Figure 1 Percentage of Isaiah Verses Found in Each Chapter of Nephi’s Writing with a Variant. Light tint indicates Isaiah’s deposition (2 Nephi 12-24). The remaining columns indicate all other Isaiah citations.
Textual analysis is best performed in a text’s original language.[1] However, Nephi’s original writings have not survived to the present day. Of necessity, then, we are left to compare the King James Version of Isaiah with the Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text.[2] This is not an entirely expedient choice: scholars have found evidence to suggest that the language of the King James Bible is the language or base text of the Book of Mormon.[3],[4] While a full discussion of this relationship is beyond the scope of this paper, it is enough for our purposes to demonstrate that recent scholarship supports the view that the King James Version is our closest available analog to Nephi’s English text. Given the hundreds of verses of Isaiah referenced in Nephi’s writings these two works lend themselves to quantitative comparison. Drawing on five sources, I will use seven methods to compare 2 Nephi 12-24 to other sections of Isaiah found in Nephi’s writing.
Skousen used the WordCruncher text-analysis toolkit to calculate the number of identical words appearing in succession. He found that this passage shared more identical word sequences than any other section of Isaiah found in Nephi’s writings. He also showed that this section had much longer strings of identical word sequences than other Isaiah-related passages. [5]
John Tvedtnes’ work offers a second approach to the same comparison.[6] After manual comparison by two reviewers,[7] Tvedtnes documented all variations between multiple versions of the Isaiah and Nephi texts. Altogether, he found 416 Isaiah verses “cited” in the first and second books of Nephi. Figure 1 demonstrates the percentage of verses with variants according to his study. In 2 Nephi 12-24 he found that 126 of the 275 verses (46%) contained minor variants on the source material. In Isaiah citations outside of 2 Nephi 12-24, 116 of the 141 verses (79%) demonstrate a variant. I tabulated Tvedtnes’ reported outcomes as binary variables and performed and binomial exact test.[8] The difference between those proportions is statistically significant and the magnitude of the difference is meaningful. Tvedtnes also noted dozens of major variants that he termed ‘paraphrases.’ No major variants were found inside 2 Nephi 12-24.
Tvedtnes acknowledges that his work was inspired by a friend who circulated a “statistical analysis of the frequency of changes” in Isaiah verses.[9] This appears to be a reference to an unpublished 1972 paper by Chris Eccel, which is partially available.[10] The excerpted portion does not appear to report all of the statistical analysis Eccel performed, but it does include his estimation that the odds of producing the observed distribution of variant frequencies from a text in which they are randomly distributed is “only four chances in a thousand.” The site on which Eccel’s partial paper is hosted also graphs the distribution of “first-order variants” and “second-order variants.” Unfortunately, Eccel’s methodology is not described, but it is worth noting that the graphical representation accompanying his paper shows the fewest variants in 2 Nephi 12-24.
More recently Ann Madsen published a comprehensive comparison of Isaiah variants found in Nephi’s writings.[11] Similar to Tvedtnes she found variants in 50% (137/273) of the verses in 2 Nephi 12-24. Outside those chapters she reports 86% (96/111) of the verses had variants. For readability her publication does not include some verses where Isaiah is cited on multiple occasions accounting for the difference in total verse count.
Finally, and largely for the sake of reproducibility I uploaded the relevant portions of Isaiah from the 1769 KJV and the Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text to the widely used validated anti-plagiarism service Copyleaks. Copyleaks uses artificial intelligence to detect commonalities between texts. Because it uses optical character recognition, I removed all punctuation and rendered the text uniformly uppercase. I then compared 2 Nephi 12-24 with other Isaiah verses found in Nephi’s writing, namely 1 Nephi 20-21 and 2 Nephi 6:16-8; I intentionally excluded 2 Nephi 27, which corresponds with Isaiah 29, since Nephi’s frequent interjected commentary would artefactually change the result. Despite this conservative approach, Copyleaks reported a 99.0% similarity score for the 7,534 words found in 2 Nephi 12-24. Only a 92.1% similarity was noted in the 2,974 words found in 1 Nephi 20-21 and 2 Nephi 6:16-8.
Thus, all seven techniques—WordCruncher consecutive identical word string length, quantity of identical strings, multiple manual evaluations of both minor and major variants, random distribution analysis, and AI analysis —demonstrate that 2 Nephi 12-24 is meaningfully closer to the corresponding Isaiah KJV text than other Isaiah citations within the books of Nephi and their corresponding Isaiah KJV texts. While this data may appear convincing, these studies do not attempt to measure causality. For that, we must rely on context. The data suggest that sections of the text were systematically treated differently than other sections. I propose that the distribution of variants is due to Nephi’s conscious decision to leave aside exegetical techniques and cite Isaiah verbatim.[12]
Given the well-described practice of rewriting scripture during the early Second Temple period and earlier, only 2 Nephi 12-24 should be considered a citation of Isaiah in today’s usage of the term.
[1] Arie van der Kooij, “Review: Eugene Ulrich and Peter W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1.II: The Isaiah Scrolls: Part 1: Plates and Transcriptions; Part 2: Introduction, Commentary and Textual Variants. DJD 32.,” Dead Sea Discoveries 22 (2015): 116–17.
[2] Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, 2nd ed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
[3] For more discussion, please see 32:00–38:00 of “History of the Text of the Book of Mormon – Royal Skousen – Volume 3 Parts 5 and 6 – 1/15/20,” Scripture Central, March 5, 2020, video, 1:33:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jlPgeX0U3Y.
[4] “The base text for the Isaiah quotations in the Book of Mormon is indeed the King James Version of the Bible.” Royal Skousen, “Textual Variants in the Isaiah Quotations in the Book of Mormon,” in Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, ed. Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1998), 369–90.
[5] Royal Skousen, “The History of the Book of Mormon Text,” BYU Studies Quarterly, 2020, 91, https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-history-of-the-book-of-mormon-text-parts-5-and-6-of-volume-3-of-the-critical-text/.
[6] John A. Tvedtnes, “Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon,” in Isaiah and the Prophets: Inspired Voices from the Old Testament, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1984), 165–78.
[7] These reviewers looked at Hebrew Masoretic text, the Hebrew scrolls found at Qumran (notably IQIsa, which contains all sixty-six chapters), the Aramaic Targumim, the Peshitta, the Septuagint or Greek translation, the Old Latin and Vulgate, and the Isaiah passages quoted in the New Testament.
[8] Confidence intervals (CI) were established using z scores that incorporated a continuity correction. The proportion of verses containing a variant in 2 Nephi 12-24 was 46%, 95% CI: (40% – 52%). The proportion of other Isaiah verses containing variants was 79%, 95% CI: (72-86%). The absolute difference between the variant proportions was 33%, 95% CI: (24%-43%), p<0.0001.
[9] Tvedtnes
[10] A. Chris Eccel, “An Analysis of the Distribution of the BM Variants” (unpublished paper, Chicago, 1972), http://www.gptouchstone.org/variants.html, Accessed May 2, 2023
[11] Madsen, Ann N., and Shon D. Hopkin. Opening Isaiah: A Harmony. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2018.
[12] To state that 2 Nephi 12-24 is a verbatim citation one of many assumptions need to be made. Some examples include: first, the translator of the Book of Mormon knew that Nephi was citing Isaiah 2-14 and used a nearly identical analog of the text to relate this passage to his own audience. This assumption is reasonable if one uses a “cultural and creative translation” model suggested by Royal Skousen. Second, alternatively both transmitters of the Masoretic text and Isaiah’s writings on the brass plates drew upon versions of similar base material that was in existence by 600 B.C. Supporting this later scenario are the variants reported by Donald Parry, wherein Second Nephi is in discordance with KJV text but in agreement with the Great Isaiah Scroll. (Parry, Donald W. and Ricks, Stephen D., “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Questions and Responses for Latter-day Saints” (2000). Maxwell Institute Publications.) Third, additionally, if we take the view that the Book of Mormon is a work of historical fiction by Joseph Smith; Smith could well mean to imply that Nephi is not performing exegetical changes in 2 Nephi 12-24 or Smith was tired. Tvedtnes nods to this hypothesis when he reports that others view the low rate of variants in 2 Nephi 12-24 as evidence that “Joseph Smith wearied of making alterations as time went by.” Many of the variants, counters Tvedtnes, were supported by earlier translations, thereby implying that Smith had access to numerous unique copies of Isaiah, some not in circulation or extant in his time. A fourth assumption might be compelling to apologists. The areas with the highest proportion of variants are 1 Nephi 20-21 and 2 Nephi 6:16-8. These correspond to the Deutero or Second Isaiah citations, specifically Isaiah 48-52:2. If one holds that Nephi only performed verbatim citations this may account for the higher degree of variance in the Second Isaiah texts (i.e. because they were not fully formed by 600 B.C. when Nephi left Jerusalem). However the types of variants are likely as important as the quantity. Joshua Sears points out the perspective and language which leads scholars to conclude Deutero-Isaiah was written after 600 B.C. “Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon: Latter-day Saint Approaches.” Pages 365–91 in They Shall Grow Together: The Bible in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon Academy. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022) The spiritual point of this analysis should not be lost on us. At face value, Nephi’s writings suggest a pre-exilic date of composition for Second Isaiah. Joseph Spencer has noted this implication of the text. (Spencer, Joseph M.. Lecture XX: Nephi’s Comments on Reading Isaiah In The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016). Further discussion of this observation is outside the scope of this paper. For my purpose I only show that 2 Nephi 12-24 is not an exegetical text (unlike the rest of his writings).