Isaiah 3:1 (King James Bible) for behold the Lord the LORD of Hosts doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water
Here the Book of Mormon text has “the whole staff of bread”, whereas the King James Bible has “the whole stay of bread”. It is possible that the Book of Mormon staff is simply a copying error based on the immediately preceding staff, especially since both staff and stay begin with the same initial letters sta. Unfortunately, the original manuscript is not extant here, so we cannot determine if stay was accidentally copied as staff when Oliver Cowdery copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟.
The Hebrew text underlying “the stay and the staff” is the masculine nominalized form of the Hebrew verb ¸s-fi-n conjoined with the feminine nominalized form of the same verb, the idea being that every form of support has been taken away. Then two examples are given: the entire support of bread and the entire support of water. For these last two examples of the word support, the Masoretic Hebrew text repeats only the masculine nominalized form.
The King James translators attempted to make a distinction between the masculine and feminine forms in the Hebrew by translating the masculine form as stay and the feminine as staff. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one figurative meaning of staff (now generally obsolete) is something that serves as a stay or support (see definition 4 for the noun staff ). We can see a derivative of this meaning when staff is used to refer to the bureaucratic system that supports an organization. Another example is in the phrase “the staff of life”, referring to ‘bread or similar staple food’ (see definition 4c under staff in the OED).
One possibility is that the Book of Mormon reading of stay-staff-staff-stay represents a Hebraistic chiasmus of the form a-b-b -a :
(a) the stay
(a) and the staff
(b' ) the whole staff of bread
(a' ) and the whole stay of water
Such an interpretation would imply that there was an alternative Hebrew text where the nominalized form of the Hebrew verb s¸-fi-n took the sequence masculine-feminine-feminine-masculine (equivalent to stay-staff-staff-stay).
As far as meaning goes, the choice between stay and staff doesn’t make much difference. Since it is difficult to determine whether the second occurrence of staff is intentional or accidental, the safest solution would be to follow the earliest textual sources (namely, the printer’s manuscript) and accept staff.
Summary: Maintain in 2 Nephi 13:1 the earliest reading (“the whole staff of bread”); although the use of staff rather than stay when referring to bread may be an error, it is also possible that the choice of staff is intentional.