Helaman 10:10 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and behold if ye shall say [that 1BCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRT|That AL| S] God shall smite this people it shall come to pass

Elsewhere in the text, if an if-clause has a quotation introduced by the verb say, the subordinate conjunction that never precedes the quotation. We see this, for instance, in the two preceding verses here in Helaman 10:

We find the same for all other series of if-clauses with direct quotes:

And the same holds for various isolated instances of if-clauses where say introduces a quotation:

Thus it is not surprising that in Helaman 10:10 the that was omitted in the 1953 RLDS edition, even if unintentionally.

In standard English we expect the that when the quote is indirect, but not when the quote is direct:

indirect quote

he said that he was coming

direct quote

he said: “I am coming”

Here in Helaman 10:10, the quote can be interpreted as either indirect or direct, so that is clearly acceptable in standard English. Even so, it is worth noting that the Book of Mormon text allows that even when the quote is direct, as in the following example:

Thus there is no grammatical or textual motivation to remove the that here in Helaman 10:10; the critical text will maintain this unique reading with the that.

Summary: Maintain the subordinate conjunction that in Helaman 10:10: “and behold if ye shall say that God shall smite this people / it shall come to pass” (the reading in 𝓟, here the earliest extant source).

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

References