D&C 98:4 in the current LDS edition reads:
And now, verily, I
say unto you concerning the laws of the land, it is my will that my people
should observe to do all things whatsoever I command them.
In Revelation
Book 2, p. 67, there is no period:
and now verely I say
unto you concerning the Laws of the land it is my will that my people should
observe to do all things whatsoever I command them
In his edition of the Doctrine
and Covenants, Drew Briney adds a comma, not a period. Commenting on the
importance of punctuation with respect to the context, Briney noted that:
The original comma would more properly be replaced with a
semicolon (or period) as everything after it comprises a full sentence and
everything after it comprises a full sentence.
While a comma suggests the same interpretation as the
semicolon (or the modern, mainstream LDS period), it creates ambiguity at its
point of placement and requires at least a second reading to be certain of its
meaning. While clarity is a major goal of this Joseph Smith Version of the
D&C, reasonable minds could come to slightly varying conclusions as to the
intended meaning and proper punctuation so we chose the original punctuation even
though it creates a certain degree of ambiguity.
Removing the comma causes worse confusion because it
makes the sentence incomplete and nonsensical.
The punctuation choice is not insignificant. The pragmatically
almost-required semicolon suggests that we must obey God’s commandments while merely
befriending constitutional laws.
Without any punctuation, these verses suggest that we
must obey all constitutional laws of the land or any law that purports to
accomplish the listed purposes—that also leaves us with an ungrammatical result
with the rest of the sentence.
Incidentally, if the following colon at the end of verse 5
indicates a clarification follows, that clarification supports the semicolon
(or period) as the proper choice of punctuation as well.
(Drew Briney, Doctrine and Covenants 1844 JSV Edition:
Lectures on Faith, Sections 1-138, 87 Uncanonized Revelations [JSV
Publications, LLC., 2025], 292 n. 709)
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