Mosiah 23:12 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and now I say unto you [as >js NULL 1|As A| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] you have been oppressed by king Noah and have been in bondage to him and his priests and have been brought into iniquity by them [NULL >jg ; 1|; ABCGHKNPRST|: DEFIJLMOQ] therefore ye were bound with the bands of iniquity

Here in his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith deleted the subordinate conjunction as. Yet elsewhere in the current text there are numerous examples of an initial as-clause followed by a finite clause beginning with therefore:

There are three other cases where therefore was deleted from this kind of construction, all by Joseph Smith in his editing for the 1837 edition:

In each of these three cases, there is a preceding wherefore or therefore before the as; the apparent intent of Joseph’s editing in these three cases was to avoid the repetition of wherefore and therefore. For further discussion, see under 2 Nephi 5:21.

The real problem with Mosiah 23:12 results from the 1830 compositor’s decision to place a semicolon (which leads to closure) just before the finite therefore- clause. This punctuation ended up creating a stranded subordinate clause, which induced Joseph Smith to remove the as in his editing for the 1837 edition. Instead, the semicolon should have been replaced by a comma, as in the numerous examples of the as-therefore construction that have been retained in the Book of Mormon text. In another passage, the 1830 compositor omitted the as (perhaps accidentally), which then permitted him to place a semicolon before the therefore-clause:

For a passage where an original as may have been removed from the original manuscript itself, see Alma 57:3.

Summary: Restore the subordinate conjunction as in Mosiah 23:12; the following main clause (which begins with therefore) completes the preceding subordinate as-clause, which means that there should be no semicolon (or any other punctuation that leads to closure) separating the two clauses.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 3

References