2 Nephi 9:50 Textual Variants

Isaiah 55:1 (King James Bible) come ye to the waters and he that hath no money come yea buy and eat yea come buy wine and milk without money and without price

Here in 2 Nephi 9:50 there is one difference between the Book of Mormon text and the corresponding Isaiah passage: the ye that occurs after the second come in the King James text is missing from the Book of Mormon text. It is possible that this ye did occur in the original manuscript, but unfortunately 𝓞 is no longer extant here. In fact, when Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟, the following yea was initially spelled as ye (but was then immediately corrected to yea). One could view this temporary error as the result of Oliver having just read ye (“come ye buy and eat”), which pronoun he had nonetheless accidentally omitted in his copying. (However, this same scribal initial error of ye for yea was made in 3 Nephi 1:3 when Oliver copied yea into 𝓟, yet for that passage there was no nearby ye to prompt such an error.)

No separate word for the subject pronoun ye occurs in the Hebrew original, so the addition of the two ye ’s in the King James Bible is due to the Early Modern English translators. The Hebrew verb ending provides the evidence that the imperative is second person plural, so the ye ’s are not set in italics in the King James Bible. Nonetheless, the imperative in English does not need to state the implied subject you (or ye in Early Modern English). In fact, for the third case of come, the King James translators did not supply the ye. Thus one could view the lack of ye after the second come in the Book of Mormon text as increasing the parallelism with the immediately following (third) come, which heads a clause beginning with “come buy”, just like the second come: “come buy and eat / yea come buy wine and milk”. Note, in particular, that the repeated “come buy” is connected to the preceding “come buy” by the connector yea, which suggests that we should expect some parallelism in the text. Consequently, both instances of “come buy” can lack the overt subject pronoun ye.

Since it is difficult to choose between these two possible explanations for why the second ye is missing in 2 Nephi 9:50, it is probably best to assume that there is no error in the Book of Mormon text.