textual Variants in Book of Mormon Manuscripts”, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 10 [Autumn 1977]: 8–30). The distinct change in level of ink flow at least argues that the change was definitely not immediate. If Joseph revised the text in this way, there is very little evidence for it beyond this one purported example. Elsewhere, there are only two examples in the original manuscript of textual variation within the biblical quotations that would argue that Joseph, while dictating, revised an original King James reading to something different. These two possibilities involve minor scribal corrections and may simply represent Oliver Cowdery’s attempt to correct what he had initially written down incorrectly. One involves changing had to have (in 1 Nephi 21:21) and the other the insertion of for at the beginning of a clause (in 1 Nephi 21:24); for discussion, see these two passages. Given the three clear examples where Oliver emended the original text written in some other scribe’s hand, it seems much more probable that the change in 1 Nephi 20:11 is the result of later editing on the part of Oliver himself. For further discussion, see pages 382–385 in Royal Skousen, “Textual Variants in the Isaiah Quotations in the Book of Mormon”, Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, edited by Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1998), 369–390.
Summary: Restore in 1 Nephi 20:11 the original reading of the original manuscript (“for how should I suffer my name to be polluted”); this reading is much closer, but not identical, to the language of the King James Bible; Oliver Cowdery’s emendation (“for I will not suffer my name to be polluted”) is based on the syntax of the following clause (“and I will not give my glory unto another”).