Isa 54:4 in
the KJV reads as follows:
Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed:
neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt
forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy
widowhood any more.
3 Nephi
22:4, a quotation of this Isaiah verse, reads as follows (emphasis added):
Fear not, for thou shalt not be ashamed;
neither be thou confounded, for thou shalt not be put to shame; for thou shalt
forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of
thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any
more.
In the Book
of Mormon, there is an entire phrase in the Book of Mormon quotation of the
Isaiah text not in the KJV. Some may be tempted to think that this is a
restoration of a long-lost phrase from the Isaiah passage that was restored by
Jesus when he quoted Isaiah to the Nephites. Notwithstanding, it does not
appear in the 1830 text of the Book of Mormon and was introduced as a result of
a mistake by a typesetter. It is not original to the Book of Mormon itself. As
Royal Skousen noted:
The typesetter for the 1837 edition accidentally
repeated part of the text here in 3 Nephi 22:4. After setting “the reproach of thy”,
the typesetter, in looking for of thy,
skipped upwards and found the of thy before
youth. Thus his typeset text ended up
repeating the words “and shalt not remember the reproach of thy youth”. This
dittography was definitely not intended. The Book of Mormon quotation of Isaiah
54 here in 3 Nephi 22 is quite exact, with only minor variation (the only
significant difference is the omission of the King James phrase “nor rebuke
thee” at the end of 3 Nephi 22:9). This 1837 error here in verse 4 changed an
original pair of parallel lines (the single most common device in Hebrew
poetry) into an excessively redundant triplet of parallelism. The RLDS 1908
edition restored the correct reading to the RLDS text, but the LDS text has
retained the 1837 dittography. (Royal Skousen, Analysis of
Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon part Six: 3 Nephi 19-Moroni 10,
3483-84)
