Isaiah 10:30 (King James Bible) lift up thy voice O daughter of Gallim
Here in 2 Nephi 20:30, one may wonder whether the Book of Mormon’s the is an error for the King James thy. Because of visual similarity, an original thy could have been accidentally replaced by the in the early transmission of the text. The original manuscript is not extant for this passage, which makes it difficult to recover the original text.
The Book of Mormon text prefers the use of the possessive pronoun before voice in the expression “lift (up) one’s voice”. If we exclude the Isaiah quotations, we have only examples with a possessive pronoun:
Only in the Book of Mormon Isaiah quotations do we get examples of the as the determiner for voice. Besides the use of the in 2 Nephi 20:30, there are four quotations of Isaiah 52:8, of which two have the the that is found in the King James version, but two others have their:
This variability suggests that either the or thy is possible in 2 Nephi 20:30, although the tendency in the citations of Isaiah 52:8 has been to replace the original the with the possessive pronoun their. In 2 Nephi 20:30, the change is in the opposite direction, from a possessive pronoun (namely, thy) to the. In any event, the definite article the will work in 2 Nephi 20:30.
It turns out that the example in Isaiah 52:8 is the only example in all of the King James Isaiah that has the instead of a possessive pronoun in this expression referring to the lifting up of one’s voice:
In the actual Hebrew for Isaiah 52:8, there is no the for voice, which means that orthographically the only difference between “the voice” and “thy voice” in the Hebrew is a suffixal k at the end of qfflol ‘voice’. Interestingly, in the Great Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran (1QIsaa), Isaiah 52:8 reads “listen / thy watchmen lift up their voice”. One could interpret this reading as evidence that there were no instances in the original Hebrew text of “lift up (the) voice”—that is, each instance of this expression originally had a possessive pronominal suffix at the end of qfflol. Such an analysis would mean that the Masoretic text for Isaiah 52:8, which has no possessive pronominal suffix, would represent an early error in the Hebrew text. In fact, this verse begins with a different use of qfflol for which there is no suffix. This qfflol is typically translated as listen (as in the New International Version), but it was ignored in the King James translation. This sentence-initial use of qfflol may have been the source for removing the possessive pronominal suffix for ‘their’ from the following qfflol. This example would then show that the Hebrew text was susceptible to losing the pronominal suffix after qfflol. In addition, this variation in the Hebrew text for Isaiah 52:8 could explain the variation in the Book of Mormon text, which has two occurrences of “lift up their voice” and two of “lift up the voice”. Finally, since in Isaiah 52:8 the second qfflol may have lost its original pronominal suffix in the Hebrew, the same may have happened in Isaiah 10:30 in the Hebrew text for the Book of Mormon. In other words, Nephi’s own copy-text may have simply read as qfflol, without the possessive pronominal suffix.
On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that thy tended to be replaced by the more common the in the early transmission of the Book of Mormon text:
Most important for this analysis, there are three examples in the original manuscript where Oliver Cowdery initially wrote the, then corrected it to thy by overwriting the e with a y:
And the first two are especially relevant since the errors occur in an Isaiah quotation:
We therefore have substantial evidence to support the hypothesis that the original text for 2 Nephi 20:30 may have originally read “lift up thy voice” (that is, identically to the King James reading).
As discussed under 2 Nephi 20:10 (see founded) and 2 Nephi 20:13 (see moved and borders), the general practice in the critical text is to accept the earliest reading of the textual sources unless there is something wrong with the reading. Here in 2 Nephi 20:30, the reading with the is definitely acceptable; thus this variant will be accepted even though there is strong evidence that it could be an error for thy.
Summary: In accord with the earliest textual reading (in 𝓟), retain the in “lift up the voice / O daughter of Gallim”, even though there is considerable scribal evidence to support the King James (and Masoretic Hebrew) reading “thy voice” here in 2 Nephi 20:30.