Mosiah 19:7 Textual Variants

The use of yea in the following clause explains that the pronoun them refers to king Noah’s people. Even though the pronoun them seems stranded, the text recovers by using the yea-clause to provide the referent for them, namely “my people”.

The 1906 LDS large-print edition introduced the us that is found in the current LDS text. This change was adopted in the third printing (in 1907) of the 1905 Chicago missionary edition. The apparent source for this innovative us is the us in the preceding clause (“the Lamanites are upon us”). Although the change to us clears up the immediate problem with them, the resulting yea-clause now becomes virtually anomalous. The pronoun us already means king Noah, Gideon, and all the people, so why do we now need a yea-clause that provides no explication? Thus the change to us creates a difficulty that never existed in the original text.

It is possible that the 1906 change from them to us is a typo. Notice a similar error that occurred earlier in the book of Mosiah (in this case, as an initial error in the printer’s manuscript):

• Mosiah 9:11
  • therefore it came to pass that after we had dwelt in the land for the space of twelve years that king Laman began to grow uneasy lest by any means my people should wax strong in the land and that they could not overpower [us > them 1|them ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] and bring them into bondage

See under Mosiah 9:11 for discussion of that example. Here in Mosiah 19:7, the critical text will maintain the original reading.