Jacob 5:37 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and because that it hath brought forth so much evil fruit thou [beheldest 1|beholdest ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] that it beginneth to perish

In Jacob 5:37, the tense for the verb behold was altered by the 1830 typesetter. The printer’s manuscript has the verb in the past tense, thou beheldest, which seems odd because the servant was observing the perishing right then and there (“it beginneth to perish”). Notice, for instance, that the surrounding verbs are in the present tense (the present perfect hath brought and the simple present beginneth). David Calabro also points out (personal communication) that the past-tense thou beheldest also seems incongruous with the previous statement of the servant three verses earlier:

The 1830 typesetter seems to have noticed the incongruity with the surrounding and preceding text, with the result that the 1830 edition ended up with the present-tense thou beholdest.

The use of the present-tense thou beholdest is directly supported in three other places in the allegory of the olive tree. In each case, the surrounding verbs are in the present tense, again either the present perfect or the simple present:

Moreover, there is evidence elsewhere in the original text supporting the present-tense form of the verb behold in a present-tense context:

This example from Alma 34:6 is particularly relevant for analyzing thou beheldest, the reading in 𝓟 for Jacob 5:37. The original manuscript is extant for Alma 34:6 and reads in the present tense (“ye also behold”). Moreover, the following clause has a present perfect form (“my brother hath proven”). Yet when Oliver Cowdery copied Alma 34:6 from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he accidentally replaced behold with beheld, thus ending up (as in Jacob 5:37) with precisely the same incongruous use of the past tense of the verb behold in a present-tense context.

Evidence elsewhere in the manuscripts shows that the scribes (especially Oliver Cowdery) frequently wrote the past-tense beheld in place of the correct behold:

We should also note here that sometimes the scribes made errors in the opposite direction—that is, sometimes they incorrectly wrote behold instead of beheld:

The number of these examples is considerably less than the errors in the other direction.

All of this evidence strongly suggests that the reading “thou beheldest that it beginneth to perish”, the earliest extant reading for Jacob 5:37, is probably an error for “thou beholdest that it beginneth to perish”; the 1830 typesetter was correct to emend the past-tense beheldest to beholdest.

Summary: Accept in Jacob 5:37 the 1830 typesetter’s emendation of thou beheldest to thou beholdest; this emendation is supported by usage elsewhere in the text as well as by Oliver Cowdery’s tendency to frequently write beheld in place of behold.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 2

References