Here the original form for the verb dwell is not extant in the original manuscript. The printer’s manuscript has the simple past-tense form dwelt, which the 1830 typesetter, John Gilbert, changed to the present tense. He selected dwelleth rather than dwell. Perhaps he thought that the final t of dwelt in 𝓟 indicated that the original present-tense verb form had a t, in other words, dwelleth. This interpretation would then mean that somehow Oliver Cowdery had miswritten in 𝓞 or 𝓟 the original dwelleth as dwelt. The original language of the Book of Mormon allows the -eth ending in the third person plural (the antecedent for the relative pronoun which is the plural all men), so Gilbert’s emendation is possible for the original text. On the other hand, the 1837 edition removed the -eth ending but kept the verb in the present tense (“which dwell upon the face thereof”).
Another possibility is that the original past-tense form dwelt is actually correct since the larger passage is consistently in the past tense (“it became a choice land … and that it was the place of the New Jerusalem”). Also note that the conditional modal verbs would and should, found in the immediately surrounding text, are past-tense forms historically. Such past-tense usage is still found in English today, for instance, in present conditional sentences such as “I would tell you if I wanted to go” (in comparison to past conditional sentences such as “I would have told you if I had wanted to go”, where the perfect auxiliary forms have and had are added to show past time).
There are three other passages in the Book of Mormon that refer to the people dwelling upon the promised land, and each of these is in the present tense:
Yet unlike the case in Ether 13:2, the surrounding text in these three cases is in the present tense; moreover, the modal verbs shall and will, unlike should and would, are present-tense forms historically.
Earlier, when I did my transcript for 𝓞, I conjectured that in Ether 13:2 the original text (and 𝓞 itself ) read dwell (as in the 1837 edition), largely on the basis of the present-tense passages listed above that have dwell. If the original text here in Ether 13:2 had the present-tense dwell, then we would have to explain how it ended up being dwelt in 𝓟. One possibility is that Oliver Cowdery (in either 𝓞 or 𝓟) accidentally crossed the final l of dwell. This seems more plausible than the possibility that in 𝓞 or 𝓟 Oliver accidentally wrote dwelt in place of a supposed dwelleth. There are no examples in his manuscript work of this latter kind of error, but there are quite a few cases in 𝓟 where Oliver accidentally crossed an l. For instance, in 3 Nephi 18:26 he intended to write the word disciples as desipels (in the manuscripts Oliver usually spelled disciple as desipel ), but here in 𝓟 he ended up crossing the l, so the word looks like desipets. Nonetheless, there are no specific examples where Oliver accidentally wrote dwelt in place of a correct dwell, not even momentarily. (The same holds for the verb spill, another verb in the text that would have ended in lt in the past tense.) In fact, there are no cases where Oliver accidentally crossed any word- final l; all his crossed l ’s (22 of them) occur earlier in the word (such as the l that he crossed in desipels, mentioned above).
Another possible argument for dwelt in Ether 13:2 as an error for dwell is the higher frequency of dwelt in the book of Ether: prior to Ether 13:2, there are 13 instances of dwelt in the original text for Ether, but there are only two of dwell. Oliver, either in 𝓞 itself or when he copied from 𝓞 into 𝓟, could have been prompted to accidentally write dwelt in place of dwell in Ether 13:2. Yet it should be pointed out that none of the two instances of dwell earlier in Ether were mistakenly written as dwelt. In other words, it is difficult to find explicit evidence for dwelt as a mistake for dwell .
Ultimately, we have to realize that the past-tense dwelt will work here in Ether 13:2 since the entire passage is in the past tense (including the historically past-tense modal verbs should and would ). The critical text will therefore restore the past-tense dwelt in this passage.
Summary: Restore in Ether 13:2 the past-tense verb form dwelt since this is the reading of the printer’s manuscript, the earliest extant source; the 1830 typesetter changed this to the present-tense form dwelleth; in the 1837 edition, this was reduced to dwell since the antecedent for the relative pronoun which was the plural all men.