The third reason the writings of Isaiah provide such difficulty is his education. Isaiah was among the educated elite of his day. He was raised in the big city of Jerusalem and spent his entire life preparing to serve the Lord. He was aggressive in dealing with the skeptics of his day for he was a prophet in his own city and did not use diplomacy with his tongue:
“The Lord…hath made my mouth like a sharp sword…and made me a polished shaft[1]. The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary[2]. “
Nephi explains that the people in the day of Isaiah were sufficiently learned to comprehend his words[3], but his eloquence and sophistication makes for a difficult transition when translated into a modern language. For all the technological gains of our modern day, our oral and written communication skills seem to pale in comparison to our Founding Fathers in eloquence and depth. We are about the same time distance from our Founding Fathers as Lehi and Nephi were from Isaiah.
The people of Nephi complained that Isaiah’s writing were too difficult to understand and demanded that Nephi interpret for them[4]. When Nephi, without the assistance of his older brothers, obtained the Brass Plates of Laban, it was discovered that they contained the writings of Isaiah. It wasn’t until they settled in the Promised Land before they had time to scrutinize their content. The two most prominent and recent prophetic writings were Jeremiah and Isaiah.
By this time the level of intelligence had atrophied and Isaiah was an elusive complexity of prophet-speak for which the Nephites were ill equipped to decipher. For years I have questioned why Nephi delighted so much in the words of Isaiah.
Nephi’s response to the request of the people was a compassionate acceptance to disclose that he could not only understand the words of Isaiah, but he had seen the same visions. Nephi was educated in the ways of the Jews and in the Egyptians. He spoke multiple languages and was ministered to by angels. He had the same tutors as Isaiah and the prophet Joseph. He spoke the spiritual language of Isaiah and no amount of prose could filter the meaning behind what Nephi had seen.
