Heather Hardy suggests (personal communication, 25 November 2008) that the word hearts here may be a mistake for heads since elsewhere in the Book of Mormon there are four instances of “lift up one’s head and rejoice” but no others of “lift up one’s heart and rejoice”:
Further, here in 2 Nephi 11:8 the word hearts is hyphenated at the end of the line in 𝓟, with he at the end of the line and -arts at the beginning of the next line. This split suggests that Oliver could have meant to write heads in 𝓟 but ended up writing hearts. He may have also been influenced by the familiarity of “lift up one’s heart and rejoice”, especially in the chorus from the hymn “Rejoice, the Lord Is King”: namely, “Lift up your heart! Lift up your voice! Rejoice, again I say, rejoice!” This popular hymn, written by Charles Wesley (1707–1788), was first published in 1744 (thus predating the translation of the Book of Mormon).
On the other hand, there is no evidence of heart(s) and head(s) ever being mixed up in the transmission of the Book of Mormon text. Moreover, the phrase “lift up one’s heart and rejoice” is quite common in the Doctrine and Covenants; in fact, it occurs in five revelations given in 1830 and early 1831:
There is also a later revelation that takes head for this expression, dating from April 1836: “therefore lift up your heads and rejoice” (Doctrine and Covenants 110:5). Either reading—with hearts or heads —is possible. Thus the critical text will follow the invariant reading with hearts for this passage in 2 Nephi 11:8, even though it is unique for the Book of Mormon.
Summary: Retain in 2 Nephi 11:8 the reading with hearts in “lift up their hearts and rejoice”; although elsewhere the Book of Mormon text has head(s) in this expression, revelations given to Joseph Smith in 1830 and 1831 support the use of heart(s).
2 Nephi 13:23, page 674, line –14
For the citation of 3 Nephi 3:23, internal evidence argues that betwixt (the reading in 𝓟) rather than between (the 1830 reading) is the correct preposition here, thus “yea to the line which was betwixt the land Bountiful and the land Desolation”. See under 3 Nephi 3:23 for discussion.
2 Nephi 16:5, page 694
In lemmatized citations, accidentals can be ignored; thus for this citation there is no need to distinguish between & and and, the misspelling of midst as mids, or the capitalization of people. Thus the reading for 𝓟 (represented as 1) can be combined with the other editions (represented as ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRST), excluding of course the 1892 RLDS edition (represented as K).
2 Nephi 17:1, page 706, lines 21–24
In order to help the reader deal with this difficult reading, I have decided to put dashes around the prepositional phrase “in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham the son of Uzziah king of Judah”. When set in sense-lines and with punctuation added, the text will read as follows:
2 Nephi 18:22, page 727, line 4
As explained under 2 Nephi 27:6, the insertion in 𝓟 of the subject pronoun they in heavier ink was probably done by John Gilbert, the 1830 typesetter. Thus at the top of page 727, the citation should read as follows:
2 Nephi 18:22, page 727
On this page, I list other examples where Oliver Cowdery omitted the subject pronoun they. Yet in one of these cases, the scribe (in 𝓞) was actually Joseph Smith, who had momentarily taken over for Oliver (and ended up writing 28 words in his own hand, including more than the first half of the following sentence):
This example of inserted they should therefore be removed from the list of cases where Oliver Cowdery accidentally omitted the subject pronoun they.
2 Nephi 19:1, page 728, line 13
Here the original reading, “at the first”, should be restored (rather than maintained).
2 Nephi 19:6, pages 736–737
Here in this famous passage from Isaiah, I have decided to treat “Wonderful Counselor” as a single title, thus removing the comma between the two words in the Book of Mormon text and making this phrase parallel to the three following names for the Messiah:
This decision follows what we typically find in modern translations of Isaiah.
2 Nephi 20:5, page 746, lines 20–21
In the middle of the page, the correct statement is that John Tvedtnes has proposed emending “is their indignation” to “is mine indignation”; in other words, in both instances the initial word in quotes should be the verb is, not the preposition in.
2 Nephi 24:12, page 794
Near the end of the page, in the list of examples of thou that lack the -est ending, we should add the example from 1 Nephi 14:23 (discussed above under the addendum for that passage). In other words, after 1 Nephi 14:8, we have this example:
2 Nephi 25:11, page 813, line 13
The statistics here are incorrect; the numbers should read 12 out of 14 (not 11 out of 13). The reason for the change is that there is one more example of notwithstanding followed by a finite clause (which needs to be added to the list of examples on this page):
There has been some question of how to punctuate this additional instance; for discussion, see under Alma 17:15.
2 Nephi 26:20, page 836, line 8
The rather contradictory statement “does clearly seem to be an error” should be replaced by something like “may be an error”.
2 Nephi 30:2, page 892, line 15
Either a comma or a colon after “I say unto you” would help facilitate the original reading.
Addenda: 2 Nephi, Jacob
2 Nephi 31:19, page 918
In the list of examples of original got and gat, preference should be given to gat over got for the example in Alma 47:5; thus the citation here should read as follows:
For the choice of gat over got, see the discussion under Alma 47:5.
2 Nephi 32:3, page 923, line 7
As explained under Mosiah 6:2, the critical text will accept the corrected reading in 𝓟 for this passage; thus the second line in this citation should read “except it were little children”, not “save it were little children”.
Jacob 1:1, page 935
In the list of momentary errors where these was replaced by the, it appears that the example under Mosiah 28:16 was the result of editing on the part of Oliver Cowdery; the original text here appears to have read the things. Thus Mosiah 28:16 should be removed from this list on page 935. For a complete discussion, see under Mosiah 28:16.
Jacob 1:11, page 942, line –1
The critical text has adopted desolate rather than desolates in Helaman 3:5 and elsewhere in the text.
Jacob 2:10, page 954
There is one other case where Jacob uses commands rather than commandments; this additional instance may be a reference to Nephi’s commands (as originally given to Jacob and now being given to Enos), or Jacob may be using commands here to refer to the commandments of God:
Jacob 2:15 [2:16], page 961, line 9
The scriptural header for this citation is incorrect; it should read Jacob 2:16 rather than Jacob 2:15. This error persists throughout this particular write-up on page 961, including the summary, and should be corrected everywhere within the write-up.
Jacob 2:17, page 963, line 9
The scriptural specification Alma 19:11 is incorrect; it should read Alma 14:11.