Mosiah 10:14–16 Textual Variants

Here in this passage, Oliver Cowdery wrote wrath for wroth two out of four times (numbered as 2 and 3 above). In the first and fourth cases, he wrote the correct wroth. In the second case, Oliver caught his error almost immediately and corrected the a to an o (the level of ink flow is unchanged). The probable source for this error is the lexical competition in standard English between the noun wrath and the adjective wroth. Nonetheless, the Oxford English Dictionary points out that wrath has existed as a variant, although infrequent, of the adjective wroth and seems to have developed by association with the noun wrath. A number of citations from 1535 through 1862 are found in the OED under the adjective wrath, including the following:

• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590)
  • for Oberon is passing fell and wrath because that she as her attendant hath a lovely boy stolen from an Indian king [wrath rhymes with hath]
• Douay Bible, Genesis 40:2 (1609)
  • Pharao being wrath against them ... sent them into the prison.
• John Milton (1629)
  • Th’old Dragon under ground … wrath to see his Kingdom fail.
• William Makepeace Thackeray (1860)
  • Lovel, seldom angry, was violently wrath with his brother-in-law.

Thus we have to at least consider the possibility that the occasional use of wrath in place of wroth in the Book of Mormon text is either original to the text or at least due to dialectal overlay.

In all, the standard Book of Mormon text has 44 occurrences of the noun wrath and 24 of the adjective wroth. In one other place, we get a mix-up between wrath and wroth, but in this instance the confusion is in the other direction and is due to a different scribe (the unknown scribe 2 of 𝓟):

• 3 Nephi 22:8 (quoting Isaiah 54:8)
  • in a little [wroth > wrath 1|wrath ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST] I hid my face from thee for a moment

In this instance, the manuscript correction (like that in Mosiah 10:14) simply involves rewriting the vowel. In all other cases, the scribes consistently wrote the a vowel for the noun wrath and the o vowel for the adjective wroth. This variation for only three cases of wroth and wrath suggests that the confusion is probably the result of a momentary problem in lexical retrieval on the part of the individual scribe rather than the result of actual dialectal variation. The manuscript corrections made by Oliver Cowdery and scribe 2 of 𝓟 are virtually immediate; and the one case of adjectival wrath that Oliver missed correcting (numbered above as 3) is probably the result of this lexical confusion rather than the result of a dialectal pronunciation of the adjective wroth as wrath. The critical text will therefore accept wroth for all four instances of the adjective in Mosiah 10:14–16. Similarly, wrath will be accepted in 3 Nephi 22:8.