There is no original manuscript for this part of the text. Here in verse 36, the printer’s manuscript has the singular face in “the face of angels”, even though in this passage the text twice reads “the faces of Nephi and Lehi” (earlier in verse 36 and later in verse 37). Here in Helaman 5:36, the 1830 compositor set “the face of angels”, the reading of his copytext (𝓟). But in the 1837 edition, the singular face was replaced with the plural faces. All subsequent editions have followed the plural reading.
As explained under 2 Nephi 26:20, there is some evidence in the earliest text for “the face of X” (where the referent for the X is semantically plural):
Both of these are based on passages in Isaiah that read in the plural when they are cited elsewhere in the Book of Mormon:
The grammatical number is mixed in Isaiah itself, with plural “the faces of the poor” in Isaiah 3:15 but singular “with their face toward the earth” in Isaiah 49:23.
There is one case in the editions where a correct plural was replaced by the singular face, also in a biblical quotation:
Here Isaiah 53:3 has the plural, “our faces”. We could take this change to the singular as evidence that the face in the earliest text for Helaman 5:36 is an error for an original plural. Unfortunately, there is no direct support for mix-ups between face and faces in the manuscripts, although some of the Book of Mormon quotations from Isaiah may involve such errors (see the discussion under 2 Nephi 26:20).
This passage in Helaman 5:36–37 can be compared to the description of Stephen in the book of Acts when he spoke before the Jewish council:
Of course, here the text is referring to only one person, not to a plurality of persons, so Stephen’s face is compared to the face of a single angel. There is one other scriptural reference to the faces of angels; and in that passage there is a plural faces:
The use in the earliest text of “the face of angels” for Helaman 5:36 may actually be acceptable. First of all, there are passages in the King James Bible where the singular face is used to refer to a plurality of individuals:
In each of these cases, we could interpret the singular face as referring to the face of each person individually.
But a more compelling argument is that the phrase “the face of angels” is actually quite common in English, with examples dating from the late 1500s up to the present time. The following examples (with original accidentals here retained) are found on Literature Online :
The traditional translation of the Venerable Bede’s Latin nam et angelicam habent faciem was “for they have the face of angels”, although faciem angelicam would be literally translated as “an angelic face” (or “the angelic face”). The phrase “the face of angels” is found in English translations of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and occurs repeatedly in various histories of Britain published in England during the late 1800s (see the examples listed on under the phrase “the face of angels”). There is also this example of “the face of angels” from a current website:
These examples show that “the face of angels”, the earliest reading for Helaman 5:36, could well be correct. The critical text will therefore restore the original singular face in the phrase “the face of angels” (but leave, of course, the original plural faces in “the faces of Nephi and Lehi”).
Summary: Restore in Helaman 5:36 the original singular face in the phrase “the face of angels” even though the larger passage has two instances of “the faces of Nephi and Lehi”; there are numerous examples of the phrase “the face of angels” from Early Modern English up to present-day English.