Isa 54:15, in the KJV, reads:
Behold, they shall surely gather
together, but not by me: whosoever shall gather together against thee shall
fall for thy sake.
When this verse is quoted in the Book of Mormon, reads:
Behold, they shall surely gather
together against thee, not by me; whosoever shall gather together against thee
shall fall for thy sake. (3 Nephi 22:15)
In his preliminary study on Isaiah variants in the Book of Mormon,
Tvedtnes wrote:
KJV "but" is deleted,
leaving only "not" in BM. This, however, does not change the meaning
. (I) It is interesting to note that, in place of MT 'ps ("nothing,
not"), IQIsa has the meaningless(?) 'ks. Both Sand LXX delete the
"but not", making it affirmative.
Before the change described above
and just after "shall ... gather together", BM adds "against
thee". - This is in line with the rest of the verse, where we read,
"whosoever shall gather together against thee". Moreover, there is
support from LXX, which adds here soi, "to thee". (B) (John A.
Tvedtnes, The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon [Provo, Utah: Foundation
for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1981], 95)
Critic David P. Wright acknowledges that the LXX supports
the reading in the Book of Mormon:
The LXX reads idou prosēlutoi soi di’emou (kai paroikēsousin soi) kai epi se
katapeuksontai (“Behold, strangers [or proselytes] shall come to you by my
agency, [and they shall live with you], and they shall find refuse with you “).
The dative pronoun “to you” in the first line correlates in position with the BoM’s
variant “against thee.” (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)
Wright, however, attempts to downplay the text thusly:
While this evidence makes one
think that the Hebrew text underlying these translations had a preposition and
pronoun in the first clause, it is far from definitive. The Hebrew verse is very
difficult and the translations paraphrase rather than offer an exact translation.
. . . In view of this, it may be that Smith inserted the prepositional phrase “against
thee” for contextual reasons. It clarifies the relationship of “they” and “gathering”
to “thou” in the larger context. The wording “against thee” duplicates the same
prepositional phrase in “gather together against thee” later in the verse. The stimulus
for the change can be seen in the italicized word “but.” The awkwardness
of the BoM reading is further testimony that we are dealing with a modification
of the KJV. The phrase “against thee” replaces the conjunction “but,”
leaving the KJV’s “Not by me” poorly coordinated with the foregoing. (Ibid.,
204, 205)
