There has been a sporadic, but persistent, tendency in the history of the text to replace “if it so be” with “if it be so”. Here in two verses, we have three cases where editions have made this change. The first occurred in the 1874 RLDS edition and has been retained since then in the RLDS text. The second occurred in the 1905 LDS edition and the third in the 1906 LDS edition, but these two changes were never copied into subsequent LDS editions.
The original text was fully consistent with respect to the word order so be in conditional clauses. Originally, there were 42 occurrences of “if it so be”, plus two more with an intervening modal auxiliary (“if it should so be” in Enos 1:13 and 3 Nephi 26:9), but there was not one with the order be so. Besides the three instances listed above, there are two other cases where the original word order has been switched:
The first change to be so occurred in the 1852 LDS edition, the second in the 1849 LDS edition. In both of these cases, the incorrect word order has persisted in the LDS text. The critical text will restore all the cases of the original word order that have been accidentally changed (namely, 1 Nephi 22:17 for the RLDS text, and Jacob 5:64 and Ether 2:20 for the LDS text).
Summary: Restore all cases of the original word order so be in the conditional clause “if it so be”: 1 Nephi 22:17, Jacob 5:64, and Ether 2:20; the original text has only the word order so be in conditional clauses (44 times).