In his review of Brent Metcalfe's essay The Priority of Mosiah: A Prelude to Book of Mormon Exegesis, Royal Skousen wrote the following about the "wherefore"/"therefore" issue raised by Metcalfe:
Nonrandom Sequences of Lexical Variants Finally, I turn to Metcalfe’s discussion of the lexical variation between therefore and wherefore in the Book of Mormon text. Metcalfe finds some interesting transitions in the usage of these two words. Basically, wherefore dominates in the small plates, therefore prevails from Mosiah to part way through Ether, then for the remainder of the Book of Mormon wherefore once again dominates. Metcalfe argues that there are not two transitions, but only one. Under the Mosiah first hypothesis, the text starts with therefore and then part way through Ether the transition to wherefore occurs, which then explains why wherefore dominates both the beginning and ending of the Book of Mormon. As support for this claim, Metcalfe argues that Joseph Smith’s revelations up through May 1829 have therefore, but from June 1829 on, his revelations and other scriptural writings have wherefore. This does not, however, prove Metcalfe’s conclusion that Joseph Smith is the one making this choice. As I have argued elsewhere,29 other evidence suggests “tight control” over the text. Nonetheless, the translation was given through Joseph Smith and reflects his English. As a result, a change in Joseph’s language could also show up as the translation was received over a period of months. Even so, the language of the original text includes King James expressions and non-English Hebraisms that are uncharacteristic of Joseph Smith’s upstate New York English.
In any event, I would suggest a few cautions and a more systematic research strategy in looking for stylistic change in the Book of Mormon text. My first caution deals with Metcalfe’s assumption that thereforeand wherefore are semantically and syntactically equivalent, and therefore freely exchangeable. Yet this is not the case. In fact, as Dwight Bolinger has argued on many occasions, there are probably no examples of synonymy that permit complete interchangeability of words. (See, for instance, Bolinger’s discussion of systematic differences between somebody and someone.)30 For the case of therefore and wherefore in the Book of Mormon text, we find that these words are not completely interchangeable. For example, there is an interrogative occurrence of wherefore (“wherefore can ye doubt”) in 1 Nephi 4:3 for which therefore could hardly be substituted. In addition, the Book of Mormon text contains examples in which therefore is preceded by a conjunctive element such as and or now, but wherefore is always clause initial: there are 18 occurrences of “and therefore,” but none of “and wherefore”; similarly, four occurrences of “now therefore,” but none of “now wherefore.” This difference between the two words is also suggested in the (Compact) Oxford English Dictionary, which lists “and therefore” as the synonym for wherefore, not simply “therefore.”31 All of this implies a discourse difference between therefore and wherefore, that the variation in usage between these two words in the Book of Mormon text may be due more to differences in discourse structure than simply lexical alternation. In other words, the variation between wherefore and therefore cannot be discussed without considering larger questions of narrative structure, in particular the role of conjunctive elements.
A second caution has to do with the lack of statistics in Metcalfe’s article. It would be easy to show that the order of occurrences of therefore and wherefore in the Book of Mormon text is highly significant in fact, it is statistically significant under any of the three hypotheses concerning the order of dictation. The same high statistical significance holds for Foster’s example of whoso and whosoever (pp. 408-9). The appropriate test for verifying the nonrandomness of a sequence of occurrences is the nonparametric ordinary runs test.32 The inadequacy of Metcalfe’s nonstatistical approach becomes all too apparent when, based on intuition only, he dismisses Foster’s suggestion that there is a nonrandom order for the occurrences of oft and often in the Book of Mormon text. Under the null hypothesis of randomness, the order statistic for the sequencing of oft and often (again for all three dictation hypotheses) occurs with a cumulative probability of 0.097. Although this probability is not significant enough for most statisticians (except at a level of significance of 0.1), it still indicates some possibility that the variation for these two words may not be random.
But there is one additional problem with Metcalfe’s decision to ignore the variation between oft and often. If he had considered the effects of “literary dependency” (pp. 409-11), he would have discovered that the sequencing for oft/often is statistically nonrandom. In his analysis of wherefore and therefore, Metcalfe systematically eliminated all cases of quotation, from either biblical sources or from Joseph Smith’s earlier revelations. Applying this same procedure to the case of oft/often, we remove one occurrence of often (in 3 Nephi 24:16) since it is a quotation from Malachi 3:16, with the result that all three remaining occurrences of often (namely, Enos 1:3, Mosiah 18:25, and Mosiah 26:30) occur together without oft intervening. Statistically, the resulting cumulative probability is a low 0.020. And once more, we get this same result for all three of the dictation hypotheses.
In order to test Metcalfe’s theory, we must see if the Book of Mormon text contains other variants in lexical choice that contradict Metcalfe’s conclusions. Are there, for instance, sequences showing more than one transition? In particular, are there examples of the text first favoring one word (or phrase), then another, and then finally preferring the original word (or phrase)? This last question is actually equivalent to asking whether there is evidence for other dictation sequences!
As a hypothetical example, consider the use of the archaic privily versus secretly in the Book of Mormon text. All four occurrences of privily are found in Alma (14:3, 35:5, 51:34, and 52:35), whereas the three occurrences of secretly occur outside of Alma: two in Mosiah (19:18 and 27:10) and one in 3 Nephi (6:23). Under any of the three given dictation hypotheses, this sequencing cannot be considered statistically nonrandom (since the number of runs has a cumulative probability of 0.200, which is too large). But if we choose to consider the hypothesis that Joseph Smith first started dictating Alma rather than Mosiah or 1 Nephi, we would get a cumulative probability of 0.057, which may be low enough to consider the change from privily to secretly statistically significant and to argue that Joseph Smith really started with Alma!
Notes for the Above
29. Skousen, “Towards a Critical Edition of the Book of Mormon,” 50-56.
30. Dwight Bolinger, “The In-Group: One and Its Compounds,” in Peter A. Reich, ed., The Second LACUS Forum 1975 (Columbia, SC: Hornbeam, 1976), 229-37.
30. Dwight Bolinger, “The In-Group: One and Its Compounds,” in Peter A. Reich, ed., The Second LACUS Forum 1975 (Columbia, SC: Hornbeam, 1976), 229-37.
32. As described in Jean Dickinson Gibbons, Nonparametric Methods for Quantitative Analysis, 2d ed. (Columbus, OH: American Sciences, 1985), 363-71.
