Here the same phrase “unto my children” occurs twice within the same sentence. The original manuscript is extant here and contains both occurrences of “unto my children”. Dittographies in the text typically involve adjacent repetitions of words and phrases; thus this instance seems unusual. If the repetition here is an error, perhaps the error was found on the small plates of Nephi.
Another possibility is that the first “unto my children” is an error resulting from Oliver Cowdery falling behind as Joseph Smith dictated this sentence, especially if he dictated too much at a time. As Oliver finished writing down “and I have made mention”, he could have heard Joseph dictating the only occurrence of “unto my children” in the sentence—namely, the one that came after the long intervening phrase “concerning the judgments of God which hath come to pass among the Jews”. Thus Oliver could have ended up writing down “unto my children” twice; he should have deleted his first “unto my children”, but he didn’t. In other words, the original text was probably a difficult reading, with “unto my children” coming only after the long intervening phrase. Similar examples of a postponed prepositional phrase can be found elsewhere in the text, as in “for Christ will shew unto you with power and great glory that they are his words at the last day” (2 Nephi 33:11) and “he made the remainder of this record viewing the destructions which came upon the people by night” (Ether 13:14).
One clear example of this kind of anticipatory error occurred elsewhere in 𝓞, although in this instance Oliver caught his dittography and crossed it out:
Since the dittography in the original manuscript for 2 Nephi 25:6 is so unusual, it seems reasonable to assume that the first occurrence of “unto my children” is an error of anticipation. The critical text will therefore emend the text here in 2 Nephi 25:6 by deleting the first occurrence of “unto my children”:
Summary: Emend 2 Nephi 25:6 by removing the first occurrence of “unto my children”; the resulting text is a difficult reading, but it explains why Oliver Cowdery could have created a very strange dittography in the original manuscript as he took down Joseph Smith’s dictation.