Isa 2:12 in the KJV reads:
For the day of the
LORD of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty,
and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low
It appears in 2 Nephi 12:12 as:
For the day of the Lord
of hosts soon cometh upon all nations, yea, upon every one yea, upon the proud
and lofty, and upon every one which is lifted up; and he shall be brought low.
Commenting
on this, John Tvedtnes wrote:
2:12 = 2 Ne. 12:12
KJV: "For the day . . . shall be upon
BM: "For the day . . . soon cometh upon all nations
yea, upon
KJV: every one that is proud . . . "
BM: every one; yea upon the proud. . ."
KJV's "shall be upon" reads merely "is upon" when translated from MT. Hence, the BM version is just as valid as KJV at this point. (J) Cf. 3:6. It is possible - but unlikely - that MT dropped the Hebrew yb' ("shall come" - like BM "soon cometh") because of its phonetic resemblance to the middle portion of the word immediately preceding it (ṣb'wt, "hosts").
The other changes are possible assuming that
B[rass]P[lates] read differently from MT. Through there is no version support,
it is interesting that 1QIsa drops the MT word cl kl
("upon every") and moves the conjunction w- (usually meaning
"and") to the following word. This happens to be in the same place as
the variation between KJV and BM, and the mobile conjunction "and"
may be BM "yea" (also a valid translation). It is possible that an
earlier text contained an abbreviated cl kl g", to which
BM read "upon all nations" and MT read "upon every proud
one". The Hebrew words begin with the same letter and hence could result
from such an abbreviation. However, it is more likely that the original read
(as reconstructed from the English of BM:
cl kl gwym
w-cl kl g'h
and the MT deleted the first through haplography
because of its close resemblance to the second. That the original so read is
evidenced by the fact that the "nations - proud" in this vs. are paralleled
in vs. 14 by "high mountains/hills - nations/people". (C) (G). (John
A. Tvedtnes, The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon, 25)
With
respect to the readings of Isa 2:12 from Qumran, Martin G. Abegg and Peter
Flint, in their The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, rendered the verse as:
Indeed the Lord of hosts will have this day:
against all that is proud and haughty and lifted up [47], and it will be
brought low;
[47] 1QIsaa. and upon all that is lifted up
4QIsab MT.
