Jacob 3:10 Textual Variants

The printer’s manuscript here reads sot, which the 1830 typesetter interpreted as set. However, another possibility is that Oliver Cowdery’s scribal slip sot stands for sat rather than set. Elsewhere in the standard edited text, there are 43 occurrences where the transitive verb set is used in either the simple past, the perfect, or the passive. In the earliest text, five of these instances read sat instead of set—that is, as either the simple past, the perfect, or the passive of the historically intransitive verb sit:

• 1 Nephi 11:1 (past perfect)
  • I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord yea into an exceeding high mountain a mountain which I never had before seen and upon which I never had before [sat 01ABCD|set EFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] my foot
• Mosiah 10:2 (simple past)
  • and I [sat 1|set ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] guards round about the land
• Mosiah 11:11 (passive)
  • and the seats which was [sat 1|set ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] apart for the high priests which was above all the other seats he did ornament with pure gold
• Alma 8:21–23 (simple past)
  • and he brought forth bread and meat and [sat 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS|set RT] before Alma and it came to pass that Alma ate bread and he was filled and he blessed Amulek and his house and he gave thanks unto God and after he had eat and was filled he saith unto Amulek …
    • [The original text here does not mean that Amulek sat down in front of Alma. Instead, as a good host, Amulek set food before Alma and let Alma eat until he was filled. The direct object for the verb set is understood. For further discussion on interpreting this passage, see Alma 8:21.]
• 3 Nephi 17:12 (simple past)
  • so they brought their little children and [sat 1ABCEFGIJLMNOPQS|set DHKRT] them down upon the ground round about him

Thus sat is possible where standard English expects set, although in the 38 other cases the earliest textual sources have the standard set rather than the dialectal sat. And there is one example, the first one listed above (1 Nephi 11:1) where sat occurs as the perfect form in a transitive case. There are 14 cases in the earliest text where the standard set occurs in the perfect (that is, preceded by the perfect auxiliary have), of which three cases refer to setting an example, just like Jacob 3:10:

• 2 Nephi 31:9 he having set the example before them
• Alma 39:1 behold has he not set a good example for thee
• 3 Nephi 18:16 I have set an example before you

In these three examples, both set and example are in the same clause (and take the form “set example”). But in Jacob 3:10 sat ‘set’ is in a relative clause, and example is in the preceding clause and acts as the antecedent for the relative pronoun that which follows. This difference in phraseology may have played a role in allowing the nonstandard use of sat to occur in Jacob 3:10.

Given the sporadic occurrence of sat for set, it is therefore possible that in the printer’s manuscript for Jacob 3:10, Oliver Cowdery’s sot stands for sat rather than the standard set. When we look at the kinds of scribal slips that Oliver Cowdery made in the manuscripts, we find that he accidentally miswrote the letter a as o quite a few times:

The tendency to write o instead of a is usually influenced by a following n (15 out of the 21 instances). And for some of these words, an o elsewhere in the word may have facilitated the miswriting of an a as o (commanded, commandments, harrowed, narrow, northward, and notwithstanding). Even so, there are two examples where a was miswritten as o right before a t and there was no o elsewhere in the word: namely, Bottle and fothers. These two examples provide support for the possibility that Oliver could have miswritten sat as sot. In contrast to all of these examples of miswriting a as o, there are only two examples where Oliver miswrote e as o; and in both of these examples there is an o elsewhere in the word that may have led to miswriting the e as an o (behold and others):

Overall, the chances are less that Oliver Cowdery miswrote set as sot.

The critical text will therefore interpret the sot in 𝓟 as a scribal slip for sat. There are five cases where the earliest text clearly read sat instead of the standard set, and Jacob 3:10 appears to be a sixth case of this nonstandard usage. For further discussion of the nonstandard use of sat, see 1 Nephi 11:1 as well as sit in volume 3.