Mosiah 10:8 Textual Variants

and they were girded [about >js NULL 1|about A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] with a leathern girdle about their loins

In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith removed the redundant about here in Mosiah 10:8, although the redundancy is not particularly offensive. As discussed under Jacob 7:8, the original Book of Mormon text (as well as the King James Bible itself ) has a number of examples where the adverb for a phrasal verb occurs twice:

Alma 55:16 and cast in the weapons of war in unto the prisoners
Alma 62:6 which had driven out the freemen out of the land of Zarahemla
3 Nephi 14:4 let me pull out the mote out of thine eye
3 Nephi 14:5 first cast out the beam out of thine own eye
3 Nephi 14:5 to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye

The last three examples quote Matthew 7:4–5, which has the repeated out in the King James translation. The editing tendency in the Book of Mormon has been to remove these redundancies (see the discussion under each example); the critical text will restore in each case the repeated adverb.

Summary: Restore the original repeated adverb about in Mosiah 10:8: “they were girded about with a leathern girdle about their loins”.

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

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