We see in this passage that the name Moses occurs six times, of which three are extant in 𝓞 (numbers 3, 4, and 6). Two of those extant instances were initially spelled Mose in 𝓞, then corrected to Moses by inserting the s at the end of Mose; in both cases the s is inserted inline with weak ink flow. In several other passages, Oliver Cowdery wrote Moses as Mose; in all cases but one, Oliver eventually inserted the final s in the manuscript:
The obvious explanation here is that Oliver Cowdery had a problem with the name Moses: he tended to omit the final s. Overall in the text, there are 75 occurrences of Moses, of which 43 are in the phrase “the law of Moses”. We get the following statistics for how many times each scribe omitted the final s in Moses:
| extant in 𝓞 | in 𝓟 | |
| Oliver Cowdery | 4 out of 21 | 3 out of 69 |
| scribe 2 of 𝓞 | 0 out of 1 | |
| scribe 3 of 𝓞 | 0 out of 1 | |
| scribe 2 of 𝓟 | 0 out of 6 |
Oliver seems to be the only one with this problem: he miswrote Moses as Mose in 7 out of 90 extant instances. The other scribes never made this error; in 8 instances they consistently wrote Moses. This difference, however, is not statistically significant since 8 is such a low number; if the other scribes miswrote Mose as frequently as Oliver did, we would have the following probabilities of getting Mose x times out of 8 cases:
| x = 0 | 0.523 |
| x = 1 | 0.353 |
| x = 2 | 0.104 |
| x = 3 or more | 0.020 |
So actually zero would be the most probable number of times that the other scribes would have misspelled Moses as Mose, providing their error rate was the same as Oliver Cowdery’s estimated error rate (here based on 𝓟 plus all the extant examples from 𝓞).
A less plausible explanation is that the spelling Mose actually represents the Hebrew name for Moses: namely, /mosˇe/, which is how the name reads in the Hebrew. One could argue that the original plates actually read Mose instead of Moses for some, if not all, of the 75 cases and that Joseph Smith dictated Mose rather than the expected Moses (at least sometimes), with Oliver Cowdery then occasionally writing down Mose. One problem with this explanation for the spelling Mose is that there is no evidence of such Hebraistic literalism for other biblical names in the Book of Mormon text. In general, we get the standard English spelling for biblical names—never Hava for Eve or Shalomo for Solomon. In fact, one could argue that Mose should actually be Moshe if the Hebrew were really being followed. It is true, however, that in some cases biblical names are misspelled in the Book of Mormon manuscripts, but all of these appear to be the result of scribal error. There are two cases where the original spelling could be interpreted as an archaic pre-biblical spelling: Nathareth instead of Nazareth (twice in 1 Nephi 11:13) and Ramath instead of Ramah (in 2 Nephi 20:29). Yet the discussion under those passages shows that both Nathareth and Ramath are very likely scribal errors and do not represent the original Book of Mormon spellings for the names for Nazareth and Ramah.
Finally, there is one other specific word for which Oliver Cowdery tended to omit the final consonant—namely, the final r in year, giving yea (see the discussion under Alma 48:21 and Helaman 3:3). Apparently Moses was a specific word for which Oliver tended to omit the final s. The critical text will assume as much and will therefore accept in every case Moses as the intended spelling of the name, not Mose.
Summary: Maintain the spelling Moses everywhere in the text, despite Oliver Cowdery’s occasional miswriting of the name as Mose.