Isaiah 4:2 (King James Bible) in that day shall the branch of the LORD be beautiful and glorious and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel
The earliest extant text (the printer’s manuscript) reads “the fruit of the earth and excellent and comely”. This reading appears to be fragmented and almost impossible to understand. In order to deal with this difficult reading, the 1830 compositor intentionally omitted the and before “excellent and comely”. The result of this conscious decision can be seen in his typesetting for the 1830 edition where there is unusually extra spacing between each of the words on this line of type, precisely enough space for an extra and that the compositor first set but later decided to remove. He spread out the extra spacing between the words already on that line rather than shifting any words from the following line to fill in the line.
Even so, the difficulty is not fully alleviated by omitting the and that originally preceded “excellent and comely”. One could interpret the 1830 compositor’s decision as equivalent to omitting the italicized shall be of the King James text. Elsewhere, there is one place where an italicized shall be of the King James text is omitted when that passage is quoted in the Book of Mormon:
On the other hand, there is no other place where any King James shall be (whether italicized or not) has been replaced by and, a change that in any event would have been quite odd.
It is possible that an extra and might have been inserted before excellent as Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 to 𝓟. The nearby and before the following adjective comely (as well as perhaps the more distant and before the preceding adjective glorious) may have led Oliver to insert an extra and before the conjoined adjective excellent. The fact that the verb for this clause was lacking may have also motivated Oliver to put something between the noun phrase and the following conjoined adjectives “excellent and comely”.
There is evidence that Oliver Cowdery sometimes accidentally inserted extra and ’s under the influence of nearby and ’s. In the following two examples, a following and seems to have been the source of the extra and. In both these cases, Oliver caught his error and corrected it:
In the first example, 𝓞 is extant and reads correctly as “must reign in dominion”. The use of the ampersand is not due to mishearing in as and since the error in 𝓟 is the result of visually copying the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Instead, it appears that the following sequence of and ’s led Oliver to place an and before dominion. In the second example, Oliver initially started to write “and a fifth part” in 𝓟, undoubtedly because of the repeated occurrence of “and a fifth part” in the rest of this passage. Oliver initially wrote an ampersand after possessed, then erased it and overwrote it with the indefinite article a.
It seems that the most reasonable solution here in 2 Nephi 24:2 is to accept the 1830 compositor’s emendation. The and before “excellent and comely” seems just too difficult to justify, and we do have evidence that Oliver Cowdery did occasionally add and in anticipation of a following and. Accepting this emendation as the original text means that the King James italicized shall be was intentionally omitted in the Book of Mormon text, a much more reasonable conclusion than accepting the replacement of shall be with and.
We should also note here that in the corresponding King James text for 2 Nephi 14:2, the clause begins with a nonitalicized and (“and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely”), but this initial and is missing in the Book of Mormon text. It is doubtful that the and in 𝓟 that follows “the fruit of the earth” is simply the misplaced and from the beginning of the clause. Such accidental transpositions of and are not found in the Isaiah quotations of the Book of Mormon. The omission of the initial and results in a somewhat awkward type of coordination (referred to as asyndetic coordination) in which the conjunction is left unexpressed. There are three other examples in the King James quotations from Isaiah where an omitted and has led to such an asyndetic construction in the Book of Mormon text:
Thus we have some independent evidence that the omission of the initial and in 2 Nephi 14:2 is intended.
Summary: Maintain the 1830 compositor’s emendation of 2 Nephi 14:2, which implies that the and before “excellent and comely” in 𝓟 is a scribal error; on the other hand, the omission of the King James and at the beginning of this verbless clause appears to be intentional.