Book of Mormon Evidences- "Poor English but Correct Hebrew!"

“ IF / THEN’ vs. “IF / AND”

Evidence the Book of Mormon is an ancient text with Hebrew Grammar-
Conditional Sentences: Professor Royal "The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text" (Yale, 2009),

In English we use “ if , then” for conditional sentences with the “then” being optional. Ex. "If Brother Rockwood keeps bouncing his leg up and down, I'll scream." What is absolutely not a common conditional form — in any period or dialect of English — is an "if/and" construction. We never say things like, "If Brother Rockwood keeps bouncing his leg up and down and I'll scream" or "If you cook it, and I'll eat it." Yet, although it never survives into English Bible translations, this construction is common in biblical Hebrew.

Significantly, the Hebrew "if/and" conditionals did appear in the original dictation manuscript of the Book of Mormon.
Examples:
1 Nephi 17:50 reads "if he should command me that I should say unto this water be thou earth and it shall be earth." That "and" was removed when Oliver Cowdery produced the so-called "Printer's Manuscript.”
Helaman 12:13-21: "yea and if he saith unto the earth move and it is moved", "yea if he say unto the earth thou shalt go back that it lengthen out the day for many hours and it is done …", "and behold also if he saith unto the waters of the great deep be thou dried up and it is done", "behold if he saith unto this mountain be thou raised up and come over and fall upon that city that it be buried up and behold it is done", "and if the Lord shall say be thou accursed that no man shall find thee from this time henceforth and forever and behold no man getteth it henceforth and forever", "and behold if the Lord shall say unto a man because of thine iniquities thou shalt be accursed forever and it shall be done", "and if the Lord shall say because of thine iniquities thou shalt be cut off from my presence and he will cause that it shall be so"

Notice how the very familiar passage recorded at Moroni 10:4 reads in the original printing: "And if ye shall ask with a sincere heart with real intent having faith in Christ and he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost."

Joseph Smith would not have seen the Hebrew "if/and" conditional sentence in the King James Bible. They had been replaced centuries before with the proper English, “if / then”.

Such expressions are certainly poor English but correct Hebrew . Though Joseph Smith was an uneducated man, he was a native speaker of English; he knew that these constructions sounded wrong. So, he eliminated them himself in the second printing of the Book of Mormon. This leakage from the text's original language into the translation remains a subtle divine hint that the original language of the Book of Mormon wasn't English, let alone Joseph Smith’s English.