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Thank you, Jeff, for the significant work put into this book review. Joseph’s triumph over counterfeit interpreters has a parallel in his greater achievement of bringing forth the Book of Mormon amidst contemporary treasure hunting ritual. While his now all-but-forgotten contemporaries were fruitlessly searching for earthly treasures, Joseph eventually won that ritual contest by bringing forth the greatest treasures of them all: the heavenly treasures of light and truth embodied in the Book of Mormon.
Joseph’s transition from using his gift of seership to better his family’s impoverished circumstances to using it instead to bring forth truth and righteousness for the Lord was a challenging, difficult, and remarkable transition–if fully understood, it represents one of the great achievements of his life.
Thank you for this excellent review. For me, this is an important observation to emphasize:
“What [Lucas and Neville] see as a restoration of tradition is actually a rejection of the traditional view before B.H. Roberts’s day, while also rejecting his Manual Theory’s model of composition without seeing text.”
All should bear in mind that B. H. Roberts did not thoroughly catalog and categorize, or comparatively study, the hundreds of instances of “bad” grammar in the Book of Mormon. Nor have most Book of Mormon researchers in our day. Their conclusions relating to translation have been based on very limited study of grammar (and vocabulary and phrase structure), and colored by inexpert views on grammatical usage and little knowledge of historical details. See my earlier paper in this journal on this topic, as well as a very recent paper in BYU Studies.
Doctrine and Covenants 9:7 reads “when you took no thought save it was to ask me” (emphasis added). This substitutional “save it was” usage – specifically mentioned in the OED (s.v. except, conj., def. 2c) – also occurs three times in the Book of Mormon (but not in Ether 15:12 or Moses 7:22, which originally read “save it were”). (In these four contexts, “save it was” is not an impersonal expression, nor is the it literal; the “it was” after save is a pro-clausal or substitutional usage.) As it turns out, substitutional “save it was” is very rare outside of this revelatory language uttered by Joseph Smith. I have searched for it several times in large databases and have only found it in 1684, occurring twice in a single book by a Scottish English author, James Canaries. So along with a host of supporting linguistic evidence, “save it was” also suggests that the English language of D&C 9:7 was given to Joseph Smith, not formulated by him, as also the English language of the Book of Mormon.
Very interesting points. Thank you, Standford. I fully agree that many talk about bad grammar in the Book of Mormon without really having dug into the issue. Too many accept B.H. Roberts’s early concerns at face value without recognizing how much has changed in our appreciation of the Book of Mormon since his day. It’s a book that becomes more impressive and relevant over time. That’s quite an achievement. Thank you for your contributions in understanding the nature of the dictated text and how meaningful some of those apparent warts may be.