The earliest extant text here reads “and his own life and they of his wives and children”. On the surface, the meaning seems to be ‘and his own life and the lives of his wives and children’; that is, the pronoun they seems to be a pluralization of the preceding life. Such usage is obviously strange, and thus Joseph Smith deleted the they in his editing for the 1837 edition. The they here is a subject form, but in this passage his own life and they are objects of the preposition of in the preceding phrase “in the defense of ”. Elsewhere in the text, they in object position has typically been edited to either those or them (see under pronominal determiners in volume 3). This kind of editing elsewhere suggests another possibility for emending the standard text, namely, editing they to those (“and his own life and those of his wives and children”), although even this seems odd because it juxtaposes the singular life with the plural those.
It should also be noted here that the 1841 British edition accidentally inserted the repeated his between the conjuncts wives and children, but the subsequent LDS edition (in 1849) restored the shorter phraseology. Usually the determiner is repeated for conjuncts involving wives and children (30 times in the earliest text). However, four cases did not have the repeated determiner in the earliest text, including this one. For discussion of this variation, see under Mosiah 23:28.
The most difficult problem here in Ether 14:2 is the plural wives. Everywhere else in the Book of Mormon, when the plural wives occurs in a neutral context (there are 43 instances), the text can be readily interpreted as assuming that a man has only one wife, as in Mosiah 19:11: “the king commanded them that all the men should leave their wives and their children”. For one of these cases, one could initially misread the passage as implying that a man could have a plurality of wives:
Here the intervening phrase “every one to the army which he would” seems to clash with the following their, but of course the their refers to the earlier they, not the singular he (or every one) that occurs in the intervening phrase. Moreover, when the text clearly refers to a man having plural wives, the word wives is always conjoined with concubines and is identified as being illicit (seven times, in Jacob 1–2, Mosiah 11, and Ether 10). Ultimately, the example here in Ether 14:2 is the only explicit case where one could interpret a man as having a plurality of wives without being condemned for it.
Some have argued that there is evidence in the book of Ether that the Jaredites had a plurality of wives—and without the condemnation of the practice that is typically found elsewhere in the Book of Mormon. The most notorious example is the mistake that entered Ether 1:41, where the earliest text refers to the brother of Jared and his family but the 1830 typesetter accidentally replaced family with families, giving “go to and gather together thy flocks … and also of the seed of the earth of every kind and thy families”. The correct reading, as explained under Ether 1:41, is the singular, “and thy family”. Orson Pratt, in a footnote to the 1879 edition, cross-references Ether 1:41 to Ether 6:20, where the large number of offspring for the brother of Jared supposedly supports a plurality of wives: “now the number of the sons and the daughters of the brother of Jared were twenty and two souls”. (The same cross-reference to Ether 6:20 was continued in the 1920 and 1981 LDS editions.) And one could also refer to Orihah’s 31 children as implying more than one wife (Ether 7:2). This evidence suggesting plurality of wives in the book of Ether is summarized on page 327 of Daniel H. Ludlow’s A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1976).
It actually turns out that the book of Ether explicitly refers to plural marriage only once— and in that one case the reference is negative:
In contrast to Riplakish, we have Coriantum who had only one wife at a time (which is clearly what was expected among the Jaredites since no special attention is brought to bear on that issue):
Coriantum’s 142 years corresponds with the longevity of the later postdiluvian biblical patriarchs, so that as we approach the time of Abraham the years eventually correspond with Coriantum’s: Peleg, 239 years; Reu, 239 years; Serug, 230 years; Nahor, 148 years; Terah, 205 years; Abraham, 175 years; Isaac, 180 years; and Jacob 147 years. It would appear that in general the Jaredite patriarchs lived longer than we do today, so the large number of children may be due to longer periods of fertility. As a result, they could have had many more children than we are used to having but without necessarily resorting to a plurality of wives. And there’s always another possibility: like Coriantum, with the death of his first wife, one could always marry a younger woman, thus increasing the prospects of having a large number of offspring. Consequently, the large number of children listed for the brother of Jared and for Orihah does not necessarily mean that they had a plurality of wives, at least at the same time. In fact, the case of Coriantum suggests that there was not even any consideration of taking an additional wife while the first one was alive, while on the other hand Riplakish is specifically referred to as one who violated what was “right in the sight of the Lord”, namely, one wife for one man. This expectation of having one wife applies, I would argue, to the brother of Jared and to Orihah. In other words, there are other possible explanations for the large number of children mentioned in the book of Ether.
Another passage in the Book of Mormon that some have argued refers to a plurality of wives is found in Alma 10:11, where Amulek’s reference to women could be interpreted as meaning ‘wives’:
For instance, John Tvedtnes has bluntly concluded that the use of women here means that “Amulek … was a polygamist”. He argues that his interpretation is supported by the use in Hebrew of the word √iˇsˇsa¯ for either ‘woman’ or ‘wife’. In support of this interpretation in the Book of Mormon text, Tvedtnes notes the use of the word women to mean ‘wives’ in 1 Nephi 17:20: “and our women have toiled being big with child and they have borne children in the wilderness”. (For Tvedtnes’s argument, see page 59 of his article “Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey”, Brigham Young University Studies 11/1 (1970): 50–60.) Even so, the English text in Alma 10:11 does not use the word wives, and one could argue that Amulek’s extended patriarchal family could have included unmarried sisters as well as Amulek’s mother, who could all be considered along with Amulek’s wife as “my women” rather than as part of the final catchall phrase, “my kinsfolks”. The point here is that there is no explicit reference in Alma 10:11 to a plurality of wives. Whenever there is such an explicit reference to the plurality of wives in the Book of Mormon, it is always negative—except for here in Ether 14:2.
In all other cases that use a singular noun or pronoun to refer to a man in association with his family, the text uses the singular wife:
These examples argue that the plural “his wives and children” in Ether 14:2 is an error for “his wife and children”:
A second possibility for Ether 14:2 would be to eliminate the difficulty of the original they as well as the problem with the plural wives; in this case they could be emended to the lives:
Actually, this second emendation suggests the possibility that the first emendation is correct— namely, Joseph Smith actually dictated “and his own life and they of his wife and children” but Oliver Cowdery thought of the word lives because of the preceding life, which accidentally led him to write wives instead of wife. One should also note that in the earliest text, the plural wives is surrounded by plurals, the pronoun they and the noun children, thus facilitating the proposed change of original wife to wives.
Given usage throughout the text, there appears to be a primitive error in Ether 14:2. It seems reasonable to at least assume that the original text read wife in the singular rather than in the plural. Since the they of the earliest reading will work, despite its grammatical difficulty, the critical text will retain the they but emend wives to wife (thus “in the defense of his property and his own life and they of his wife and children”).
Summary: Emend Ether 14:2 to read “in the defense of his property and his own life and they of his wife and children”; in accord with the earliest text, the his should not be repeated before children; an additional emendation, not adopted here, would be to replace they with the lives (“in the defense of his property and his own life and the lives of his wife and children”).