Enos 1:26–27 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and [as 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQS| RT] I saw that I must soon go down to my grave having been wrought upon by the power of God that I must preach and prophesy unto this people and declare the word according to the truth which is in Christ and I have declared it in all my days and have rejoiced in it above that of the world and I soon go to the place of my rest …

This complex initial subordinate clause is never completed; thus the committee for the 1920 LDS edition deleted the subordinate conjunction as so that the original sentence fragment was eliminated. The original text of the Book of Mormon had many examples of such complex constructions “getting out of control”, so to speak, and never being completed. Over time editors have striven to remove such infelicities—in this case, by deleting the as. For a list of examples, see the discussion under 1 Nephi 8:7.

Summary: Restore in Enos 1:26 the original subordinate conjunction as; although this change restores an incomplete initial subordinate clause, such complex fragments were fairly frequent in the earliest text and appear (for the most part) to belong in the original text.

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

References