3 Nephi 21:15–16 Textual Variants

Micah 5:11–12 (King James Bible) and I will cut off the cities of thy land and throw down all thy strong holds and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand

Here in 3 Nephi 21:16, the 1840 edition replaced the original hand with land. It is possible to interpret this 1840 change as intentional, although not necessarily so. Earlier in verse 15, the nearly parallel clause reads “and I will cut off the cities of thy land”, which undoubtedly prompted the change in verse 16 (whether intentional or not) to “and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thy land”. The 1908 RLDS edition restored the original hand, but surprisingly the 1920 LDS edition consciously adopted the 1840 reading (the change is marked in the 1920 committee copy). The earliest reading, hand, is definitely correct since it is not only the earliest reading in the Book of Mormon text but it is also the reading in Micah 5:12. The critical text will restore the original hand.

There are two examples in Oliver Cowdery’s copying of the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟 where he mixed up land(s) with the visually similar hand(s):

• 2 Nephi 24:25 (Isaiah 14:25 has land )
  • that I will break the Assyrian in my [land 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|hand > land 1]
• Helaman 16:7
  • and as they went forth to lay their hands on him behold he did cast himself down from the wall and did flee out of their [lands 0ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST|hands 1].

In both instances, 𝓞 is extant and reads land(s). In the first instance, Oliver’s error was only momentary; but in the second, he never caught his error. (In this second case, the 1830 edition was set from 𝓞, so Oliver’s error did not persist.) Also note that in Helaman 16:7 there is a preceding hands in the passage (“to lay their hands on him”) that led Oliver to misread lands as hands when he copied the text. We have a similar case here in 3 Nephi 21:16: a preceding land in verse 15 led to the 1840 change of hand to land (whether intentional or not).