Jacob 7:8 Textual Variants

Joanne Case (personal communication, 7 December 2003) suggests that here the adverbial in seems to be an error and should perhaps be deleted. If the use of in is an error in Jacob 7:8, it may have come from the following into (“into my soul”) or from the in in the following clause (“insomuch that I did confound him in all his words”).

Another possible emendation would be to replace in with out since elsewhere there are numerous examples of “the Lord pouring out his Spirit”:

• Mosiah 4:20 nay he hath poured out his Spirit upon you
• Mosiah 18:10 that he may pour out his Spirit more abundantly upon you
• Mosiah 18:12 O Lord pour out thy Spirit upon thy servant
• Mosiah 18:13 and may the Spirit of the Lord be poured out upon you
• Mosiah 25:24 and the Lord did pour out his Spirit upon them
• Alma 8:10 that he would pour out his Spirit upon the people
• Alma 19:36 thus the Lord did begin to pour out his Spirit upon them
• Helaman 6:36 the Lord began to pour out his Spirit upon the Lamanites

This usage is also found in the familiar phrase from Joel in the Old Testament, which is quoted by Peter in Acts 2:17:

• Joel 2:28 (King James Bible)
  • and it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh

Yet all of these examples refer to the Lord “pouring out his Spirit upon someone” rather than “into their soul”.

Evidence elsewhere in the text shows that phrasal verbs can sometimes repeat their adverbial by allowing the adverbial to occur immediately after the verb proper and also after the direct object. This kind of redundancy has generally been edited out of the text:

• Mosiah 10:8 (“to be girded about with something about one’s loins”)
  • and they were girded [about >js NULL 1|about A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] with a leathern girdle about their loins
• Alma 55:16 (“to cast in something in unto someone”)
  • and Moroni had prepared his men with weapons of war and he went to the city Gid while the Lamanites were in a deep sleep and drunken and cast in the weapons of war [in 01ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS| RT] unto the prisoners insomuch that they were all armed
• Alma 62:6 (“to drive out someone out of somewhere”)
  • they became exceeding strong even stronger than the men of Pachus which was the king of those dissenters which had driven [out 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS| RT] the freemen out of the land of Zarahemla

Such adverbial repetition is also found in the King James Bible, including one passage from the Sermon on the Mount that is quoted in 3 Nephi:

• 3 Nephi 14:4–5 (original Book of Mormon text, quoting Matthew 7:4–5)
  • let me pull out the mote out of thine eye and behold a beam is in thine own eye thou hypocrite first cast out the beam out of thine own eye and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye

For the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith removed the adverbial redundancy for the two phrasal verbs pull out and cast out in this King James quotation (by deleting the first out in each instance). The occurrence of such repetition in the King James text, as well as the examples of gird about, cast in, and drive out in the Book of Mormon text, argues that the redundancy of pour in in Jacob 7:8 is intentional rather than attributable to an error in transmission. If the text were to be edited here, the in should probably be deleted, just as the first adverbial was deleted in Mosiah 10:8, Alma 62:6, and 3 Nephi 14:4–5. The critical text, however, will keep the original reading in Jacob 7:8 even though the proposed revision “the Lord God poured his Spirit into my soul” reads more fluently.