Helaman 15:9 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and ye know also that they have buried their weapons of war and they fear to take them up lest by any means they [shall 1A|should BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] sin

Both the 1830 edition and the printer’s manuscript have the modal shall in this lest-clause. The 1837 edition changed the shall to should, probably accidentally. A similar example of shall being replaced with should in a lest-clause occurred later in the text, in the 1888 LDS edition:

Either reading is theoretically possible here in Helaman 15:9 and in Mormon 8:17, although the modal verb should is much more frequent in lest-clauses than shall (which probably explains the tendency to replace shall with should ). For the overall text, we get the following statistics for the use of modals in lest-clauses:

should 48 times

NULL (no modal) 21 times

shall 15 times

could 2 times

would 2 times

might 1 time

In each case, we select the modal found in the earliest text. The original use of shall in the lest- clause here in Helaman 15:9 is perfectly acceptable and will be restored in the critical text. For a comparison of the modals used in a similar conditional clause (namely, in the that-clause that complements the verb phrase “will/wilt ... suffer”), see under Alma 56:46.

Summary: Restore the original modal shall in Helaman 15:9: “lest by any means they shall sin” (the reading in 𝓟 and the 1830 edition, both firsthand copies of 𝓞).

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

References