1 Nephi 21:11 Textual Variants

Isaiah 49:11 (King James Bible)

and I will make all my mountains a way and my highways shall be exalted

Here Oliver Cowdery misinterpreted a way as the adverb away and wrote it that way in both manuscripts. Its occurrence in the original manuscript shows once more that this manuscript is indeed a dictated manuscript. It was up to Oliver to determine whether Joseph Smith’s /ßwei/ was a way or away. Oliver might have been subconsciously influenced by the much more frequent (and phonetically similar) phrasal verb take away, although he did not actually write “I will take all my mountains away”.

The first two editions (1830, 1837) continued with “I will make all my mountains away”. For the 1840 edition, the correct a way was set. On the other hand, the first three LDS British editions continued to set away (since they derive from the 1837 edition). Finally, in the second printing of the 1852 edition, away was corrected in the stereotyped plates to a way, probably by reference to the 1840 edition (which was frequently used to correct the text for the second 1852 printing).

The Hebrew word here is the noun derek ‘path, way, road’, which the King James Bible literally translates in the singular. The English word away actually derives from the two-word phrase “on way”, but of course its original meaning is no longer recoverable from away, nor would that meaning work here in 1 Nephi 21:11.

Elsewhere in the manuscripts, the scribes occasionally mixed up away and a way, but none of these other instances of error entered any printed edition (unlike the case in 1 Nephi 21:11):

• 2 Nephi 8:10 (Oliver Cowdery in 𝓞 and 𝓟; a way in Isaiah 51:10)
  • that hath made the depths of the sea [away 01|a way ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] for the ransomed to pass over
• Mosiah 29:7 (Hyrum Smith in 𝓟; 𝓞 not extant; John Gilbert corrected 𝓟)
  • and draw [a way >jg away 1|away ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] a part of this people after him
• Mormon 3:4 (scribe 2 in 𝓟, but immediately corrected by him; 𝓞 not extant)
  • after this tenth year had passed [a way > away 1|away ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST]
• Ether 14:25 (Oliver Cowdery in 𝓞; corrected by him when he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟)
  • and their wickedness and abominations had prepared [away 0|a way 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] for their everlasting destruction

All of these misspellings probably occurred in 𝓞 itself, which is consistent with other evidence that 𝓞 was written down from dictation rather than visually copied from some other written text.