Nephi's vision of the future continued. He now became an eyewitness of the fact that the Nephite-Lamanite battles would continue until the complete destruction of the Nephite nation in about a.d. 421. He saw that the symbols of his father's dream had pathetic but particular relevance to his own people: because they yielded to the temptations of the devil (mists of darkness), traversed the broad roads to death (rather than the strait and narrow path), and associated themselves with the pride and wisdom of the world (the large and spacious building), they qualified themselves for the depths of hell and thus became separated forever from their God by divine justice.
Book of Mormon Linguistics
As to the nature of the language in which the book was written there are no authoritative answers to be given at present. This much can be said: Moroni identified the characters with which he worked as “reformed Egyptian.” These characters, he said, were “handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech.” (Mormon 9:32.) The system appears to be a type of shorthand. Moroni added that the plates were not “sufficiently large” to make the record in Hebrew. Hebrew is a completely alphabetic language, whereas in Egyptian a symbol can represent an entire concept. Moroni further stated that “none other people knoweth our language” and that the Lord had “prepared means for the interpretation” (Mormon 9:32-34). Confirming this, Joseph Smith said, “I translated the Book of Mormon from hieroglyphics; the knowledge of which was lost to the world” (letter to James Arlington Bennett, as cited in Cannon, Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet, p. 460). Oliver Cowdery also affirmed that the language of the Book of Mormon “cannot be interpreted by the learning of this generation” (Messenger and Advocate, October 1835, 2:198)