One might wonder here if the verb take in “take an oath unto you” is a mistake for make (that is, “make an oath unto you”). 𝓞 is not extant for the verb here, but it could have read make. Another possibility is that Oliver Cowdery misheard Joseph Smith’s dictated make as take. Generally, the text has examples of both “make an oath” and “take an oath”. We have the following examples without any complementary prepositional phrase (four with make and three with take):
But if the verb is complemented by a prepositional phrase, the verb is make and the preposition is unto (except, of course, for the one case of “take an oath unto you” here in Alma 44:8):
In the Book of Mormon text, the phrase “to take an oath” never otherwise takes a complementary prepositional phrase.
When we consider the transcript for 𝓞, we find a very likely explanation for why 𝓟 reads “and we will not suffer ourselves to take an oath unto you”. Although 𝓞 is not extant for the crucial word take, there is good reason to think that 𝓞 actually read make (that is, “and we will not suffer ourselves to make an oath unto you”). Right below, in the next line of 𝓞, we have an extant occurrence of take (in “but take our weapons of war”), and this seems to have led Oliver Cowdery to miscopy the preceding make as take. In volume 1 of the critical text, I assumed that in line 14 on this page of 𝓞 the text read take (bolding added to the transcript):
( l)iver them up unto you & we will not suffer our WEOPONS OF WAR WE WILL DE
( ) [ ] oa(th u) which we know that we shall brake & also our
-SELVES TO TAKE AN UNTO YO
( b)ut take our (w po)ns of war & suffer that we may depart into the wild CHILDREN EO
The conjectured reading with take is, of course, strictly based on the reading in 𝓟. But more likely, the original manuscript read as follows (here I fill in the lacuna with the appropriate lowercase text and again add the bolding):
In other words, as Oliver copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟, his eye accidentally glanced down from line 14 to 15 where the correct take in line 15 led him to replace the correct make in line 14 with the visually similar take, thus creating the difficult reading “and we will not suffer ourselves to take an oath unto you”. The critical text will therefore emend the text here, replacing take with make: “and we will not suffer ourselves to make an oath unto you”.
Summary: Emend Alma 44:8 to read “and we will not suffer ourselves to make an oath unto you”; one possibility is that 𝓞 read this way, but while copying from 𝓞 into 𝓟 Oliver Cowdery accidentally replaced make with take since right below in the next line of 𝓞 was the word take (“but take our weapons of war”); not only is the reading “take an oath unto you” difficult, but there is no support for this kind of phraseology elsewhere in the Book of Mormon.