Nephi has created a problem for his writing. He has wandered from his outline, and is now at the end of a section on prophecy rather than history. To move the writing back to a more historical framework, he says that “I, Nephi, did teach my brethren these things.” It is a transition without a preceding indication that he was teaching. Indeed, what Nephi says of these things is clearly a triggered aside.
Nephi is using the idea of teaching his brothers as a literary device to provide the more historical context that his concept for 1 Nephi required. Therefore, he brings his narrative back to teaching his brothers. Interestingly, however, he triggers another aside. Nephi’s declaration that his people should believe in “the Lord, their Redeemer” leads him to think of Isaiah.
In the framework of teaching his brothers, he will read Isaiah to them, but Nephi intends that Isaiah should be read against their current situation, not Isaiah’s world of one hundred years in the past and in the Old World. Nephi suggests that he “did liken all scriptures unto us.”
The process of likening scriptures is to take from the old and apply it to the current. Sometimes this process will required shifting the meaning that a text might have had at the time that it was written, but it makes the message applicable to the present. Isaiah becomes a lesson for Nephi’s current situation as it is likened to his brothers, and his people.
Against that light we will examine the two chapters of Isaiah which Nephi inserts into his text.