2 Nephi 5:21 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
wherefore as they were white and exceeding fair and delightsome that they might not be enticing unto my people [therefore >js NULL 1|therefore A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them

Joseph Smith removed the therefore here in 2 Nephi 5:21 because of the wherefore at the beginning of the same sentence. Joseph apparently viewed this repetition as an unnecessary redundancy. In a number of other places in the text, Joseph Smith removed this kind of repetition from a long extended sentence:

Even so, Joseph Smith left unchanged some cases of the repeated wherefore and therefore:

In the original text, the repetition of wherefore or therefore serves an important narrative function— namely, to bring the reader back to the initially stated conditional clause that begins the sentence. In most instances, there is a long interruptive dependent clause or phrase between the repeated wherefore ’s and therefore ’s. For similar examples of this kind of usage, see 1 Nephi 11:1.

Summary: Restore all instances where a repetitive wherefore or therefore has been deleted from a long sentence, including 2 Nephi 5:21.

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

References