Ether 6:5 Textual Variants

Royal Skousen
and it came to pass that the Lord God caused that there should [ 1ABCDEFGHIJKLNOPS|be MQRT] a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters towards the promised land

As explained under Alma 46:13, the original text permits expressions of the form “there should ”. Here in Ether 6:5, the 1905 LDS edition added the be verb before the noun phrase (giving “there should be a furious wind blow”); this reading has persisted in the LDS text. The critical text will remove the intrusive be.

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

References