Helaman 2:1 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
after Moronihah had established again [the 0A|the >js NULL 1| BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] peace between the Nephites and the Lamanites …

Here Joseph Smith removed the definite article the since in English we expect the phraseology “to establish peace between X and Y”—that is, without the definite article the. If peace is postmodified by an of-prepositional phrase, we typically get the before peace in the Book of Mormon text:

Moreover, there are three occurrences of “to keep the peace” without any postmodification, and in each case the definite article the has been retained:

Of course, the verb here is keep rather than establish, and we expect the the in that case.

There is no other example in the text quite like this one in Helaman 2:1. Here Joseph Smith’s editing seems to deal with a question of style rather than grammar. The critical text will restore the original the.

Summary: Restore in Helaman 2:1 the definite article the before peace since the earliest text read this way and there is really nothing wrong with the expression “to establish the peace”.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 5

References