In this passage we have four cases where there has been some editing of the grammatical number. As we shall see, the critical text will restore the earliest reading in all four cases, the plural desires, the singular man, the plural wills, and the singular it.
The earliest, fully extant source for the phrase “according to their desire(s)” is the printer’s manuscript, and it reads in the plural. In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith emended the plural desires to the singular desire, probably because the following clause uses the singular pronoun it to refer to desires: “according to their desires / whether it be unto death or unto life” (original text). But as explained under Mosiah 18:10, 11, the use of singular pronouns to refer to desires is quite common in the original text. Thus the critical text will accept the plural desires here in Alma 29:4.
It should be pointed out here that the reading in 𝓞 for this phrase is complicated. It appears that Oliver Cowdery originally wrote the plural desires twice in 𝓞, then crossed out the first one. But we cannot be sure that he initially created a dittography in this instance since the second desires is only partially extant:
just God for I Kno that he granteth unto men according to theirdesir( )
ES
It is theoretically possible that Oliver initially wrote the plural desires, then corrected it to the singular desire by rewriting the whole word inline (but in the singular). This kind of correction, however, would be contrary to Oliver’s practice: if he had wanted to correct desires to the singular desire, he would have crossed out or erased the plural s. In the manuscripts, we find that Oliver never corrected a plural s by rewriting the whole word, either supralinearly or inline. Sometimes he caught his error before finishing the s; such aborted s’s were not crossed out. Usually he erased the plural s, but sometimes he simply crossed it out. We get the following statistics for the two manuscripts (the count for 𝓞 is limited since most of 𝓞 is not extant):
𝓞 𝓟
aborted s 4 2
erased s 22 25
crossed-out s 9 6
total 35 33
Thus it is extremely doubtful that in 𝓞 for Alma 29:4 Oliver corrected desires by crossing it out and then writing desire inline.
There is considerable evidence, on the other hand, that Oliver frequently wrote single-word dittographies. In the original manuscript, for instance, there are 34 extant cases where Oliver miswrote two instances of the same word inline. Most of these repetitions involve function words (pronouns, determiners, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, and the like). And of these 34 examples, 27 of them are corrected by crossing out or erasing the first instance, not the second. In five cases, Oliver repeated a fully lexical noun or verb (namely, come, slaves, Lord, caused, and world ), and in each case he crossed out the first instance of the repeated word. The case of slaves is very much like what apparently happened in Alma 29:4 with the word desires, also a plural noun:
Brethren & we will be theires s(la ) we repair unto them the many mur
VES UNTILL
Even though the plural ending for the second instance of slaves is not extant in 𝓞, it would be unreasonable to argue that this second slaves was actually the singular slave. Correcting slaves to slave is not really an option in Alma 27:8 since the plural is required (“and we will be their slaves”). In the case of Alma 29:4, the plural is not required since in theory desires could have been corrected to desire by crossing out the plural and writing the singular desire inline. Yet all of the specific manuscript evidence argues that Oliver never did correct the plural s by rewriting the entire word as a singular. The critical text will therefore assume that the original word in 𝓞 for Alma 29:4 was the plural desires and that Oliver initially wrote the plural desires twice in 𝓞.
Elsewhere in the text, when we have the verb grant, we always get the plural desires, never the singular desire —and this is irrespective of whether we are dealing with just one person or several people:
Thus the plural desires is expected in Alma 29:4.
At the end of the verse in Alma 29:4, we have the same kind of problem in number agreement with respect to the plural wills and the singular pronoun it. In this case, Joseph Smith left the plural wills unchanged in his editing of 𝓟 for the 1837 edition but changed the singular it to they (giving “according to their wills whether they be unto salvation or unto destruction”). Interestingly, the 1905 LDS edition changed the plural wills to the singular will, even though the following pronoun was still the plural they that Joseph had earlier introduced into the text. This use of the singular will continued in the LDS text (in two subsequent editions, the 1907 and the 1911) until the 1920 LDS edition restored the plural wills.
Clearly, the original plural wills and the singular it are fully intended, especially since there is the following striking parallelism with the original language earlier in the verse:
Moreover, there are other instances in the original text where the plural wills occurs:
Notice that in two of these examples, a conjoined noun is also in the plural: “wills and desires” in Mosiah 16:12 and “wills and pleasures” in Alma 12:31 (but Alma 4:8 has “wills and pleasure”). For the two instances of “wills and pleasure(s)” in the book of Alma, there has also been a tendency to replace the plural wills with the singular will. For discussion regarding that tendency, see under Alma 4:8 and Alma 12:31.
Finally, we have the case of man here in Alma 29:4. The word man occurs at the end of the line in 𝓞, and the word is extant except for the final n. In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery initially copied the singular man, then corrected it to the plural men by crossing out man and supralinearly inserting men. There is no change in the level of ink flow, which implies that there was little delay in Oliver’s decision to emend man to men in 𝓟. He was probably influenced by the following plural pronouns (them and their) that have man as their antecedent (“he allotteth unto man yea decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable according to their wills”). In addition, the text earlier on in this verse uses the plural men in a parallel clause: “he granteth unto men according to their desires”.
There is considerable evidence for mixing up man and men in the manuscripts (see the list under 1 Nephi 15:35). In fact, here in Alma 29:4, the 1841 British edition unintentionally restored the singular man. On the other hand, there is evidence that the text allows plural pronouns to refer to singular man since man sometimes takes the plural interpretation of ‘mankind’:
The second example of man was changed to men in the 1920 LDS edition—but the two others have been left unchanged. Clearly, the earliest use of man rather than men is possible in Alma 29:4. The critical text will restore the singular man even though theoretically it could be an error for men.
Summary: Follow in Alma 29:4 the earliest reading with respect to the grammatical number of the nouns and pronouns: “he granteth unto men according to their desires whether it be unto death or unto life / yea I know that he allotteth unto man yea decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable according to their wills whether it be unto salvation or unto destruction”.