Enos 1:18 Textual Variants

Joanne Case has suggested (personal communication, 7 December 2003) that this passage should read “thy fathers have also requested of me this thing”. This clearly seems to be the meaning. One possibility is that there has been a visual misreading here since required and requested look alike. The original manuscript is not extant for this part of the text.

More interesting as a possibility is that the verb form required is actually correct but that it has the obsolete meaning ‘requested’. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the verb require originally had the meaning ‘to ask or request’ (see the first three definitions listed under section I, all of which are identified as obsolete). The OED citations show this meaning continuing up into the 1600s, including one dating from 1613 in Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII. In this scene Cardinal Wolsey is speaking to the king but definitely not requiring anything of the king, only requesting:

• King Henry VIII (act 2, scene 4, lines 144–146)
  • Most gracious sir, In humblest manner I require your Highness That it shall please you to declare …

There are also a number of instances in the King James Bible where the word require clearly has this now-archaic meaning of ‘request’, including the following examples:

• Ezra 8:22
  • for I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers and horsemen to help us against the enemy in the way
• Proverbs 30:7
  • two things have I required of thee deny me them not before I die
• Luke 23:23–24
  • and they were instant with loud voices requiring that he might be crucified and the voices of them and of the chief priests prevailed and Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required

Some other Book of Mormon instances of required may also mean ‘requested’, as in Mosiah 18:27: “and he that hath but little / but little should be required”.

What is most striking about the Book of Mormon use of require with the meaning ‘request’ is that it provides an example of a word meaning that had apparently died out long before 1829. Yet there are quite a few examples of words with archaic meanings dating from the 1500s and 1600s that occur in the original text of the Book of Mormon and not just in quotations from the King James Bible. In fact, some of these archaic word uses are not found in the King James Bible (although this particular one is). For a list of examples, see under Mosiah 19:24. For a complete discussion of the archaic language in the original Book of Mormon text, see volume 3.