Since either of these readings will work, it appears that this correction in the printer’s manuscript is a virtually immediate correction to the reading of the original manuscript (which is no longer extant here). The level of ink flow for the crossout and the supralinear their iniquities is unchanged. The initial choice of the word priestcrafts may be due to the occurrence of the phrase “because of priestcrafts and iniquities” earlier in the text, prior to the long Isaiah quotation that starts at 2 Nephi 12:
We also notice here in 2 Nephi 25:12 that in the printer’s manuscript Oliver Cowdery spelled priestcrafts as Priestscrafts—that is, the first word in the compound noun is the plural priests. This misspelling is due to the fact that the word priestcraft is normally pronounced /priskræft/. When the final /st/ of priest is combined with the initial /kr/ of craft, the resulting complex consonant cluster /stkr/ is readily pronounced as /skr/—that is, without the t. This resulting pronunciation can therefore lead one to think that the first word in this compound is the plural priests since that plural is normally pronounced as /pris/ rather than as /prists/, the more careful pronunciation. In 2 Nephi 10:5, Oliver also misspelled priestcrafts this same way in the printer’s manuscript, although there he later tried to cross out the extra s but ended up crossing out the s before the t rather than the one after it. There are two more occurrences of this compound noun in 2 Nephi 26:29, and here too Oliver misspelled both in 𝓟 as priestscrafts. Elsewhere in the text, there are seven other occurrences of priestcraft(s), but all of these were spelled with the singular priest in 𝓟 (six by the unknown scribe 2 and one by Oliver Cowdery, in 3 Nephi 16:10). None of the ten instances of priestcraft(s) are extant in 𝓞. Of course, the critical text will use the standard spelling, priestcraft(s).
Summary: Maintain in 2 Nephi 25:12 the corrected reading in 𝓟, “because of their iniquities”.