Isaiah 10:5 (King James Bible) O Assyrian the rod of mine anger and the staff in their hand is mine indignation
When copying this passage from 𝓞 into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “their staff ”, then somewhat later crossed out the their and wrote the above the crossed-out their. The ink flow for the crossout and the insert mark was made with heavier ink flow, while the supralinear the was written with weaker ink flow. The correction may have been made when Oliver proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞. The apparent source of the error was the their in the immediately following “in their hand”.
The Book of Mormon text for this passage reads “is their indignation”, whereas the King James Bible has “is mine indignation”. The parallelistic Hebrew text twice claims that the Assyrian symbol of power represents God’s judgment (“the rod of mine anger and the staff in their hand is mine indignation”). It seems possible that the final their (the one in “is their indignation”) is an error in copying, although we do not have the original manuscript here. Emending “in their indignation” to “in mine indignation” has been proposed by John A. Tvedtnes (for his arguments, see page 48 of “The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon”, FARMS preliminary report, 1984).
The preceding initial error in 𝓟, where Oliver Cowdery initially wrote their instead of the in the phrase “the staff in their hand”, shows that the original their before hand can lead to copy errors. More significantly for the reading here in 2 Nephi 20:5, there are instances in the manuscripts where the scribes accidentally wrote the wrong possessive pronoun under the influence of a preceding pronoun. In each of the following ten cases, the scribe corrected his initial manuscript error:
Thus we have considerable evidence elsewhere in the manuscripts to suggest that “and the staff in their hand is their indignation” in 2 Nephi 20:5 could be an error for “and the staff in their hand is mine indignation” (the King James reading).
Ultimately, the reading in the Book of Mormon (“the staff in their hand is their indignation”) is not a difficult reading unless one notices the problem in the lack of parallelism with the previous “the rod of mine anger”. Clearly, if we did not have the King James Bible to compare the Book of Mormon text to, we would probably not notice any difficulty with “their indignation”. On the other hand, there would have been no clear motivation for changing “mine indignation” to “their indignation” (assuming that the King James reading, which follows the original Hebrew, is indeed the original Book of Mormon reading). Thus we are left with a very difficult decision. Probably the safest solution here would be to retain the earliest Book of Mormon reading (“their indignation”), but with the understanding that this reading could very well be a scribal error for “mine indignation”.
Summary: Retain in 2 Nephi 20:5 the reading “their indignation” (the reading of the printer’s manuscript, here the earliest textual source); nonetheless, this reading may be an error for “mine indignation” (the King James reading), where the replacement of mine by their in the Book of Mormon text could be an early transmission error caused by the their in the immediately preceding “in their hand”.