There is not enough room in the lacuna between extant fragments of 𝓞 for “unto men wise men”. In my transcript for 𝓞, I proposed that wise men was supralinearly inserted. However, the lacuna is sufficiently long that various other insertions could be proposed.
Ross Geddes has suggested (personal communication, 22 September 2004) that “unto men wise men” may be an error since what we expect here is something like “unto men yea wise men” or “unto men even wise men” rather than this bare appositive restatement “unto men wise men”. In order to accept the noun phrase wise men as an appositive to men, the 1830 typesetter placed commas around wise men. Geddes suggests an intriguing third possibility for the original text, namely “unto many wise men”. Such a phrase could have been misheard as “unto men wise men” when Joseph Smith dictated the text to Oliver Cowdery. It seems reasonable to assume that Joseph’s pronunciation of many would have been /meni/, the common pronunciation in English since Early Modern English. One of Joseph’s scribes, scribe 3 of 𝓞, definitely had that pronunciation, as evidenced by that scribe’s spellings for the word:
menny 12 times
many 8 times
meny 2 times
The Oxford English Dictionary lists the Middle English spellings meni, meny, and menie for the word dating back to the 1200s; according to the OED, the spelling menny occurs in citations as early as the 1500s. So when Joseph pronounced many as /meni/, Oliver could have heard /men/, especially since men actually occurs two words later in “unto many wise men”.
In support of this last emendation, there are a couple of other instances in the text of “many men”: the Words of Mormon 1:17 reads “and there were many holy men in the land”, and 3 Nephi 3:3 reads “to suppose that ye can stand against so many brave men”. There are a few other instances of “many ... men” in the text:
Yet none of these six examples show any variation in many due to influence from the following men.
Basically, the question here in Helaman 16:14 is whether men can be followed by an appositive like wise men. There are examples elsewhere in the text of appositives similar to this one, but none are fully parallel. For instance, wise men in “unto men wise men” does not have any determiner, unlike other noun-phrase appositives in the text:
Note that the last one does not have any postmodifying prepositional phrase headed by of, so we end up with a simple noun phrase for the appositive, just like here in Helaman 16:11 (even though in Helaman 14:16 we still have a determiner, that, while Helaman 16:11 has no determiner).
The appositive wise men here in Helaman 16:14 has a corrective function: it restricts the number of referents, from men to wise men. There are a number of other instances in the text where appositives have a corrective function, including these which involve either restriction or expansion:
Ultimately, we have to recognize that “unto men wise men” is possible. Moreover, we cannot find any scribal evidence to support emending men to many. Yet there is considerable scribal evidence for the occasional loss of yea:
Oliver Cowdery’s loss of yea in the manuscripts:
initially in 𝓞 4 times
initially in 𝓟 12 times
in 𝓟 when copying from 𝓞 3 times
Thus “unto men yea wise men” is quite possible in terms of scribal errors. We get comparable results for the loss of even in the manuscripts, which gives support for “unto men even wise men”:
Oliver Cowdery’s loss of even in the manuscripts
initially in 𝓞 2 times
initially in 𝓟 5 times
in 𝓟 when copying from 𝓞 1 time
In other words, we find scribal support for Geddes’s two other emendations, “unto men yea wise men” and “unto men even wise men”, but not for “unto many wise men”. Given the number of possible emendations here, the critical text will maintain the earliest extant reading, “unto men wise men”, the reading in 𝓟 and the 1830 edition, especially since that reading is actually possible.
Summary: Maintain in Helaman 16:14 the reading of both 𝓟 and the 1830 edition, “unto men wise men”, where wise men acts as a noun-phrase appositive for the preceding men.