Mosiah 12:34 Textual Variants

Exodus 20:2 (King James Bible) I am the LORD thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt

The original text of the Book of Mormon has the same verb form have as does the corresponding King James passage in Exodus 20:2. The have is actually in agreement with the preceding I (that is, “I ... have brought thee out of the land of Egypt”). In the Hebrew, the verb form for have brought directly expresses a first person singular subject; the King James use of have is therefore literally consistent with the original Hebrew. A similar example is found later on in the book of Leviticus:

• Leviticus 20:24 (King James Bible)
  • I am the LORD your God which have separated you from other people

Like Exodus 20:2, the original Hebrew for Leviticus 20:24 directly supports the literal English translation: the verb form that follows the relative pronoun explicitly indicates that the subject is I. The critical text will therefore restore the earliest reading in Mosiah 12:34: “I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt”.

For the 1837 edition, the original have was replaced by has. In addition, Joseph Smith edited the relative pronoun which to who, in accord with his general editing practice of replacing which with who(m) whenever the relative pronoun refers to a person. The change to has assumes that the antecedent for the relative pronoun which (or the edited who) is the nearest noun phrase, the Lord thy God, rather than earlier I. Interestingly, in the 1841 British edition, the typesetter accidentally changed the has to hast, perhaps under the influence of the preceding thy in “the Lord thy God”. This inappropriate verb form was maintained in the LDS text until the 1920 edition, when hast was replaced by hath, probably because the biblically styled hath sounded more appropriate than the has that the 1837 edition had introduced. Like has, the hath assumes that the antecedent for the relative pronoun is the Lord thy God.