Helaman 5:11 Textual Variants

The final part of this passage is hard to understand. Something could be wrong here in the relative clause that ends the verse: “which bringeth unto the power of the Redeemer unto the salvation of their souls”. 𝓟 reads this way, as does every printed edition. 𝓞 is not extant here, so perhaps there was some error that occurred when Oliver Cowdery copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟. Or perhaps some error occurred when Joseph Smith dictated the text to Oliver.

A number of correspondents have suggested a couple of emendations to the text here, involving either the addition or deletion of a single word:

Karl Franson (personal communication, 2 October 2003) suggests that the first occurrence of unto is extra; in other words, the original text read “which bringeth the power of the Redeemer unto the salvation of their souls”. An extra unto could have been inserted during the early transmission of the text, prompted by the following unto in “unto the salvation of their souls”.

Joseph Reed (personal communication, 22 November 2003) suggests that something has been left out here. More specifically, Ross Geddes (personal communication, 12 September 2004) suggests that the subject pronoun them is missing; in other words, the original text read “which bringeth them unto the power of the Redeemer unto the salvation of their souls”. If them had been pronounced /ßm/, then it might have been hard for Oliver Cowdery to hear this syllable after the verb bringeth since that word already ends in an unstressed syllable, /ßh/, that has the same reduced vowel /ß/. In addition, there is the following syllable, the un of unto (pronounced as /ßn/), and it is almost identical to /ßm/. Thus it could have been quite difficult to hear them (pronounced as /ßm/) between bringeth and unto.

On the other hand, Lyle Fletcher points out (personal communication, 19 October 2004) that although the verb bring almost always takes a direct object, there are a few cases of ellipsis, as in the following examples:

• three-witness statement (“he brought and laid the plates before our eyes”)
  • and he brought and laid before our eyes that we beheld and saw the plates and the engravings thereon
• Alma 32:31 (“every seed bringeth forth fruit unto its own likeness”)
  • and now behold are ye sure that this is a good seed
    I say unto you : yea for every seed bringeth forth unto its own likeness
• Alma 55:8 (“we have took of their wine and brought it with us”)
  • and behold we have took of their wine and brought with us
• Ether 12:28 (“faith hope and charity bringeth the humble unto me”)
  • and I will shew unto them that faith hope and charity bringeth unto me / the fountain of all righteousness

In the last case, “the fountain of all righteousness” is not the direct object but instead an appositive modifying me (on this point, see the discussion regarding the phrase “the Sun/Son of righteousness” under 2 Nephi 26:9). More importantly, this last example refers to bringing the humble to Christ, similar to bringing the repentant to salvation in Helaman 5:11. Thus we can provide a reasonable interpretation for Helaman 5:11 without resorting to emendation. The critical text will therefore maintain the invariant reading in this passage without specifying any explicit direct object for the verb bring, thus “which bringeth unto the power of the Redeemer unto the salvation of their souls”.