Mosiah 14:11 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
he shall see [of 1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPS| QRT] the [travel 1|travail ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] of his soul and shall be satisfied

Isaiah 53:11 (King James Bible) he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied

The 1911 LDS edition of the Book of Mormon removed the word of after see, perhaps because the word of seemed awkward here. However, the resulting text changes the meaning of the original Hebrew (and the translated King James Bible). The Hebrew text clearly means something different from “he shall see the labor of his soul”. The original meaning of the preposition of is ‘from’ and the implied meaning of the Hebrew text is ‘he shall see the results from the labor of his soul’. Three Qumran manuscripts of Isaiah (1QIsaa, 1QIsab, and 4QIsad) have the additional word light (“from the labor of his soul he shall see light”), as does the Greek Septuagint in its paraphrastic translation of this passage. Despite the difficulty of the literally translated King James Bible (derived perhaps from a defective Hebrew text), the critical text will restore the original preposition of in Mosiah 14:11 since it is the earliest extant reading of the Book of Mormon text and it agrees with the King James reading.

Oliver Cowdery both spelled and pronounced travel and travail identically, as travel /trævßl/. As discussed under 2 Nephi 29:4, the context in each case determines whether the text should read travel or travail. Here in Mosiah 14:11, we obviously have travail, the King James reading.

Summary: Restore in Mosiah 14:11 the King James Bible’s preposition of after see since the earliest Book of Mormon textual sources read this way; the removal of the of leads to a potential change in the meaning of the passage; in this verse, the manuscript reading travel stands for the word travail in modern English.

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

References