Here in verse 12, Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “to suffer death” in 𝓞, but he soon corrected the text by crossing out suffer and supralinearly inserting be put to (the correction is written with slightly heavier ink flow, probably the result of Oliver redipping his quill). Oliver’s error here was very likely the result of him having just written down four instances of the verb suffer—and all in reference to death:
Thus Oliver’s initial error in verse 12 of writing “their seed should cause many to suffer death” is virtually expected. Moreover, there would have been no motivation for either Oliver or Joseph to have consciously emended the text here to read “their seed should cause many to be put to death”. Either reading is theoretically possible since elsewhere in the text there are 13 occurrences of “to suffer death” and 21 of “to put to death”. The critical text will therefore accept the corrected reading in 𝓞: “their seed should cause many to be put to death”.
Stan Larson, on page 246 of his master’s thesis, A Study of Some Textual Variations in the Book of Mormon Comparing the Original and the Printer’s Manuscripts and the 1830, the 1837, and the 1840 Editions (Brigham Young University, 1974), argues that the correction here in Alma 25:12 represents Joseph Smith deliberating “over how to express an idea” and that since both phrases “convey essentially the same thought”, Joseph decided to emend his original reading. In actuality, there is very little if any evidence in the original manuscript for stylistic emendation on Joseph’s part, although there is some evidence that in the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery occasionally emended the text, especially in places where other scribes had taken down Joseph’s original dictation. Yet Oliver always edited towards expected phraseology (see, for instance, the discussion and examples under 1 Nephi 20:11); there is no evidence that Oliver ever attempted to create variety with his editing. Overall, the evidence argues that Joseph read off a fully prepared Englishlanguage text to his scribes and that he did not emend it as he dictated the text. Nor is there any independent evidence that scribes and editors consciously emended the text simply to avoid overuse of the same word.
Summary: Accept in Alma 25:12 the corrected reading in 𝓞: “that their seed should cause many to be put to death”; Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “that their seed should cause many to suffer death”, mainly because the preceding text in verses 9–11 uses the verb suffer four times in referring to death.