The word pleasing is not itself extant in the original manuscript, but spacing considerations based on surrounding fragments indicate that it was probably inserted supralinearly—that is, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “before the bar of God” and then corrected it by inserting pleasing. The transcript of 𝓞 reads as follows:
Jacob 6:12–13 (lines 3–5 on page 111 of 𝓞)
( I b)i(d you f)a(r)ewell untill I shall ( y)ou be I SAY MORE FINELY MEET
( )
PLEASING
( d) which bar striketh the wic(ke ) with awful dr
-FORE THE ^ BAR OF GO D
( ) ——————————— Chapter (V) ‰‰‰‰‰‰‰‰Ω ( )
-EAD & FEAR — AMEN ———— Ω
Accidentally omitting the word pleasing is perfectly reasonable here since normally the Book of Mormon refers to simply “the bar of God” (in nine different places) but only twice to “the pleasing bar of God”—here in Jacob 6:13 and once more at the end of the entire text, where Moroni declares:
The problem here in these two passages is that the word pleasing does not really work as a descriptive adjective for “the bar of God”. For the righteous, it may well be pleasing, but not for the wicked, as Jacob himself says in Jacob 6:13: “which bar striketh the wicked with awful dread and fear”. Nor do the nine other occurrences of “the bar of God” denote anything necessarily pleasing, including three that are definitely negative (each marked below with an asterisk):
Christian Gellinek (personal communication, 25 September 2003) suggests that the reading “the pleasing bar” is actually an error for “the pleading bar”. Gellinek further suggests that this change of pleading to pleasing (in Jacob 6:13 and Moroni 10:34) could have taken place as Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟. He proposes that 𝓞 had the correct pleading but that Oliver misread the d of pleading as an elongated s (that is, as pleaßing) and ended up writing pleasing in 𝓟. Presumably, Oliver twice made this same error in copying, here in Jacob 6:13 and also in Moroni 10:34. Yet nowhere else, while copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟 did Oliver ever misinterpret a d as an elongated s. In fact, Oliver himself rarely used that form of s in the manuscripts unlike scribes 2 and 3 of 𝓞, so he would not have been inclined to visually misinterpret pleading as pleaßing.
I myself would conjecture that if such an error entered the text, it probably occurred as Oliver Cowdery took down Joseph Smith’s dictation. (For Jacob 6:13, Oliver was definitely the scribe in 𝓞; for Moroni 10:34, he is the most likely candidate since the nearest extant portions of 𝓞 are in his hand.) Phonetically, pleading and pleasing are identical except for the manner of articulation for one sound: pleading has the voiced alveolar stop /d/ and pleasing the voiced alveolar fricative /z/. In the case of Jacob 6:13, Oliver could have also been influenced by the fact that previously in the book of Jacob there were several references to the very similar “pleasing word of God”:
But this source for influencing the text cannot explain the use of pleasing in Moroni 10:34 since there are no prior occurrences of the adjectival pleasing in the entire second half of the Book of Mormon text (that is, after Alma 30:53). Moreover, the book of Moroni was apparently dictated before the small plates of Nephi (see volume 3 for discussion of the order of translation). Since the small plates include the book of Jacob, there could have been no influence from the book of Jacob when Oliver took down Joseph’s dictation at the end of the book of Moroni. In fact, the phraseology in Moroni 10:34 is not literally “the pleasing bar of God” but instead is “the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah”, so the influence of “the pleasing word of God” from Jacob 2–3 couldn’t have been that strong even if the book of Jacob had been dictated prior to the book of Moroni.
What seems to have happened is that Oliver Cowdery, being completely unfamiliar with the legal term pleading bar, substituted the more familiar word pleasing for pleading, even though pleasing itself did not make much sense. There are a number of examples in the original manuscript where Oliver made this kind of mistake—that is, if a word or a phrase was unknown to him, he tended to substitute a more common word or phrase (but with varying degrees of success). In each of these cases, the substitution seems to have occurred in the original manuscript as Oliver took down Joseph Smith’s dictation; then it was later copied as such into the printer’s manuscript:
weed (𝓞, 𝓟) instead of reed (1830 edition)
bosom (𝓞, 𝓟) instead of besom (1830 edition)
arrest (𝓞, 𝓟, 1830 edition) instead of wrest (1837 edition)
drugs (𝓞, 𝓟) instead of dregs (1830 edition)
fraction (𝓞, 𝓟) instead of faction (1830 edition)
The examples of weed for reed and fraction for faction are not impossible readings, but given Oliver’s predilection to misinterpret unfamiliar expressions, weed and fraction are probably errors. For each of the five cases listed above, English language usage supports the current reading. (See the individual discussion for each of these examples.)
It should also be pointed out that for all these examples, Joseph Smith himself could have been responsible for the misreading. Even so, the fact that Oliver Cowdery copied these mistakes from 𝓞 into 𝓟 is an indication that Oliver himself was probably unfamiliar with the original words and phrases found in these examples. For four of these expressions, the 1830 compositor figured out the correct interpretation and emended the text appropriately (in the case of besom, he probably consulted his King James Bible). But the 1830 compositor, just like Oliver Cowdery, could not figure out the correct reading for two cases—namely, the phrase “wrest the scriptures” and the legal expression “before the pleading bar”. The 1830 compositor set both as Oliver had written them: “arrest the scriptures” and “before the pleasing bar”. The first of these was later corrected by Joseph Smith himself in his editing for the 1837 edition of the Book of Mormon, but the other has remained in all printed editions, apparently because no one until recently has recognized pleasing bar as an error for pleading bar.
One may wonder how Oliver Cowdery could have twice misinterpreted pleading bar as pleasing bar. Moroni 10:34 and Jacob 6:13 are located some distance apart (with about 110 manuscript pages of 𝓞 separating them, under the assumption that the small plates of Nephi were translated last). But one should note that the example of “wrest the scriptures” is also twice misinterpreted as “arrest the scriptures”, and the distance between Alma 13:20 and Alma 41:1 is almost 70 manuscript pages of 𝓞, also a large amount. It is clearly possible to make the same misinterpretation at two different times.
The term pleading bar appears to have been used in the English courts of earlier times, according to the following historical information available on the Internet:
“Report on Fordwich Trip” in Kent Message “Extra”, 10 September 1999
, accessed on 23 October 2003:
The tour ended at the town hall. Mr. Tritton said: “That was the most interesting part of the day. The people who made the film reproduced the court room back at their studio. They had the jury bench, the pleading bar, everything, right down to the smallest detail of King Charles II’s coat of arms.”
At the head of the stairs, Sgt. Bassett ducks under a beam inscribed ‘Love and honour the truth.’ In real life the court’s pleading bar, where prisoners stood while on trial, is at the head of the stairs. It does not obstruct anyone entering the room, nor bear an inscription—though the motto ‘Love and honour the truth’ is prominent under King Charles II’s Coat of Arms, displayed on the ceiling above the panelled rear wall.
Fordwich Town Hall website (updated on 23 July 2003)
< www.canterbury.gov.uk >, accessed on 23 October 2003:
On the first floor is the Court Room where all criminal cases in Fordwich were tried until 1886. The accused would stand flanked by the Town Constables, at the “pleading bar” situated at the head of the stairs. (Hence the expression “prisoner at the bar”). The Judge or chief magistrate was the Mayor for the time being and he sat in the chair at the north end of the room, flanked by six Jurats on each side, seated on the “bench”. The Mayor’s seat and bench together with the paneling are early Tudor in origin.
In The English Legal Heritage (Leicester, England: Oyez Publishing, 1979), there are three pertinent pictures (on pages 14–15, 26, and 85), each showing a defendant standing at the pleading bar and facing the judges or the jury. And the examples in the Book of Mormon text refer to the person being judged at the bar of God as standing:
The term pleading bar is now archaic in Britain. Note that the first website provides a definition for “the court’s pleading bar”; the second website uses quotation marks in referring to the “pleading bar”; and the book The English Legal Heritage never uses the term pleading bar anywhere in the text or in any of the captions for the pictures. The legal language now used refers to the defendant “in the dock” (no longer “standing at the bar”). The Oxford English Dictionary lists no citations of the term pleading bar, but Ed Cutler (personal communication, 1 October 2004) has found the following two instances of the term on Literature Online (); both citations date from the early 1600s (spelling regularized here):
And the actual translator of the Book of Mormon—the Lord himself or his translation committee—seems to have been familiar with the term! And it provides a vivid picture of how momentous and potentially dreadful the day of judgment will be for us as defendants standing at the pleading bar, with the Lord as judge, twelve apostles as jury (see 1 Nephi 12:8–10 and Mormon 3:18–19), and Nephi, Jacob, and Moroni as witnesses.
Summary: Emend Jacob 6:13 and Moroni 10:34 to read “the pleading bar” instead of the problematic “the pleasing bar”; Oliver Cowdery was apparently unfamiliar with the legal term and substituted pleasing for pleading, probably when he took down Joseph Smith’s dictation for these two passages.