Mosiah 11:17–18 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and the Lamanites [come 1|came ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] upon them and killed them and drove many of their flocks out of the land … and it came to pass that king Noah sent his armies against them and they were driven back or they [drive 1|drove ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] them back for a time

Here the 1830 typesetter dealt with two incorrect uses of the simple present tense by substituting the corresponding simple past-tense form (came for come and drove for drive). Of course, the original manuscript could have also had the simple past-tense forms. But another possibility is that the original manuscript might have used the periphrastic past-tense forms, did come and did drive, so that these errors in the printer’s manuscript could have simply been due to the loss of the past-tense auxiliary verb form did. Nonetheless, it is rather doubtful that in Mosiah 11:17–18 both come and drive are the result of dropping the auxiliary verb form did. There are no examples elsewhere in the text of more than one periphrastic do being omitted within a given passage; but there are quite a few passages where Oliver Cowdery omitted a single periphrastic verb form, at least momentarily:

In each of these examples, Oliver initially omitted the auxiliary verb do in the printer’s manuscript but later supplied it, sometimes almost immediately.

For the specific case of come, we have considerable evidence that Oliver Cowdery frequently miswrote came as come:

Thus Oliver frequently replaced came with come. On the other hand, there are 38 occurrences in the original text of did come (counting only those cases without any intervening word between the did and the come), yet for none of these did the scribes ever drop the auxiliary did. The preponderance of the textual evidence suggests that here in Mosiah 11:17, the come in the printer’s manuscript is an error for came rather than did come.

With respect to the case of drive, the solution is more difficult. There are seven occurrences of did drive in the text:

For five of these cases, the preceding finite verb is also the auxiliary verb did.

In contrast to these examples, there are six examples in the earliest text of the simple pasttense drove or drave:

In five of these six cases, the preceding finite verbs are also in the simple past tense. In only one case, the last one, is the preceding finite verb the auxiliary verb did. Related to this last example is the following instance where the immediately preceding finite verb is once more the auxiliary did:

For this example, Oliver Cowdery later (with uneven and heavier ink flow) changed drive to drove and slay to slew. These two changes appear to be the result of proofing 𝓟 against 𝓞, not editing; for discussion, see under Mosiah 21:8.

In Mosiah 11:18 the preceding finite verb is the simple past-tense were (“they were driven back”), which suggests that statistically the more probable original reading was drove rather than did drive; nonetheless, did drive is still possible. Yet one further possibility is that the original text read drave rather than drove. Of the six occurrences of the past-tense form for drive in the earliest text, two actually read drave (see the preceding list). For the three cases where 𝓞 is extant, one reads drave while the two others read drove. If the original manuscript (not extant for the book of Mosiah) read drave in Mosiah 11:18, the misreading to drive would have been much easier since a looks much more like i than o does; in fact, Oliver Cowdery frequently wrote his a like a u, which would have further facilitated the misreading drive.

Ultimately, the probable source for misreading either drove or drave as drive in Mosiah 11:18 was the occurrence of driven in the immediately preceding clause (“they were driven back”). Since drove is slightly more frequent than drave in the earliest readings, the critical text will assume that the 1830 typesetter’s emendation of drive to drove restored the original reading. Yet both drave and did drive remain viable alternatives here in Mosiah 11:8.

Summary: Accept in Mosiah 11:17–18 the 1830 emendations of come to came and drive to drove as the most probable original readings; even so, there is some possibility that the original text read did come in the first instance and either drave or did drive in the second instance.

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

References