In a previous post, I summarized an article by Joseph Spencer entitled “Prolegomena to Any Future Study of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon.” Recently, I had the chance to email back and forth with Joe and ask him some questions I still had after reading his article, and he gave me permission to post our exchange as an interview.
I recently read an article that pointed out some interesting patterns. In 1 and 2 Nephi, Isaiah and several themes related to his teachings are used extensively. Then, suddenly, Isaiah goes completely unused in Enos through Helaman (and the first part of 3 Nephi). Then, Isaiah is reintroduced “with a vengeance” in 3 Nephi by the Savior, almost as soon as He appears to the Nephites. Joe Spencer drew some interesting conclusions as to why that might be.
This morning, I just unwittingly found a small difference in the scriptural text between the 1981 printed edition and the online scripture text. Yes, I know that “thrash” and “thresh” are two forms of the same word, having the same meaning. I also know that the current online edition incorporated small changes to the supplementary material and in a few cases to the punctuation. But I did not know that the online edition had incorporated any changes to the actual wording of the scriptures. Very interesting!
One way I study the scriptures is by redesigning them in different ways. It started out as a one-time experiment, but I’ve ended up reformatting almost the entire standard works. When the scriptures were first written, there were no verse numbers or chapter breaks. So that’s how my files start out. I then go and enter headings, hit Enter at natural paragraph breaks, or color dialogue to make it easy to see at-a-glance if diety is talking, or if a prophet is talking, and how long the dialogue lasts. I’ve put links in this post so that others can redesign the scriptures on their own.