I think that when we ask about getting better, we also have to ask about getting better at what ...
A couple of thoughts I had while thinking about this question today - and I may not get to what you are asking, but I think that it may be of interest -
Let's reduce (for the purpose of this discussion) the issues with the Book of Mormon to the two primary scenarios - an entirely modern text, and a modern text based on some ancient text. When we discuss the idea of a lexical expansion, from the perspective of a believer, we have to differentiate between the two. I am going to emphasize that model from the position of a believer because (a) it is in some ways much more interesting (the theory is more complex), and (b) because it makes the discussion of the modern text easier to explain. So I am really going to focus on this question from the perspective of a believer.
First, some comments on translation. Translation can produce lexical expansion. But it is not (in my opinion) as common as lexical reduction. One example of lexical reduction (my term) is the whole biblical narrative of Noah. There is a Hebrew word in the text that is (in a couple of different forms) used repeatedly: NHM. In the King James text, it is variously translated as: (1) to be sorry, be moved to pity, have compassion, (2) to be sorry, rue, suffer grief, repent, (3) to comfort oneself, be comforted, and (4) to comfort oneself, ease oneself. The KJV uses a relatively small set of words to translate the term, more recent translations use a broader set of terms. There is a lot of space covered by this term - and the narrative of Noah uses the whole range, starting with Gen. 5:29 "And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed." The name Noah is closely related to the word - but here, the word is translated "This same shall comfort". A prophecy that Noah would lift the curse on the earth (the one God placed when he booted Adam from the Garden). God meanwhile, in Gen. 6:6 starts in a bad frame of mind: "And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." And here, the word is translated "repented". So we get the repeated use of this word until the end - and in the end, Noah offers a sacrifice, and moves God from an angry regretful state (NHM) to a state of comfort (also NHM) - and God lifts the curse on ground, and the prophecy is fulfilled. Reading the text in Hebrew, there is an ambiguity in the term which creates a framework through which we can understand the narrative and the way that Noah and God interact apart from their direct communications. It is a brilliant piece of literature in this way. But when we translate this term into English (and do so in very different ways throughout this narrative) we lose the ambiguity and the connectedness that it provides to the reader and we replace it with a much more specific idea in each place. Our choices in reading are completely limited by the translation. This is a lexical reduction caused by translation.
Lexical expansion caused by translation is when a relatively specific term is translated into word that has some ambiguity which allows it to be read in different ways. This creates space where multiple understandings are available - many (perhaps most) of which were never intended by the author of the source text. And within the interpretation of religious texts, this creates some strange things. The one that jumps most readily to mind would be the reading of Ezekiel 37 in early LDS interpretation. This is where we read about the "sticks" of Judah and Ephraim in the King James text. In 1831 or 1832, William Phelps was reading a copy of Jahn's Biblical Archaeology, and he encounters a discussion about these verses. And he is inspired by the language there. And so in the paper he publishes, he writes this:
So, whatever Ezekiel meant in his text, Phelps has added to this meaning of a newspaper stick - and of course, this lexical expansion (through translation) takes off in early Mormon opinion to the point that we get the changes in D&C 27 in 1835. So this is an example of a sort of lexical expansion we might see in translation. And it is all wrapped up in how it is read (as much as in how it is written).Ezek. also says: Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, for Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, for Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the house of Israel his companions: and join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thy hand. The Bible for the stick of Judah, and the Book of Mormon for the stick of Joseph, in the hand of Ephraim, is all that need be said, upon these words, for no man ever pretended to know, (till the Book of Mormon came,) any thing about the tribe of Joseph, or his history, notwithstanding God had declared by the mouth of Hosea, That he had written the great things of his law to Ephraim; and they are counted a strange thing. The ancient and modern practice of reading sticks, wants but little elucidation. The common school-boy ought to know, that anciently, they wrote on parchment for common use, and rolled it round a stick; and, latterly, newspapers are put into a stick for public utility.
So getting back to the question. The Book of Mormon (and the reason why I enjoy analyzing it from this believer's perspective) is fascinatingly complex for the purposes of these kinds of close readings. And I might suggest that when we discuss this idea of lexical expansion, there are several really important points to make (I am only considered the text here from the perspective of a believer - its more interesting and still useful to the non-believer in ways that I think will be largely self-evident):
1: There are incongruities in the text. These exist in just about any way of approaching the text - but they are much more pronounced when we approach the text from the perspective of historicity.
2: The Book of Mormon is a modern text - and we have some sense of when it was produced and published (I put no value in the theories of significantly earlier writing). The gold plates are its source.
3: The believer first needs to distinguish the incongruities of the modern text from the alleged ancient source.
So let me illustrate what this means in terms of an item in the list linked in the OP.
So if we just look at the paired instances of goats and wild goats, we have them in Enos 1:1 and 1 Nephi 18:25. But the underlying problem that we have is that the language of the goat and wild goat is almost certainly taken from Deuteronomy 14:4-5 - "These are the beasts which ye shall eat: the ox, the sheep, and the goat, The hart, and the roebuck, and the fallow deer, and the wild goat, and the pygarg, and the wild ox, and the chamois." There isn't any more real context in the Book of Mormon for the wild goat - it only occurs in these two places. The obvious conclusion is that it occurs in the text of the Book of Mormon in these places because of the way that it occurs in the biblical text. I could go further and suggest that it occurs this way in the Book of Mormon (like the Isaiah passages) precisely because of the way that it occurs in the KJV. Clearly, there isn't anything related here to loan shifting (by my earlier definitions). But, it would certainly be a plausible place to discuss lexical expansion. The Nephites enter a new world - and one of their needs is to identify which animals are clean and unclean - and the rules for this are in Deuteronomy 14. What is the difference between the goat and the wild goat? One follows the rules for being a clean animal and one doesn't. And while the context in the text hints at something like this, there is nothing conclusive in the text because what the text says is very limited (we draw out nuances with difficulty). Of the other two references to goats, one is really interesting to me (Alma 14:29) because the imagery doesn't come out of the Old Testament. And we have Ether 9:18 - "And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man." This one is fascinating because it makes swine a clean animal (contra Deuteronomy 14:8). But in neither of these cases do we have the wild goat. The conclusion (for me) is that the Book of Mormon's use of goats and wild goats as presented is more an artifact of translation than any lexical expansion (or any loan-shift). And as an artifact of translation, it doesn't have any value as an anachronism.Goats & Wild Goats (Confirmed as a loan shift). Though species of goats in the Americas appear to have gone extinct prior to Book of Mormon times, Early Spanish observers characterized certain species of Mesoamerican deer as “goats” and “wild goats”.
If I wanted to be really speculative, I would turn to the limited context provided by Alma 18:29 as the only literary context that might suggest lexical expansion: and when they saw Alma and Amulek coming forth out of the prison, and the walls thereof had fallen to the earth, they were struck with great fear, and fled from the presence of Alma and Amulek even as a goat fleeth with her young from two lions; and thus they did flee from the presence of Alma and Amulek.
This idea of a goat fleeing from two lions could be understood as a prey-predator relationship, where the predators hunt cooperatively in pairs. Context means everything here (and of course is uncertain). Jaguars fit the bill, but so do Mexican wolves. I could probably find other potential pairings in other geographic locations. The metaphor in the text here would appear to be drawn from the ancient source - and if the language is reflective of the ancient source, it would necessarily imply lexical expansion in the Nephite vocabulary for both the goat and the lion - and the translation (lexical reduction) makes it very difficult to determine what that lexical expansion would have been like in the Nephite language use. The analysis helps us ask better questions of the text - which leads to more interesting and engaging speculations and theory. Lexical expansion connected to translation can explain the anachronism.
At the same time, what I also end up with is a simple notion - the idea of goats and wild goats is for me attributable to the modern text entirely. It isn't interesting - and seen in this light, it doesn't create an anachronism that can be attributed to the alleged ancient source, and it stops being interesting to the critic. The other two discussions about goats don't provide us with anything new either (at least about goats). So we are largely left with nothing in terms of either an anachronism or a real need to address that question.
And at the same time, the metaphor about two lions hunting goats is absolutely fascinating - and a space in which to look for something more. The issue of swine as food is also of interest to me. In the case of the lions, lexical expansion in the ancient source offers potential to the believer, while sourcing the text might be an interesting approach for the critic. And for the issue of swine - while there are lots of ways to explain the incongruity away (the Jaredites weren't followers of the Law of Moses, Moroni is writing from a post-Mosaic Law period, and so on), both of these are places where you could actually make an argument (as speculative as it would be) for loan-shifting in the ancient text in the sense that the word translated as swine has shifted/expanded to include some sort of domesticated animal that was considered useful for food or that the lion expands to cover a local native predator, but then that predator's behaviors are pushed back onto the lion (thus the shift).
Now back to the one that has been debated ad nauseum -
It is on the basis of lexical expansion that we could see a connection being drawn between the horse and a tapir - on the basis of the taxonomical classifications we see in Deuteronomy 14. Horses and tapirs are both odd-toed ungulates - they do not split the hoof. Neither one are ruminants. And so on. The horse in the Book of Mormon is generally not very descriptive - but there are two things that are flags for me in reading the text. The first is that the horse and chariot in Alma 18 is more engaged in the narrative than anywhere else. The Isaiah text in 2 Nephi 12, and the related text in 3 Nephi 21 aren't helpful. The specific language in most places can be easily attributable to the modern text (via the language of the KJV). The story with the "preparing his horses and his chariots" deserves a closer look. The other thing for me is Deuteronomy 17 - the kingship code which reads (17:15-20):
Every time we have a wicked king, this is the standard that is used to discuss it. This includes David and Solomon in Jacob 2:24 - "Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord." But this isn't all that Jacob says. Earlier he points out the pride issue: "and because some of you have obtained more abundantly than that of your brethren ye are lifted up in the pride of your hearts, ... and persecute your brethren because ye suppose that ye are better than they." This is minor stuff. The best example is the excoriation of King Noah. Mosiah 11:2 provides a list that seems to come right out of Deuteronomy: "For behold, he did not keep the commandments of God, but he did walk after the desires of his own heart. And he had many wives and concubines." We have the accumulation of wealth. There is that fascinating bit in which the whole "set a king over thee" is taken literally in the sense of representing rank through tiered seating. It isn't just hearts that lifted up - Noah has his tower, and the priests are given seats that are higher up than all the others. What does Abinadi do? He accuses them of the sins of Deuteronomy 17: "And again he said unto them: If ye teach the law of Moses why do ye not keep it? Why do ye set your hearts upon riches? Why do ye commit whoredoms and spend your strength with harlots, ..." and then he does for Noah what Deuteronomy says that the king should do for himself: "And now I read unto you the remainder of the commandments of God, for I perceive that they are not written in your hearts." Later in Ether we have the wicked Jaredite kings being criticized using the same language. In all of this (this continued use of Deuteronomy 17) there is never once a single mention about horses. And this is the one context in which I would expect it - if there were actual horses with the Nephites. Even in a wholly modern text, this is something of a glaring omission - for a text which so heavily engages these Old Testament passages. So these two ideas become the incongruity to be explored - the horse in Alma 18, and its absence effectively everywhere else. Is the horse in the Book of Mormon a result of lexical expansion? It could be. But, we can't simply jump there without dealing with the more complicated narrative issues first. What I would say is that I have no reason (on the basis of our limited knowledge of the past) to see a Nephite population with the domesticated horses of our experience. The arguments for and against the horse as anachronism should be fairly narrow. But by keeping the criticisms fairly broad and not recognizing that much of the current arguments are drawn from issues that can (and should be) attributed to the modern text - where some references to horses are (with relative certainty) caused by the relationship between the Book of Mormon and the KJV (either as a source or as a deliberate use in translation), the response also remains overly broad - and neither side really encourages engagement with the text. The real goal should be to get to the incongruity that should be the center of the discussion over the meaning of the text.15 Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother.
16 But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the Lord hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way.
17 Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.
18 And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites:
19 And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them:
20 That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.
So now, I am going to return to that question that started this post - what do I suppose is an expansion that may work better? Ostler's expansion theory isn't at this level of linguistic information. His position is that the Book of Mormon starts with this ancient narrative and in a sense, it takes the texts own advice and likens it unto ourselves - Joseph Smith's translation is, in this sense, a reworking of the ancient source - a reinterpretation of that narrative to make it applicable to a modern context. It's a topic I have thought about at length. I think that my essay that best relates to this was my essay: "Nephi: A Postmodernist Reading". I started that essay describing an incongruity that I observe:
But, to answer that question, I would say this - when our discussion of the text helps us better understand the text - that is when a discussion of an expansion is better. I am not critical of good apologetic arguments. I can be critical of arguments that I think aren't very good. But my aim in that criticism is to help build better arguments. Dan Peterson and Matt Roper are certainly not targets for me - Dan's interactions with me have always been respectful and insightful. This doesn't mean that we agree on everything. Having experiences discussing Mormonism with both critics and believers, I think that the real goal should be about encouraging engagement with the text. And while I think that my own idiosyncratic views are unlikely to ever be broadly accepted, I think that sometimes I can provide a valuable counterpoint that aims at helping people read the text in different ways.Nephi, of course, could not have been a postmodernist. No matter what conclusions we may draw from the text, even from the perspective of a book published in 1830, his work simply stands outside the postmodern time period. Yet as I, a postmodernist, read Nephi, I find that he reflects that perspective. In this sense, I am providing both a postmodern reading of Nephi and illustrating how Nephi anticipates that reading. My goal in this essay is to offer a new perspective on the narrative of the Book of Mormon — a perspective that changes not only the way we read the text but also the way the text changes us and our perceptions of our faith.
