Ether 1:33 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people and [swear 1ABCDEFGHIJKLNOPS|swear > swore M|swore QRT] in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth

Here the earliest textual source, the printer’s manuscript, reads swear, but this is an error for the past-tense form sware (the result of swear and sware being homophones of each other). The misspelling probably originated in 𝓞 as Oliver Cowdery took down Joseph Smith’s dictation. In the third printing (in 1907) of the 1905 LDS edition, swear was replaced by the modern-day pasttense form swore. The LDS text has continued with swore, but the critical text will restore the original sware here. For another example of swear as a misspelling for sware, see under Ether 8:14; for a general discussion on the competition between sware and swore in the history of the text, see under Enos 1:14.

Summary: Restore the original past-tense form sware in Ether 1:33.

Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part. 6

References