Isaiah 13:17 (King James Bible) behold I will stir up the Medes against them which shall not regard silver / and as for gold they shall not delight in it
Here in 2 Nephi 23:17, the original Book of Mormon text varied from the King James text by omitting the italicized as for and inserting the negative conjunction nor before the clause “they shall not delight in it”. This last difference created an awkward nonstandard construction as well as a double negative (“nor they shall not delight in it”). The RLDS text has retained the original Book of Mormon phraseology, while the 1920 LDS edition reconfigured the syntax, giving the standard inverted word order (“nor shall they delight in it”). The original Book of Mormon text had only one case of nor preceding a clause for which the inverted word order showed up (that is, where the finite verb preceded the subject):
The current LDS text has one more case of the standard inverted word order after nor:
Originally the word order for this passage was different. In addition, there was a negative not. But instead of nor, the sentential conjunction was or:
This example is further complicated by having some preceding occurrences of nor and or (for further discussion, see Mosiah 2:13). The important point here is that this example originally had the noninverted word order (with the subject preceding the finite verb) followed by the negative not, just like originally in 2 Nephi 23:17.
Interestingly, the original text also had three examples where nor served to conjoin two subject noun phrases, which necessarily meant that the following verb phrase was forced to maintain the noninverted word order (that is, where the subject precedes the finite verb):
In each of these cases, the nor-conjunct is acting parenthetically and should perhaps be repunctuated using commas:
If we ignore the fact that these three clauses use the conjunction nor to conjoin a pair of subject conjuncts and start reading with the nor, all three of these have the same word order in the original text as does 2 Nephi 23:17:
In other words, each of these clauses contains the following sequence of words:
nor + noun phrase + helping verb + not + main verb
To be sure, the construction in all four cases is nonstandard in modern English. But since it is used this many times in the text, it appears to be intentional. For this reason, the critical text will retain the earliest reading in 2 Nephi 23:17, despite its awkwardness in modern English.
It should also be noted that the editing of the three passages with conjoined subjects involving nor has been uneven. In the first case, the not was deleted; in the second case, the nor was changed to or; but in the third case, there has been no change at all:
For further discussion, see negation in volume 3.
David Calabro points out (personal communication) that the Book of Mormon reading removes the original parallelism of the Hebrew, which is followed very literally (and awkwardly) in the King James translation. In the original Hebrew, the words silver and gold are found in separate but parallel clauses. The it at the end of the second clause refers to gold. Consequently, a modern English translation such as the New International Version translates this parallelism as “who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold”. A very literalistic English translation might be “who for silver do not care / and for gold do not delight in it”. In Hebrew, the clause- final preposition translated as in is represented by the clitic b-, which cannot stand alone but must occur with some nominal or pronominal form. Here the suffixal fflo (corresponding to it in English) must be added, which thereby refers the reader back to the preceding word gold. The King James translators chose to maintain the literal in it, and thus they inserted an italicized as for before the word gold. The Book of Mormon reading removes the as for and conjoins gold with the preceding silver. The rest of the second clause is then separated off by inserting nor in front of “they shall not delight in it”. However awkward, this alteration is clearly intended.
Summary: Restore the original reading in 2 Nephi 23:17 (“nor they shall not delight in it”); similar examples involving nor and conjoined subject noun phrases, despite their awkwardness, occur fairly frequently in the original text.