It appears that this passage contains a dittography of and work. We do not have the original manuscript for any part of Mosiah, so we cannot even use spacing considerations between extant fragments to argue for the accidental repetition of and work. But a strikingly parallel passage in the book of Helaman argues that the additional and work in Mosiah 10:5 is probably an error:
In Mosiah 10:5, Oliver Cowdery probably miscopied the original manuscript by accidentally repeating and work. Elsewhere in the printer’s manuscript, there is evidence of dittographies for which the repetition includes an initial and followed by one or two other words. In each of the following examples from the printer’s manuscript, Oliver caught his dittography as he was copying the text from 𝓞 into 𝓟:
In three other passages, there appear to be similar instances of dittography that were not caught (in each case the proposed dittography is set in bold):
See each of these three passages for discussion.
The first occurrence of and work in Mosiah 10:5 definitely seems strange. First of all, it basically repeats the meaning of the preceding verb toil (“and toil and work”), yet nowhere else in the text do we have the two verbs toil and work used together in such a redundant way. Moreover, there are no other examples in the text of people working without some kind of complement to the verb work (either nominal, verbal, or adverbial). There are, for instance, references to working “all manner of fine work” (Mosiah 11:10 and Ether 10:23), working “all manner of cloth” (Ether 10:24), and working “all manner of work of exceeding curious workmanship” (Ether 10:27)— besides the example of working “all manner of fine linen / yea and cloth of every kind” (here in Mosiah 10:5). Internal evidence therefore suggests that the repeated and work in Mosiah 10:5 is probably an error and should be deleted.
This proposed conjectural emendation was first recommended in material submitted by me to the LDS Church Scriptures Committee on 2 July 1996. Independently, John A. Tvedtnes has suggested the same emendation; see page 8 of The Most Correct Book: Insights from a Book of Mormon Scholar (Salt Lake City, Utah: Cornerstone, 1999).
Summary: Remove the probable dittography and work in Mosiah 10:5, giving “and I did cause that the women should spin and toil and work all manner of fine linen”; such a reading is consistent with the reading in Helaman 6:13.