The original manuscript is extant here and reads “& it came to pass in the forty & sixth yea”. Both scribal practice and internal evidence argue that the word yea here is an error for year, that the original text read “and it came to pass in the forty and sixth year”. The word year was not omitted in 𝓞; instead, Oliver Cowdery accidentally wrote year as yea, neglecting to supply the final r. He copied the yea into the printer’s manuscript, and all the printed editions have continued with this bizarre reading. The preceding verse, as expected, explicitly uses the word year for specifying the two preceding years:
There are a few passages in the text where the word year is ellipted, but that occurs only if the word year has already been used within the clause:
In my discussion regarding the ellipted year under Alma 48:21, I mistakenly cited only the first part of the last passage as if it were the only example of this kind of ellipsis in the text. Even so, the same basic finding holds: when there is only one numerical specification for a year within a sentence, the word year appears in the original text, although in two instances the earliest extant text has yea, here in Helaman 3:3 and also in Alma 48:2 (see below).
It should also be pointed out that there are a couple of cases of coordinated years in the text such that the first number occurs without the word year, but that is because the plural word years appears at the end of the coordination:
If we consider these cases as instances of ellipsis, we still find that both numbers occur within the same sentence.
Internal evidence shows that the word yea is inappropriately used here in Helaman 3:3; we expect yea either to amplify or to modify what has just been stated. The yea here in Helaman 3:3 stands out as an isolated use of the word, with no narrative purpose, except perhaps to sound biblical. Michael Parker and Thomas Uharriet, students in my textual criticism classes during the early 1990s, separately investigated the use of yea in the Book of Mormon text. Excluding cases where yea simply means ‘yes’, they discovered that in virtually all cases the word yea means ‘in fact’, ‘more precisely’, or ‘in other words’. The exceptions include the two examples where the earliest extant text reads yea instead of the correct year (in Alma 48:2 and Helaman 3:3). In addition, there is one other problematic instance of yea, in Alma 12:14, that leads to an emendation in a noun rather than in the yea (see under Alma 12:12–14 for discussion regarding the current reading “our words will condemn us / yea all our works will condemn us”).
There is considerable evidence in the manuscripts that Oliver Cowdery sometimes miswrote year as yea. In some cases, he caught his error; in others, he did not:
The example in Alma 48:2 reads yea in the earliest extant source, 𝓟. But in that case, the 1830 typesetter could easily determine that yea was a mistake for year since the word appears in the middle of the common phrase “the Xth year of the reign of the judges”.
The example in Alma 48:21 is interesting because it directly shows Oliver Cowdery making the error: 𝓞 is extant and reads year, yet he copied it into 𝓟 as yea without correction. That example is also interesting in that the editor for the 1849 LDS edition, Orson Pratt, tried to deal with the unusual syntax by adding the word year while keeping the yea, thus allowing that problematic instance of the word yea to remain in the text.
Oliver Cowdery’s tendency to omit the final r can be found in the orthographically similar word your. There are 11 instances in the two manuscripts where he initially omitted the final r in your. But unlike year, Oliver always corrected the you to your in the manuscripts. In any event, Oliver’s tendency to drop the final r in year is symptomatic of a more extensive tendency. (Three of these examples of initial r-loss for your occur at the end of a manuscript line and may therefore more accurately represent an attempt to fit the final r in at the end of the line instead of writing it at the beginning of the next line, as -r .)
There is no doubt that the yea here in Helaman 3:3 is an error for year. Moreover, it would be wrong to insert the word year and retain the yea, just as it was wrong to do so in Alma 48:21. This emendation of year for yea in Helaman 3:3 was first proposed by Stan Larson on page 567 of his article “Conjectural Emendation and the Text of the Book of Mormon”, Brigham Young University Studies 18/4 (1978): 563–569. In footnote 17 on that page, Larson also mentions the convoluted textual history for the example in Alma 48:21.
Summary: Emend Helaman 3:3 to read “in the forty and sixth year” without any yea; the yea here in 𝓞 is an error for year.