Conjectural Emendation in the Book of Mormon

Conjectural Emendation in the Book of Mormon

An Overview of Conjectural Emendation in the Critical Text Project

Critical texts have previously been prepared for important religious, historical, and literary works, but until fairly recently, not for the Book of Mormon. A critical text shows all the substantive changes that a written work has undergone, from its original version to its present editions. When referring to a critical text, the term means that notes accompany the text so that the reader can see how the work has changed over time and thus judge between alternative readings.

There are two main goals for the critical text of the Book of Mormon. The first is to determine, to the extent possible, the original English-language text of the book. The second purpose is to establish the history of the text, including both accidental errors and editorial changes that the book has undergone as it has been transmitted down through time in its many editions.

In my work on the critical text of the Book of Mormon, I normally rely on the earliest extant sources in determining the reading of the original text. I also look at usage elsewhere in the text to see if it will support the earliest reading or an alternative one. Sometimes the earliest extant reading will contain an unusual word or involve an awkward expression. In such cases, I look for linguistic evidence, both historical and dialectal, in support of such usage. Where appropriate, I consider evidence from biblical language, either from the King James Bible or from the original Hebrew and Greek that underlie the biblical translation. For a brief discussion of these points, along with some examples, see the section entitled “Textual Variants” in the introduction to volume 4 of the critical text, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon.¹

After investigating these linguistic sources, I occasionally find cases where the earliest reading is problematic and sometimes even impossible. In instances of this kind, scribes, typesetters, and editors have typically emended the text by conjecture. Each of these cases must be thoroughly investigated to determine whether the conjectural emendation is most plausibly the correct one. But in some cases, neither the earliest reading nor its subsequent conjectural emendation may be acceptable. Such a situation may lead to the possibility of further conjectural emendation.

As an example of an early attempt to emend an impossible reading, consider the following reading from the original manuscript:

Here scribe 3 first wrote hole, then inserted the same word, hole, above the line, so that the corrected text reads “and also his hole hole.” Clearly, this reading is unacceptable. When Oliver Cowdery copied this sentence into the printer’s manuscript, he interpreted “his hole hole” as “his household,” which is one possible conjecture. But usage elsewhere in the Book of Mormon text suggests that the correct emendation should be “his whole household.” For example, all other Book of Mormon instances of household involve a universal quantifier, either all or whole or the negative equivalent, none. Consider ten cases in positive clauses where we find either all or whole as the universal quantifier:

The example in Alma 22:23 (“his whole household”) suggests that the original text in 1 Nephi 7:5 also read “his whole household.” Such a conjectural emendation would explain why scribe 3 ended up repeating hole in the original manuscript: hole and whole are homophones while hole and -hold are nearly identical in pronunciation.

It is instructive here to consider what I would do if the original manuscript were not extant for this passage. If this were the case, the earliest textual source would be the printer’s manuscript, with its reading “Ishmael and also his household.” Without the unacceptable reading of the original manuscript (“Ishmael and also his hole hole,” with its repeated occurrence of hole), I would not be justified in emending the text of 1 Nephi 7:5 since there is nothing inherently wrong with “Ishmael and also his household.” In fact, the plausibility of the current reading explains why no edition of the Book of Mormon has ever emended Oliver Cowdery’s phraseology here in 1 Nephi 7:5 to read “Ishmael and also his whole household” (or “Ishmael and also all his household”). If the original manuscript were not extant here, I would simply have to say that, except for this one case, all the Book of Mormon instances of household have a universal quantifier. Just because an earliest reading is unique within the text is no excuse for an emendation. Statistically, there will always be unique readings in any text of sufficient length.

The crucial restriction on conjectural emendation is that there must be something actually wrong with the earliest extant reading. The initial motivation for proposing a new conjectural emendation is that none of the readings (either the earliest reading or subsequent emendations) make sense, after taking into account evidence from the history or dialects of the English language or, when appropriate, evidence from the King James Bible and from Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the biblical scriptures. And before accepting a proposed conjectural emendation, we must consider whether there is scribal evidence in the manuscripts or from manuscript transmission in general that would explain how the earliest textual reading might have been derived from the proposed conjectural emendation. In other words, the emendation must be supported by evidence from linguistic usage as well as scribal practice elsewhere in the manuscripts.

Throughout my work on the Book of Mormon critical text project, I have tried to credit those who have suggested conjectural emendations. When a suggested change has already appeared in print, I cite the earliest published source that I can find for that suggestion. In many cases, various individuals have communicated their suggestions directly to me. It is amazing how it has helped to have others looking for problematic readings in the text—difficult readings that I have been oblivious to until they were pointed out to me. Of course, some of these suggested emendations have turned out to have insufficient evidence to support their adoption. In other cases, further investigation of a problematic reading has sometimes led me to propose an alternative emendation. In volume 4 of the critical text, I discuss all of these cases of proposed changes and credit those who first suggested them to me. For a list of the proposed conjectural emendations for approximately the first half of the Book of Mormon (up through Alma 21), see the appendix to this article; except for Alma 21, this list derives from the conjectures that have been discussed in parts 1—3 of volume 4, published from 2004 through 2006.

One important aspect of conjectural emendation is that this process is sometimes more frequent than one might expect, although compared with other changes in the text, it is relatively infrequent. For instance, based on work on the critical text project thus far, about 95 percent of the changes proposed to the standard text are based on the earliest textual sources, mostly the two manuscripts. So relatively speaking, the effects of conjectural emendation are limited, accounting for about 5 percent of the changes. Even so, one must recognize that the text has been subjected to conjectural emendation from the earliest stages of textual transmission, especially by the scribes as they copied from the original manuscript (O) to the printer’s manuscript (P) and by the 1830 compositor as he attempted to set the type from his copytext, usually the printer’s manuscript P (but from Helaman 13 through Mormon 9, the original manuscript O). The 1830 compositor, John Gilbert, was frequently confronted with difficult readings, usually errors made in copying from O into P. The majority of his conjectural emendations appear to be correct, often because the emendation to the difficult reading was quite obvious, such as his decision to change “fasting and proping” (the reading in P for Omni 1:26) to “fasting and praying” (the 1830 edition).

In the following analysis, I give the statistics for the number of conjectural emendations made at various stages in the history of the Book of Mormon text. (These numbers are based on only those conjectural emendations that have been proposed for the first half of the Book of Mormon, up through Alma 21.) For each source, I specify how many of these emendations have been accepted and how many have been rejected in the critical text project:

And as part of this project, I have considered quite a number of additional emendations, some proposed by others (a few in print but most by private communication) and many by me. Overall, I have accepted about one third of these more recently proposed conjectural emendations. Again, these statistics cover the first half of the text (up through Alma 21):

The high number of conjectural emendations in this project is largely the result of using the computer to analyze thousands of textual variants. Textual variants frequently suggest the possibility of alternative readings, based on conjecture. If we consider all these conjectural emendations as a whole, we first observe that the process is not rare. Overall, about 40 percent of these proposed emendations have been accepted in the critical text project. Some textual sources for emendation have not fared as well as others. For instance, Oliver Cowdery’s conjectural emendations in the original manuscript are generally unacceptable (with an acceptance rate of only 21 percent). Most of the conjectural emendations in the 1920 LDS edition are rejected in the critical text project (7 out of 8), while the rate of acceptance is quite high for the 1830 edition (60 percent), the 1837 edition (50 percent), and the 1981 edition (83 percent).

The Archaic Vocabulary of the Original Text

One finding that has complicated the application of conjectural emendation to the Book of Mormon text is that the vocabulary of the original Book of Mormon appears to derive from the English of the 1500s and 1600s, not from the 1800s. Lexical evidence suggests that the original text contained quite a few words with meanings that were lost from the English language by 1700. On the other hand, I have not been able thus far to find word meanings in the text that are known to have entered the English language after the early 1700s.

In the following sampling, I list some of the clearest examples in the Book of Mormon of this archaic vocabulary from the 1500s and 1600s. (In this discussion, I exclude, of course, archaic words such as besom ‘broom’ that are found in Book of Mormon quotations from the King James Bible.) For each word and its meaning, I provide citations from the original text of the Book of Mormon and corresponding citations from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and include the range of dates for citations in the OED with this meaning. In some instances, the word can be found with that meaning in the 1611 King James Bible (as in the first two examples listed below). Some of the other words appear to predate 1611 by a few decades. The difficulty of these archaic words has sometimes resulted in accidental changes during the early transmission of the Book of Mormon text. Other times, editors and typesetters have consciously replaced an archaic word with a more recognizable alternative.

Conjectural Emendations Based on Archaic Vocabulary

If the original vocabulary of the Book of Mormon text dates from Early Modern English, one might wonder if there are any archaic word meanings that were unrecognizable to Joseph Smith and his scribes, thus leading them to misinterpret and change the language during the early transmission of the text. Two possibilities have arisen thus far. The first one deals with the word ceremony in Mosiah 19:24: “and it came to pass that after they had ended the ceremony, that they returned to the land of Nephi.” The problem with this passage is that the word ceremony seems out of place. The larger context implies that their discourse was simply over:

The OED lists no meaning for ceremony that would work reasonably well for this passage except to assume that the conversation itself is a ceremony or that it involved some kind of ceremonial aspect in, for instance, recounting the execution of king Noah.

I have had a number of my students and research assistants try to find another word that might work better in Mosiah 19:22—24, one that would perhaps sound or look like ceremony. The idea behind this approach is that such a word might have been miscopied or misheard as ceremony. The most plausible suggestion proposed thus far comes from Renee Bangerter in her 1998 BYU master’s thesis,² where she proposes that the original word in Mosiah 19:24 might have been sermon. Although the current meanings for this word will not work in this passage, Bangerter notes that the OED gives the earliest meaning for sermon as ‘something that is said; talk, discourse,’ which would exactly fit the context described in Mosiah 19:22—24. This meaning is, however, obsolete; the last citation in the OED with this meaning dates from 1594: “Desiring Don Infeligo with very mild sermon to be friends with Medesimo again.” The last citation with this meaning found on Literature Online comes from Giles Fletcher and dates from 1593: “Out of my braine I made his Sermon flow.”³

In part 3 of volume 4 of the critical text, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (published in August 2006), I discuss under Mosiah 19:24 how sermon could have accidentally been replaced by ceremony. Basically, I propose the following scenario: the scribe for the original manuscript (which is unfortunately not extant here) spelled sermon as cermon, which was then misread as ceremony (and spelled as cerimony) when Oliver Cowdery copied the word from the original manuscript into the printer’s manuscript. Such a conjectural emendation is permissible if the vocabulary for the original Book of Mormon text dates from the 1500s and 1600s.

One argument that has been frequently made in support of ceremony here in Mosiah 19:24 is that in many cultures conversation is ceremonial, so the conveying of information between these two parties in Mosiah 19:22—23 could have been a ceremony. But by this standard, every event in the Book of Mormon could be shown to be ceremonial, cultic, or ritualistic in some way—whether launching ships, engraving scriptures, preaching, fighting battles, planting crops, taking journeys, or dying: anything can be explained as a ceremony. Yet it should be noted that the Book of Mormon otherwise lacks words like ceremony, rite, and cult. The word ceremony occurs nowhere else in the Book of Mormon text. And although the scribal spelling rites has been maintained in a few places in the text, it is virtually certain that in every case the original text read rights rather than rites, including two places in the current LDS text, Alma 43:45 and Alma 44:5. (These last two cases will be discussed in part 4 of volume 4 of the critical text, to appear in 2007.)

Besides the general proposal that conversation is a ceremony, some scholars have found different ceremonial aspects that could be linked to the conversation described in Mosiah 19:22—23. John Sorensen, for instance, has argued that the reference to a ceremony in verse 24 has something to do with the earlier killing of king Noah, described in verses 19—21: “Mosiah 19:24 speaks of a ‘ceremony’ in connection with the slaying of king Noah by his rebellious subjects, but there is no hint of the nature or purpose of that ceremony.”⁴ John Tvedtnes, on the other hand, has argued that the ceremony referred to in Mosiah 19:24 is “one of purification associated with the onset of the fall festivals of the month of Tishre, at which time citizen-soldiers in the ancient Near East returned home to engage in the fall harvest.”⁵

There is a more general problem with searching for cultural arguments as evidence for strange readings in a text—namely, there is no limit on the use of such arguments. If we hunt long enough, we can always find some culture somewhere with a practice that will support virtually any given reading (although for Book of Mormon work we might prefer that the evidence come from Mesoamerica or the Middle East). As an example, consider the case of Mosiah 17:13, where all the (extant) textual sources read “and scourged his skin with fagots.” Although the textual and linguistic evidence is very clear that in Mosiah 17:13 scourged is a mishearing for scorched (see the discussion for that passage in part 3 of volume 4), yet some have defended the current reading scourged by hunting for examples of people being beaten with burning sticks or of people being beaten prior to being burned at the stake.⁶ In my own textual analyses of the Book of Mormon, I avoid using cultural evidence simply because it can always be found. In some cases, specific evidence from the Mosaic law and its practice may be appropriate, as in the discussion regarding whether striped, the spelling in the printer’s manuscript for Alma 11:2, should be read as stripped or striped. But even there that evidence is restricted to practices that are explicitly referred to in the biblical text.

I have also found that the original text of the Book of Mormon always makes linguistic sense, although not necessarily for modern-day speakers of English. There are Hebrew-like constructions that seem strange, even unacceptable, in English, yet these constructions make sense from the point of view of Hebrew. There is vocabulary that is strange today but would have been understandable to English speakers living in the 1500s and 1600s. And the biblically styled language of the text seems to date from this same time period, yet it does not imitate the specific language of the King James Bible. (Of course, the biblical quotes in the Book of Mormon do follow the King James text for the most part.) So when we run up against otherwise inexplicable cases like ceremony in Mosiah 19:24, the most probable explanation is that ceremony stands for some kind of error providing the error can be explained as textually derivable from an appropriate emendation, one that is consistent with language elsewhere in the Book of Mormon. The proposed sermon does fit if we allow the possibility that the original vocabulary of the Book of Mormon derives from the 1500s and 1600s, not the 1800s.

The Pleading Bar of God

A second possible misinterpretation deals with the expression “the pleasing bar of God,” as found in Jacob 6:13 (and similarly in Moroni 10:34 as “the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah”). In part 2 of volume 4 of the critical text (this part was published in August 2005), under Jacob 6:13, I argue that “the pleasing bar” is actually a mistake for “the pleading bar.” An abbreviated description of the evidence for emending the text to “the pleading bar” was initially presented in 2004.⁷ This conjectural emendation was first proposed by Christian Gellinek in 2003. There are no uses of the term “the pleasing bar of God” anywhere on the Internet except in citations from the Book of Mormon, yet there is clear evidence that the legal term pleading bar was used in the 1600s. And as might be expected, no instances of pleading bar have thus far been found during the 1800s, in either England or the United States. But such a conjectural emendation is consistent with the hypothesis that the vocabulary of the Book of Mormon dates from Early Modern English.

Part of the argument here relies on the evidence from the manuscripts that at least Oliver Cowdery and maybe even Joseph Smith (as he dictated the text) tended to replace unfamiliar vocabulary with words they were familiar with, even if the resulting phraseology did not make much sense. In every case, there is considerable phonetic similarity between the words that were mixed up:

Notice that some of these earliest readings will work: “wither even as a dried weed,” “my soul was wrecked,” “the drugs of a bitter cup,” and “there is some fraction in the government.” Yet in each case the phonetically similar word introduced into the printed edition works much better and more consistently with usage in the English language. Relying on Oliver’s excessively elevated and ornate writing style in the Messenger and Advocate from October 1834, one might deduce that Oliver would never have made such mistakes. But the evidence from the Book of Mormon manuscripts (dating from 1829, over five years earlier) directly contradicts such an assumption. Oliver’s language ability may have improved over the years. To be sure, the 1830 typesetter exceeded Oliver’s language abilities at the time of the printing of the 1830 edition. Note that the 1830 typesetter is the one responsible for correcting most of the above misinterpreted phrases, but not all: even he left unchanged “my soul was wrecked” and “some have arrested the scriptures.” The important point here is that Oliver twice accepted the implausible phraseology “to arrest the scriptures” (in Alma 13:20 and Alma 41:1) instead of the correct “to wrest the scriptures.” In a similar way, he could have twice misinterpreted the phrase “the pleading bar” as “the pleasing bar” (in Jacob 6:13 and Moroni 10:34).

And these are not the only conjectural emendations that reject a workable but strange reading in the manuscripts, as in the following examples from 1 Nephi (all of which are extant in the original manuscript):

(Interestingly, Oliver Cowdery himself made the first three of these emendations when he copied the text from O into P; I am responsible for the fourth one, while Joseph Smith made the last one in his editing for the 1837 edition.) When we compare each of these earliest readings with usage elsewhere in the Book of Mormon text as well as in the King James Bible or more generally in the English language, including Early Modern English, we discover that these earliest extant readings are probably not the original readings, even though these earliest readings will, in some sense, work.⁸

Just like the use of the word ceremony in Mosiah 19:24, one could argue that “the pleasing bar of God” is perfectly fine and should be left alone. Yet this phraseology is inconsistent with respect to the many references to being judged at “the bar of God” found throughout the Book of Mormon text. I repeat them here because it is important to realize that none of these passages refer in a positive way to the day of judgment; they are either negative or neutral:

There is nothing here to suggest anything pleasing about the bar of God. In fact, we get the same result when we look at the two cases in the current text of pleasing bar. One passage is negative, the other neutral:

The first example comes after a long passage (Jacob 6:5-12) in which Jacob warns the unrepentant of God’s coming judgment.

Of course, one can always find some source that will support the notion that the day of judgment will be pleasing, at least to the righteous. One example is C. S. Lewis’s claim in Reflections on the Psalms that the Psalms support an interpretation of the day of judgment in which we will be more like plaintiffs than defendants. C. S. Lewis provides evidence from the Psalms for his interpretation, citing examples like “when God arose to judgment to save all the meek of the earth” (Psalm 76:9, the King James Bible). But more importantly, C. S. Lewis does not ignore opposing evidence. For instance, he also cites those passages in the Psalms that support the traditional Christian view of the day of judgment, such as “and enter not into judgment with thy servant / for in thy sight shall no man living be justified” (Psalm 143:2, the King James Bible). And C. S. Lewis is rightly concerned that the positive view of the day of judgment might be misused: “All this of course has its spiritual danger. It leads into that typically Jewish prison of self-righteousness which Our Lord so often terribly rebuked.”⁹ To be sure, there is no need here for C. S. Lewis to emphasize the supposed Jewish nature of this self-righteousness; it seems to be endemic to the whole human race! But ultimately, the use of C. S. Lewis’s writings is irrelevant in determining the text of the Book of Mormon. As with the example of ceremony in Mosiah 19:24, we can always find some cultural evidence in support of our interpretation of the text. There will always be evidence that for some the day of judgment will be “a resounding triumph.”

In the Book of Mormon text, on the other hand, we have a strong and consistent image of the day of judgment as a trial before the bar of God. Nor is there any reason from the text itself to assume that these references to the bar of God are merely figurative or metaphorical. Note, in particular, the use of the very legalistic word arraign (originally raign in the Book of Mormon text) in Alma 11:44: “and all shall be brought and be arraigned before the bar of Christ.” In fact, the legal interpretation should also be applied to the proposed “the pleading bar of God.” The term pleading here does not refer to making a plea for mercy. As lawyers know, the word pleading refers to making one’s case in court (originally oral, now written) and neutrally refers to the arguments and evidence both for and against a person. (See the earliest definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary for the noun pleading as well as for the noun plea and the verb plead.)

Another legal aspect to the judgment of God is found in two separate statements in the Book of Mormon—namely, that Christ’s twelve apostles in Jerusalem and the twelve Nephite disciples or ministers will play some role in judging the house of Israel:

Here the references to the twelve apostles judging the twelve Nephite ministers imply that the judgment being referred to is individual, not collective. Although the specific role of the twelve in that judgment is not spelled out, it is clearly referred to. One should not automatically dismiss the idea that the twelve may play a role in the day of judgment.

The Book of Mormon also refers to the day of judgment as occurring before the judgment seat of God (12 times), as in “that ye may be found spotless at the judgment seat of Christ” (from the title page of the Book of Mormon). Interestingly, references to the bar of God in the Book of Mormon are restricted to the day of judgment, while the judgment seat as a place of judgment is also used to refer to secular governing (45 times), as in the statement that Kishcumen “murdered Parhoron as he sat upon the judgment seat” (Helaman 1:9).¹⁰ There is biblical evidence in support of being secularly judged before the judgment seat (10 times in the New Testament), as in Pilate’s judgment of Christ in Matthew 27:19: “when he was set down on the judgment seat / his wife sent unto him.” The use in the Book of Mormon of “the bar of God” seems real enough even though it may not represent an ancient system of judgment (unlike the references to the judgment seat).

Now let us turn to the question of external evidence for the phrases “the pleasing bar of God” and “the pleading bar of God.” One thing is quite clear: in judicial contexts there is irrefutable linguistic evidence for pleading bar, but none thus far for pleasing bar (except in the current Book of Mormon text). To be sure, there is evidence for pleasing bar alone, as in “the most aesthetically pleasing bar in Manchai” and “a visually pleasing bar at the side of the screen.”¹¹ Of course, these examples are not evidence for “the pleasing bar of God.”

There are two Internet citations that refer to a seventeenth-century English courtroom, now a museum, in Fordwich, England (near Canterbury). This courtroom dates from the time of Charles II (reigned 1649—60). The citations clearly identify what the pleading bar is:

The tour ended at the town hall. Mr. Tritton said: “That was the most interesting part of the day. The people who made the film reproduced the court room back at their studio. They had the jury bench, the pleading bar, everything, right down to the smallest detail of King Charles II’s coat of arms.”

At the head of the stairs, Sgt. Bassett ducks under a beam inscribed ‘Love and honour the truth.’ In real life the court’s pleading bar, where prisoners stood while on trial, is at the head of the stairs. It does not obstruct anyone entering the room, nor bear an inscription—though the motto ‘Love and honour the truth’ is prominent under King Charles II’s Coat of Arms, displayed on the ceiling above the panelled rear wall.¹²

On the first floor is the Court Room where all criminal cases in Fordwich were tried until 1886. The accused would stand flanked by the Town Constables, at the “pleading bar” situated at the head of the stairs. (Hence the expression “prisoner at the bar”). The Judge or chief magistrate was the Mayor for the time being and he sat in the chair at the north end of the room, flanked by six Jurats on each side, seated on the “bench.” The Mayor’s seat and bench together with the paneling are early Tudor in origin.¹³

One could dismiss these citations to pleading bar as somehow errors, especially since they are not found in legal documents dating from the 1600s. Yet the term pleading bar does exist in literary references that do date from the early 1600s.¹⁴ In the first case, there is no doubt that the whole passage refers metaphorically to a courtroom:

John Harington, Orlando Furioso (1607), book 27, stanza 46, lines 369—72:

If you deny my claim, here I will prove it,

This field the court, this list my pleading bar,

My plea is such, as no writ can remove it,

My judge must be the sequel of the war.¹⁵

(Here list specifies an area set aside for jousting or other combat.) The second citation is found in a play that was apparently written no later than 1634:

John Webster, Appius and Virginia, act 5, scene 1

Fortune hath lift thee to my Chair,

and thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar.

Of particular interest here is the evidence that John Webster was no novice in legal matters. Scholars have argued that he was admitted to the Middle Temple (one of the English courts of law) on 1 August 1598. Moreover, he is considered the primary author of a play that deals with legal issues, The Devil’s Law Case; or, When Women Go to Law, the Devil Is Full of Business (published in 1623). Thus it is not surprising that there is a metaphorical reference to pleading bar in his play Appius and Virginia, first published in 1654 (after Webster’s death) and attributed to Webster (the title page refers to Webster as the sole author, although he may have had collaborators, a common enough practice even today).¹⁶

Now one may claim that the term pleading bar cannot be found in judicial records dating from Early Modern English. This may be so—although there are a lot of legal records to be checked, most of which have never been electronically transcribed. There might be a good reason for why the term might be missing from legal records—namely, legal records refer to the specifics of cases, not to the structure of the courtroom, neither to its furniture nor to the placement of that furniture. The claim that pleading bar does not exist in judicial records is meaningless unless one has already established that in general there are references in those records to the courtroom structure and its furniture. More likely, the term pleading bar would appear in histories commenting on specific cases, or in literary works that use the term metaphorically, as we have seen.

But if we look long enough, maybe we can find the term pleading bar in an actual legal source from the 1500s and 1600s. Quite recently, with the kind help of Frank Kelland, a reference librarian at the Howard W. Hunter Law Library at Brigham Young University, I have been able to locate such an instance of the term pleading bar—namely, in the Law Notes Collection deposited in the Department of Special Collections, the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, at the University of Kansas. These seventeenth-century notes are written in the secretary script, a court-derived script common in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹⁷ These notes have the manuscript number MS P367 and are identified as a quire of twelve leaves containing a list of headings written in English for the most part and with notes below each heading written in “law French.” The bibliographic citation states that “each heading is followed by a number of phrases—legal apothegms, definitions, judgements—each with a citation either to a statute or to what is apparently a page number. Crowding and blanks indicate on-the-spot compilation.” The word apothegm here refers to “a short, pithy, and instructive saying or formulation.”¹⁸ And at the top of the eighth leaf, we have a heading with the term “Pleading bar & trav’s.” The last word, trav’s, is Law French for travers and means “denial in pleading.”¹⁹ Thus the heading is equivalent to pleading bar and denial. On the twelfth leaf, the date is given as “21 Ja. 15” (presumably 21 January 1615). The University of Kansas bibliographer states that this quire “may have been tipped into a printed book.” In other words, the quire seems to have served as an index for an unidentified law book, especially since the headings are arranged alphabetically and the reference citations were added as they were found in the book. The law book itself was probably in French.

In my mind, the linguistic use of pleading bar as a legal term is established. This is not the relevant issue. Rather, the issue is whether the original Book of Mormon text referred to “the pleasing bar of God” or to “the pleading bar of God.”

One may then ask, “Why should the Lord give a revealed text to Joseph Smith that he, Joseph Smith, could not fully understand?” Frankly, I do not know the answer. But the evidence is mounting that despite the strangeness of it all, the revealed text was not fully comprehensible to readers in the 1800s (nor to readers today). This is not just an issue of the archaic vocabulary. There are also the non-English Hebraisms in the original text (such as the repeated use of the if-and construction originally in Helaman 12:13—21), constructions that were generally removed by Joseph Smith in his editing for the second (1837) edition. So why did the Lord reveal such a Hebraistic text? We do not know why, but we do know that he did do it! And why did the Lord allow the text to be given in nonstandard English? We do not know why, but it was! And why did the Lord choose to have the biblical quotations based on the King James Bible when some of its language was unrecognizable to Joseph Smith and his scribes (as in the indecipherable “the besom of destruction”)? If one assumes that the Lord would only reveal a perfectly understandable text, then we must assume that all of these strange linguistic uses must be mistakes that Joseph or his scribes introduced into the text.

The point is this: we go where the evidence leads us. And we consider all the evidence, not picking and choosing only those interpretations that support our own conceptions. We may have our own views of what may happen at the day of judgment, but we shouldn’t let those views determine how we establish the Book of Mormon text. Just because we may think that the day of judgment will be a positive experience (for us, at least), this does not mean that the Book of Mormon text must agree with us.

There are other examples where our interpretation of the text has been influenced by our conceptions of what the Lord will and will not do. Consider B. H. Roberts’ claim that the Book of Mormon text could not have been given word for word directly by the Lord since the resulting text was in ungrammatical English:

If the Book of Mormon is a real translation instead of a word-for-word bringing over from one language into another, and it is insisted that the divine instrument, Urim and Thummim, did all, and the prophet nothing—at least nothing more than to read off the translation made by Urim and Thummim—then the divine instrument is responsible for such errors in grammar and diction as occur. But this is to assign responsibility for errors in language to a divine instrumentality, which amounts to assigning such errors to God. But that is unthinkable, not to say blasphemous. Also, if it be contended that the language of the Book of Mormon, word for word, and letter for letter, was given to the prophet by direct inspiration of God, acting upon his mind, then again God is made responsible for the language errors in the Book of Mormon—a thing unthinkable.²⁰

According to this view, it is tantamount to blasphemy to think that God would make a grammatical error in English. Of course, what B. H. Roberts was really claiming here was that if God had given the text word for word, it would have been in his, B. H. Roberts’, correct English!

A similar example of letting our own conceptions determine our interpretation is found in the assumption that Joseph Smith must have read from an actual copy of the King James Bible when he translated the biblical quotations in the Book of Mormon, mainly because in those passages the Book of Mormon text follows the King James text:

There appears to be only one answer to explain the word-for-word similarities between the verses of Isaiah in the Bible and the same verses in the Book of Mormon. When Joseph Smith translated the Isaiah references from the small plates of Nephi, he evidently opened his King James Version of the Bible and compared the impression he had received in translating with the words of the King James scholars. If his translation was essentially the same as that of the King James Version, he apparently quoted the verse from the Bible.²¹

The unstated assumption here is that if the Lord himself had chosen the translation for the biblical quotations, he would have used his own translation or one that would have directly reflected what was on the plates, rather than following an outdated, awkward, and occasionally mistranslated King James text. But perhaps the Lord himself decided to use the King James text as the base text but allowed for the occasional alteration, just as when Moroni cited the Bible to Joseph Smith, sometimes in agreement with the King James text and other times differently (as explained in Joseph Smith—History 1:36—40).

Clearly, making conjectural emendations is often a difficult task. Sometimes the correct reading is obvious: “it came pass” is undoubtedly an error for “it came to pass.” But in many instances, no clear-cut decision is possible, although a text must be chosen when one decides to publish an edition of the Book of Mormon or to translate it into another language. There are degrees of uncertainty, and some conjectures are more conjectural than others. For me, pleading bar makes perfectly good sense, pleasing bar does not. Others are welcome to their own views.

Appendix: Substantive Conjectural Emendations (from the title page through Alma 21)

In the following, I provide a list of substantive conjectural emendations for the first half of the Book of Mormon text (up through Alma 21). I exclude here cases of emendation involving punctuation or grammar.

There are five columns: (1) the passage from the Book of Mormon in which the emendation occurs; (2) the earliest or standard reading; (3) the proposed conjecture; (4) the source for the conjecture (that is, who proposed it first); and (5) whether the conjecture is accepted in the critical text project.

Two-symbol abbreviations are used for the names of the books; basically, for single-word books, the first and last letter are used to represent the book (thus jb = Jacob, es = Enos, jm = Jarom, oi = Omni, mh = Mosiah, aa = Alma); for other books, symbols for each key word are used (thus 1n = 1 Nephi, 2n = 2 Nephi, wm = Words of Mormon).

The numbers following the books’ names stand for the chapter and verse. I assign two numbers each to the chapter and verse, with a leading zero when necessary, thus 1n0205 stands for 1 Nephi 2:5. I use 00 to stand for an original preface, thus 1n0100 stands for the preface to 1 Nephi that is found just prior to chapter 1 of 1 Nephi.

I use bold in the readings to show where the conjectural emendation occurs. If the conjecture involves a fairly long addition to the text, I use NULL to mean that the words are not found in the earliest or standard reading.

In giving the source for the emendations, I use O to stand for the original manuscript, P for the printer’s manuscript. O* and P* stand for original or initial readings in the two manuscripts, while O^c and P^c stand for corrected readings in the two manuscripts. If the change first appears in an edition, I give the year for that edition. If an R follows the year, this means that edition is an RLDS edition; the 1858 edition is followed by W to indicate that it was the 1858 Wright edition, a privately printed edition that serves as part of the RLDS textual tradition.

Sometimes conjectures can be identified with specific individuals, in which case I give their name. Certain two-letter abbreviations are used for the following individuals who are responsible for a large number of conjectures: OC = Oliver Cowdery, JG = John Gilbert, JS = Joseph Smith, and RS = Royal Skousen. Some of the manuscript scribes are unidentified, so they are represented by the symbol S followed by a number: S3 in O and S2 in P.

Notes

I wish to thank Don Brugger, David Calabro, Ross Geddes, and Grant Hardy for helpful criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.

1. Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2004), part 1, 3–6.
2. Renee Bangerter, “Since Joseph Smith’s Time: Lexical Semantic Shifts in the Book of Mormon” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1998), 16–18.
3. See lion.chadwyck.com (accessed 13 June 2005).
4. John L. Sorenson, Images of Ancient America: Visualizing Book of Mormon Life (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1998), 189.
5. See John A. Tvedtnes, The Most Correct Book: Insights from a Book of Mormon Scholar (Salt Lake City: Cornerstone, 1999), 186.
6. For one example, see Brant Gardner’s “Scourging with Faggots,” Insights 21/7 (2001): 2–3.
7. Royal Skousen, “The Pleading Bar of God,” Insights 24/4 (2004): 2–3.
8. See the discussion under each of these passages in part 1 of volume 4 of the critical text.
9. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 17.
10. The earliest textual sources, the original and printer’s manuscripts, suggest the spellings Kishcumen and Parhoron.
11. Gleaned from www.google.com (accessed 15 May 2006).
12. “Report of Fordwich Trip,” Kent Messenger, “Extra,” 10 September 1999 at www.powell-pressburger.org (accessed on 23 October 2003).
13. Fordwich Town Hall Web site (updated on 23 July 2003) at www.canterbury.gov.uk (accessed on 23 October 2003).
14. Found on Literature Online at lion.chadwyck.com (accessed 13 June 2005).
15. Sir John Harington’s Translation of Orlando Furioso by Lodovico Ariosto, ed. Graham Hough (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 318.
16. For further discussion of Webster’s possible legal background, see Clifford Leech, John Webster: A Critical Study (New York: Haskell House, 1966).
17. See D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1994), 201–2, 248–49.
18. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. “apothegm.”
19. See J. H. Baker, Manual of Law French, 2nd ed. (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1990), 207.
20. See B. H. Roberts, “Translation of the Book of Mormon,” Improvement Era, April 1906, 428–29.
21. See Daniel H. Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 141.