Paul Huntzinger (personal communication, 30 July 2004) suggests that the conjunction or in Ether 8:24 is a mistake for for. The passage does not state any condition that would prevent the condemnation of this secret combination for its murders. Elsewhere the text has examples of the expected for woe but none of or woe:
Conditional instances of woe- statements can be found in the text, but the condition is always explicitly stated:
The only conditional aspect here in Ether 8:24 is whether the Gentiles will resist the secret combination in their midst. But the woe- statement appears to apply to the secret combination itself (“woe be unto it”), not to the Gentiles as a whole unless the it refers to the Gentile nation, yet we have to go all the way back to verse 22 to get such a referent—and a generic one at that (“and whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations”). Also note that the singular pronoun it is twice repeated later on in verse 24, and for those two instances of it the referent is definitely the secret combination itself, not the nation that supports it: “woe be unto it because of the blood of them which have been slain / for they cry from the dust for vengeance upon it and also upon those who build it up”. Further, other passages in the Book of Mormon declare that those who belong to secret combinations must repent or they will be destroyed, as in the following passage where Alma is speaking to Helaman concerning the Jaredite secret combinations (at the end, Alma extends his warning to all who belong to such combinations but allows for their repentance):
In Ether 8:24, Moroni declares a woe upon this future secret combination that will exist among the Gentiles, although there is no condition of repentance mentioned. The real danger, of course, is that the evil of the secret combination will spread to the entire nation and bring down the whole nation, as Mormon himself explains in referring to Alma’s earlier warning:
According to Mormon, this is precisely what happened to the Jaredites, who had allowed these secret combinations, under the influence of Satan, to spread throughout the land:
Thus here in Ether 8:24, not only will the secret combination itself be destroyed but the nation that supports it. Moroni rightly warns the Gentiles to “awake to a sense of your awful situation”. The woe is proclaimed against the secret combination, but it is extended to the entire Gentile nation. Yet ultimately the woe is specifically directed against the secret combination; thus for works much better as a connector in Ether 8:24 than or.
The original manuscript is not extant in Ether 8:24. If an error occurred, it may have been in 𝓞 since Oliver Cowdery, the scribe in 𝓞 for this part of the text, could have misheard for as or. Or the or could have been an error introduced into the text when Oliver copied the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟. There are three definite cases in the history of the text where or and for have been mixed up; one occurred in 𝓞 and another in 𝓟 (the third occurred in the 1841 British edition). For all three examples, see the list under Mormon 8:15. In the discussion there I consider the possibility (but reject it) that in Mormon 8:15 the or in the phrase “or the welfare of the ancient and long dispersed covenant people of the Lord” is an error for for. But here in Ether 8:24, it seems that such an error did occur. The critical text will in this case accept the emendation for in place of the or.
Summary: Accept in Ether 8:24 the conjectural emendation of or to for, thus eliminating our expectation that the woe-clause should be conditional.