When I was a teenager, it dawned on me that if the Book of Mormon is telling the truth about its origins and creation (and I believe it is), then it would include a translation of the oldest-known version of Isaiah's writings, copied from a source created much closer to Isaiah's lifetime than any other known sources. (The next-oldest is the Great Isaiah Scroll, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which you can read online in translation here, alongside a translation of the Masoretic text: http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/chapters_pg). As a teen this meant to me that if the translation was correct, we could read the most correct version of Isaiah--especially given that we consider the English Book of Mormon a revealed translation, making it even more correct than a typical translation. I was curious how it was different.
So I sat down and tried to compare them, making notes by hand. I got through several verses of very small changes and was disappointed and frustrated that it was very hard work for very little reward ("reward" to me at that time meaning "big revealing changes.") I got bored and set the whole thing aside.
It's now many years later, and I have been working on creating a readable version of the oldest known text of the Book of Mormon ("readable" meaning I could sit down and read it for joy, not for research or study like you would use Royal Skousen's work for). I have wanted to read the Book of Mormon the way it fell from Joseph's lips as he was reading the revealed translation to his scribes since I was in Royal Skousen's class in my senior year at BYU in 1996. So I'm making myself a version I can read in a format I like. In the process, I have also been comparing the handwritten versions to the 2013 Book of Mormon and creating a chart of every difference I find (except spelling differences), which handwritten manuscript I was looking at when I found it, and what iteration I put into my "readable" version, explaining and justifying all the editorial decisions I've had to make. My long-term goal is to also see where each of these changes came from--who introduced them, when, and whether it was deliberate or accidental. Many of the differences (and there are hundreds) are stylistic changes made by Joseph Smith or authorized by him. As this is a secondary project for me (my main project right now is creating a readable version of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible that is easy to access, with in-line edits, footnotes discussing both rough drafts and editorial choices I have made, and in a format readable to text readers for the visually impaired; I'm in Psalms now. But I digress.)
So, chugging along noting changes in the various Book of Mormon editions, and I got to the first big Isaiah quote. I immediately remembered the project I had attempted when I was a teenager, and I realized I wasn't going to get to the earliest known iteration of Isaiah by comparing the 1987 Book of Mormon to the King James Bible because there were probably edits made by the well-meaning but not prophetic compositor and the editing teams over time to make the text more closely match the King James Bible. I already knew they put in chapter breaks to match the Bible chapter breaks (which were not done by a prophet, but by scholars over a thousand years after Isaiah wrote), and I suspected there were textual changes as well. Meanwhile, it was exciting to see the BoM-original chapter breaks, which make far more sense than the newer ones and highlight some structural things like the repeat of the phrase "his hand stretched out still." On a side note, it makes me wonder how many seminary lessons were taught about chiasmus or other Hebrew poetic structures without regard to whether the chapter breaks they're analyzing are even in the same place in the original.
Plodding along, picking it up occasionally, I finally reached the end of the "big chunk" of Isaiah that Nephi quotes. Sure enough, there is clear evidence of editors, scribes, and possibly the compositor making edits to the handwritten texts (The Original Manuscript--which doesn't all exist anymore, but parts that do are available online--and the Printer's Manuscript--which is complete and preserved and available online.) You can see a couple of these edits-to-match-the-Bible on the Joseph Smith Papers website. Footnote 196, for example, shows where Oliver Cowdery made one of these changes: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/printers-manuscript-of-the-book-of-mormon-circa-august-1829-circa-january-1830/81
When I got to the end of the big Second Nephi Isaiah section in my oldest-known-text project, I realized I could now finally create that chart of changes that I wanted when I was a teen. Of course you can find these kinds of charts online, but I wanted one that compared the King James Isaiah to the handwritten texts of the Book of Mormon--what I call the Oldest Known Text of the Book of Mormon, as close as possible to how it fell from Joseph's lips when he first read it aloud. I wanted to compare it to the Isaiah from before the editors changed things to more closely match the Bible--trying to get to that oldest known version of Isaiah.
It took a couple days, but tonight I finished the chart for the section from Second Nephi that covers Isaiah 2-14. What I found is most changes are really something you'd expect from translation choices (is/shall be; forests/forest). Some are more significant (at least three times one version has "not" where the other doesn't; at one point the BoM uses "remnant" where the KJV uses "raiment," changing the metaphor entirely). Some add or eliminate long phrases, some of which really are significant. There are over 200 differences between the handwritten Book of Mormon texts and the King James version in this part of Second Nephi alone. I count a change as a phrase that has one or more differences, not including spelling. Some verses have more than one change, as more than one phrase has differences. Some verses have one change, some none.
How did I compare these? I copied both texts into a document, removed all the punctuation, and fed them both into a diffing tool--an app used by programmers to compare two blocks of text. The diffing tool highlighted differences for me, and I made a chart of the differences. I did not note spelling differences ("defense/defence"). I also did not put into the chart differences in a few verses that I think were copying errors in the handwritten manuscripts (what we would today call typos). These are: 2 Ne 14:6, where "covert" was written "covet"; 2 Ne 18:8, where "over" was written "ever" to render "overflow and go ever," which doesn't make sense in the context; 2 Ne 24:23, where “besom” was written “bosom,” which again doesn’t make sense; 2 Ne 23:23, where “chaste” was written instead of “chased” and then later crossed out and corrected by someone and was likely a mishearing of the spoken homophone that was then copied into the PM and corrected there; 2 Ne 23:15, where the word "every" was repeated across a line break unintentionally when the text was copied for the PM.
I'm still digging in to decipher what changes matter and what don't, but wanted to share the chart so others can explore the differences as well.
Here is a spreadsheet of the chart of difference:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FYCpu1nOhnYr9JFSE39bEgTweRNOq77NRYxNlCuzXQw/edit?usp=sharing
You can access the pdf of the chart of differences here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A0eg0SQq42WLbzgHrTBK8trntvzoq3bY/view?usp=sharing
