Mosiah 23:28 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
therefore they hushed their fears and began to cry unto the Lord that he would soften the hearts of the Lamanites that they would spare them and their wives and [ 1|their ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] children

The printer’s manuscript lacks a repeated their before children. Normally, the Book of Mormon text repeats the determiner in conjuncts involving wives and children (30 times in the original text):

their wives and their children 21 times

our wives and our children 5 times

your wives and your children 2 times

for their wives and for their children 1 time

the wives and the children of the guards 1 time

In two of these cases, the repeated determiner has been omitted at some time in the history of the text; in the first case, the omission was restricted to only one edition, but in the second case the omission has continued in all subsequent editions:

These examples show once more the tendency to remove repeated determiners from conjunctive noun phrases (for a complete discussion, see conjunctive repetition in volume 3).

However, there are three other cases where the earliest source for the text (the printer’s manuscript in each instance) has the determiner in front of only the first conjunct, wives:

Note in the last instance how the 1841 British edition accidentally inserted a repeated his before children, but this repeated determiner did not continue in subsequent editions.

Thus there appears to be some evidence that the determiner is not always repeated when wives and children are conjoined. The critical text will in each case follow the earliest textual sources in determining whether the determiner is repeated.

Summary: Restore in Mosiah 23:28 the earliest reading without the repeated their: “that they would spare them and their wives and children”.

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

References