2 Nephi 12:16 Textual Variants

Isaiah 2:16 (King James Bible) (2 ) and upon all the ships of Tarshish (3 ) and upon all pleasant pictures

This famous Book of Mormon passage combines two different readings, the Greek Septuagint translation (literally, “and upon every ship of the sea”) and the Masoretic Hebrew reading (literally, “and upon all ships of Tarshish”). This link with the Septuagint was noted by Sidney B. Sperry on pages 172–173 of Our Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, Utah: Stevens and Wallis, 1948). Andrew Stewart, a student in my 1991 course on textual criticism, discovered that the first phrase in the Book of Mormon text can also be found in Coverdale’s 1535 Bible: “upon all ships of the sea” (spelling regularized), which may derive from the Greek translation. In the Septuagint and the Coverdale translation, the phrase “ships of the sea” replaces “ships of Tarshish”, implying that “ships of the sea” is an attempt to interpret the enigmatic Hebrew “ships of Tarshish”. The Book of Mormon has both readings, which suggests that in some earlier transmission of the Hebrew text the phrase “upon all ships of the sea” was originally a marginal note explaining the phrase “upon all ships of Tarshish” but that eventually this explanatory note was inserted directly into the text itself.

One other difference between the Book of Mormon text and the King James reading is the use of the definite article the. The Book of Mormon text originally had the after all in each of the three cases: “and upon all the ships of the sea and upon all the ships of Tarshish and upon all the pleasant pictures”. On the other hand, the King James Bible is missing the the in the last case (“all pleasant pictures”). Similarly, the 1830 edition is missing the the in this last case. The 1830 compositor may have referred once more to his King James Bible to eliminate what appeared to be an extra the in the printer’s manuscript. The original manuscript is not extant here, so it is possible that the original text actually lacked the extra the in the last line; under this interpretation, Oliver Cowdery could have introduced the the under the influence of the two preceding occurrences of all the.

The Hebrew text has no definite article with all (nor does the Greek text), so at least the reading of the printer’s manuscript (with all the before all three noun phrases) reflects the consistency of the original Hebrew. Frequently the Book of Mormon shows more parallelism than the King James version of Isaiah, especially with respect to function words such as the. For other examples of increased parallelism for function words, see 1 Nephi 20:12–13 (and), 1 Nephi 21:10 (the), and 2 Nephi 6:17–18 (them). Because of the extended parallelism of all the in the earliest textual source (the printer’s manuscript), the critical text will accept the third instance of all the in 2 Nephi 12:16.