Isa 51:15 in the KJV reads:
But I am the Lord thy God, that
divided the sea, whose waves roared: The Lord of hosts is his name.
When this verse is quoted in 2 Nephi 8:15, there is a slight
difference at the end of the verse:
But I am the Lord thy God, whose
waves roared, the Lord of hosts is my name.
Commenting on this, John Tvedtnes noted that:
It is a simple matter of changing
the pronominal suffix, from MT šmw
to šmy (these two
letters are frequently confused in the Biblical text because of their
resemblance one to another). LXX agrees with BM in this instance (onoma moi,
"my name"), so it is apparently not just a question of paraphrase.
(B) The possibility of an abbreviation exists, but it is not the simplest
explanation. (John A. Tvedtnes, The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon
[Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1981], 86; "B" means "Version Support for BM" [ibid., 96])
Tvedtnes is correct concerning the LXX; the Göttingen text of Isa 51:15 reads:
ὅτι ἐγὼ ὁ θεός
σου ὁ ταράσσων τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ ἠχῶν τὰ κύματα αὐτῆς, κύριος σαβαωθ ὄνομά
μοι.
Interestingly, the Vulgate also reads “my name”:
ego autem sum Dominus Deus tuus
qui conturbo mare et intumescunt fluctus eius Dominus exercituum nomen meum
Critic David P. Wright acknowledges that there is ancient
support for “my name” instead of “his name,” while disagreeing with Tvedtnes
that this is evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Mormon. He writes that
this is evidence of “contextual smoothing” of the KJV, noting that:
Verses 15-16 have God speaking in
the first person. The third person formulation of the phrase “the Lord of hosts
is his name” appears awkward. Hence a revision to “my name” seems in order. The
neighboring italicized word “is” may have offered some impetus for this
change. The Greek translation may have construed an original third-person
pronoun as first person for similar contextual reasons. (David P. Wright,
“Joseph Smith in Isaiah: Or Joseph Smith in Isaiah,” in American Apocrypha:
Essays on the Book of Mormon, ed. Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe [Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 2002], 204)
Of course, one could ask, even if Wright is correct, what
would there to stop the scribe(s) who worked on the Isaiah text on the Brass Plates
and/or Jacob in 2 Nephi 8 do the same thing as the Septuagint translators did,
that is, “[construe] an original third person pronoun as first person”?
