Mosiah 9:19 Textual Variants

In English, the phrase “help (to) do something” can occur with or without the infinitival marker to. Here in Mosiah 9:19, the 1830 typesetter added the to before bury, but this was unnecessary since the reading “did help bury” is perfectly fine—in fact, this reading is much more natural in modern English than the current reading “did help to bury”, especially if the archaic use of the do verb is removed (compare “I helped bury him” with “I helped to bury him”). In accord with the reading in 𝓟, the RLDS text has restored the original reading (from the 1908 edition on).

There is one other place in the Book of Mormon text where the verb help is followed by an infinitive clause; for this particular example, there is a series of conjoined infinitive clauses:

• Ether 8:16
  • and they were kept up by the power of the devil to administer these oaths unto the people to keep them in darkness to help such as sought power to gain power and to murder and to plunder and to lie and to commit all manner of wickedness and whoredoms

Also in this example, the infinitival subject is explicitly stated (“such as sought power”), which helps facilitate the use of the infinitival to. In the King James Bible, we have two examples of help followed by an infinitive clause, and in both cases the infinitival to is there:

• Deuteronomy 22:4 thou shalt surely help him to lift them up again
• 2 Chronicles 20:23 every one helped to destroy another

One could argue from these few examples that the original text for Mosiah 9:19 read “did help to bury their dead” and that the infinitival to was accidentally lost during the early transmission of the text. But the earliest reading without the to is perfectly fine; moreover, one opposing example with to (in Ether 8:16) is insufficient to emend the other example for which the to is lacking. The critical text will accept the earliest extant reading in Mosiah 9:19 as the original reading.