Greg Wright (personal communication, 26 November 2002) suggests that here either maketh is an error for making or there is an and missing. The second suggestion seems more plausible from the point of view of manuscript errors, especially if the and was written as an ampersand. 𝓞 is not extant for this particular part of the sentence, but an original and in 𝓞 would have been written with an ampersand since Oliver Cowdery was the scribe. Of course, it is also possible that Oliver omitted the and in 𝓞 when he took down Joseph Smith’s dictation. There is some evidence that Oliver occasionally omitted and in 𝓞 and 𝓟, if only momentarily. We have, for instance, the following three cases where he initially omitted the and before a finite verb form:
Thus Oliver could have omitted the and in Ether 12:4, either in 𝓞 or in 𝓟.
The basic problem here in Ether 12:4 is that the earliest text has an asyndetic conjoining of predicates within a relative clause. There are no examples of this kind of relative clause construction elsewhere in the text. The reason for this is that without the and one expects an asyndetically attached predicate to apply to some noun phrase that precedes the relative pronoun which or who. Thus it is not surprising that elsewhere in the text, out of 93 instances of conjoined predicates in relative clauses involving which or who, all but one have the coordinating conjunction and between each predicate; for the one other case, the conjunction is but:
In particular, and consistently occurs between predicates in relative clauses with multiple conjoined predicates:
If any of the and ’s were omitted from these passages, we would immediately misread the asyndetically conjoined predicate as referring to some noun phrase that precedes the which or who. We should also note that this use of connecting and ’s between conjoined predicates holds for cases of “whose ” and “which ”:
Here in Ether 12:4, since the and is missing before maketh, we immediately think that “maketh an anchor to the souls of men” refers to some noun phrase preceding “which hope cometh of faith”, which is wrong. The asyndetic “maketh an anchor to the souls of men” refers to the noun hope, as is clear from the parallel language in the following New Testament passage:
In Ether 12:4, the nearby noun hope is the subject for the finite verb form maketh (thus “which hope … maketh an anchor to the souls of men”). Here the critical text will emend Ether 12:4 to read “which hope cometh of faith and maketh an anchor to the souls of men”, thus making sure that the relative clause correctly reads with two predicates conjoined by and. In this case, it appears that the connecting and was lost during the early transmission of the text.
Summary: Emend Ether 12:4 by adding the word and before maketh, thus removing an implausible reading and at the same time making it clear that the subject for maketh is the noun hope.