Your example of “pure and delightsome” vs. “white and delightsome” is a particularly interesting example, but runs counter to your point.

It was Joseph Smith (in the 1840 edition) that made that change. The LDS church was just slow to include the change in their version of the BoM because they based their later editions after 1840 on the European editions which didn’t include the clarification. In 1981 they finally “caught up” with all the clarifications JS had intended. This is well documented.

Thanks for the clarification on jaguars.

I should point out that Friberg’s painting also shows Europeans (which were not found in the Americas in the time period indicated) and not Palestinians or Asians(which maybe were?)

When I transcribe difficult original manuscripts from that era, I often supply an adjacent “reading column” with minimal editing and a few crucial words supplied. Comparing a readable text to a rough original reminds us how much effect a cleaned-up version can have. And of course the Book of Mormon’s Bible-imitating Elizabethan (or Jacobean, or “King James”) literary style has far more power over our psyches than many of us might acknowledge. “Smith judiciously wrote his book,” observed Dr. Paul C. Gutjahr, “in an idiom that constantly invoked the holy cadences of the King James Bible. While Alexander Campbell was taking the eth endings off words, Smith was putting them on.” – An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, [c. 1999]), 153.

I really agree with that thought, and was going to state it when I read it already said

Alma

@Alma: Would you be willing to share something like that with the greater bloggernacle?

That BRM was a major contributor to the 1981 version (headings, etc.–including the one major correction that was just made to insert “among the”) doesn’t come as a surprise; it also makes me like it less. Does that make me a bad person?

Actually, it’s stated fact.

“QUESTION: Who is responsible for the little informational headings preceding each chapter in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price?

ROBERT J. MATTHEWS: I would be glad to tell you who did that… I think it would be no breach of etiquette or of confidentiality if I were to say with pleasure that Elder Bruce R. McConkie produced those headings.” in “The JST: Retrospect and Prospect—A Panel” Joseph Smith Translation: The Restoration of Plain and Precious Things,
ed. Robert L. Millet, Monte S. Nyman, p. 300-301.

I also assume that Pres. Monson was in charge of the publication committee because of seniority in the quorum rather than for previous work experience.

I wonder about your point 2, in the sense that the Church included in the missionary editions of the Book of Mormon, presumably in an attempt to increase “clarity”, illustrations of Book of Mormon scenes by Arnold Friberg, and pictures of relics of ancient MesoAmerica in some editions as well.

At some point increasing clarity impacts the message of the text, like when readers can’t imagine Abinadi in any other way except as a skinny old guy in chains in a court with a fat bad man with lounging leopards about the place.

Both Friberg’s illustrations and the heavily edited text present a respectable smooth image that sometimes, at least for me, clashes with the rough content (Shiz and Coriantumr, piles of rotting corpses, cataclysmic upheaval to the landscape, etc.)

Has anyone out there read a weatherbeaten first edition of the Book of Mormon with the original errors left in?

Regardless of the first, some of the formatting changes are necessary for the second to be accomplished, which is the purpose of all communication.