2 Nephi 4:11 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
for thou [shalt 1ABCDEGHIJKLMNOPQRST|shall F] inherit the land like unto thy brother Nephi

The history of the text shows some variation in the ending for the modal verb shall. When the subject is the second-person thou, we have cases of both shalt and shall. In this instance, the 1852 edition accidentally replaced shalt with shall, probably because in modern English speakers expect modals to take an invariant form (shall in this case). For discussion of the modal form will (and its related wilt), see 1 Nephi 1:14. For a complete listing of the textual variation between “thou shalt” and “thou shall”, see infl al endings in volume 3.

Summary: Here in 2 Nephi 4:11, the earliest textual sources support “thou shalt”, the expected biblical usage.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 1

References