Jacob 6:1 Textual Variants

Here Oliver Cowdery corrected the initial text of the printer’s manuscript when he supralinearly inserted behold with a heavier ink flow. This change does not appear to be grammatically motivated, especially since it creates a sentence with two behold ’s. Oliver Cowdery probably added the behold while proofing his copy against the original manuscript (which is not extant here).

There are 22 examples in the text of two or more behold ’s in the same sentence, including the following examples where there is an intervening subordinate clause headed by a subordinate conjunction:

• Alma 34:35
  • for behold if ye have procrastinated the day of your repentance even until death behold ye have become subjected to the spirit of the devil
• Alma 52:1
  • And now it came to pass in the twenty and sixth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi behold when the Lamanites awoke on the first morning of the first month behold they found Amalickiah was dead in his own tent
• Helaman 14:20
  • but behold
    —as I said unto you concerning another sign / a sign of his death—
    behold in the day that he shall suffer death the sun shall be darkened

The last example has the same subordinate conjunction that Jacob 6:1 has (namely, as). From the perspective of usage elsewhere in the Book of Mormon text, there is nothing unusual about the use of multiple behold ’s within the same sentence; the insertion of the first behold in Jacob 6:1 should therefore be accepted as the reading of the original text.