Under Mosiah 16:1 in part 2, I stated that I would separately discuss in volume 4 each instance in a long list of cases where hand and hands had been mixed up, even if only momentarily, in the history of the text. Except for one case, all are discussed under their appropriate places in volume 4; the missing case is the one here in 3 Nephi 4:8.
In this instance, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote hand at the end of a manuscript line in 𝓟, then virtually immediately added the plural s inline (there is no change in the level of ink flow for the correcting s ). Here the 1830 edition also reads in the plural. For this part of the text, both
𝓟 and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of 𝓞; thus 𝓞 undoubtedly read in the plural, as will the critical text. As explained under Alma 5:4, the original text strongly prefers plural instances of “delivering someone out of the hand(s) of X”; the expression virtually always takes the plural hands (32 times, including here in 3 Nephi 4:8), but there is apparently one instance of the singular hand (in Alma 5:4).
Summary: Maintain in 3 Nephi 4:8 the plural hands, the corrected reading in 𝓟 as well as the 1830 reading.