Outlier: “Except it were” phraseology (15×)

Perhaps the most non-literal “except it were” in a single text.

The Book of Mormon has fifteen instances of “except it were”; ten of these occur in the book of Mosiah (e.g. “there was nothing preached in all the churches except it were repentance and faith in God” mh2522). In all of these, the it is an expletive, unlike the two in the King James Bible, which have a literal it (followed each time by the past participle given):

John 6:65
Therefore said I vnto you, no man can come vnto me,
except it were giuen vnto him of my Father.

John 19:11
Iesus answered, Thou couldest haue no power at all against me,
except it were giuen thee from aboue:

In the Book of Mormon, “it were” in the phrase “except it were” is usually a pro-form that expresses the same content as a contextually recoverable phrase or clause. The OED has a brief description of this kind of pro-form construction: “After except conj. the phrases it be, it were, etc., are often used instead of repeating the principal verb.” (Oxford English Dictionary, “except (conj.), sense 2.c,” June 2025, [link].)

In a recent search, two seventeenth-century translations were found to come the closest to the Book of Mormon’s usage level of “except it were.” One was published in 1651 (13×), the other in 1614 (12×).

The most that occur in the large eighteenth-century database of more than nine billion words are from later editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a sixteenth-century text.

• Book of Mormon (1829): 15
• The life of Father Paul (1651): 13.

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