Isaiah 14:32 (King James Bible) what shall one then answer the messengers of the nation
When compared with the King James text, 2 Nephi 24:32 shows two differences. The first has to do with the grammatical subject of this clause. In the Book of Mormon text, the subject is “the messengers of the nations”; in the King James text, the subject is the italicized one, which means that the King James translators interpreted the Hebrew as having no explicit subject. The Hebrew verb is in the singular; since messengers is in the plural, one possibility (adopted in the King James translation) is to interpret the subject as missing and consider messengers as the object of the verb. Another possibility is to take “the messengers of the nation(s)” as the grammatical subject, which is what we find in the Greek Septuagint; there this clause was translated as “and what answered the kings of the nations”. The variation between the words kings and messengers is the result of the similarity in the Hebrew of mlk ‘king’ and ml√k ‘messenger’. (The vowels are omitted here since the original Hebrew text would have been written without vowels.) In any event, the Greek translators took the plural construct form mlky /ml√ky as the grammatical subject, as does the Book of Mormon text. For further discussion, see page 60 in John A. Tvedtnes, “The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon” (FARMS preliminary report, 1984).
The second difference here in 2 Nephi 24:32 has to do with the Book of Mormon’s plural form nations rather than the singular nation of the King James Bible and the Hebrew. Interestingly, ancient translations of the Hebrew have nations (the Greek, the Syriac, and Aramaic Targums). As mentioned above, the Greek refers to kings rather than messengers. Perhaps the reason in the Greek for the plural nations is because in Isaiah 14 there are two earlier references to “all the kings of the nations” (in verses 9 and 18). Given the plural kings, the plural nations is to be expected on semantic grounds. It should also be noted that for Isaiah 14:32 the Great Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran (1QIsaa) also has kings instead of messengers, but it maintains the singular nation (that is, it reads “the kings of the nation”). This reading suggests that the original Hebrew text read “the messengers of the nation” (the Masoretic reading). The only other reference in the book of Isaiah to “messenger(s)” and “nation(s)” is in Isaiah 18:2 (which is not quoted in the Book of Mormon); this verse mentions “swift messengers to a nation scattered and peeled” (the King James reading), with definite reference to a single nation.
Summary: Follow the Book of Mormon text with its use of the noun phrase “the messengers of the nations” as the subject of the clause; the Book of Mormon reading is reflected in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew.