Redaction: This is a difficult passage to interpret precisely. Nephi uses prophecies of Jerusalem’s destruction to connect his previous concern for Jerusalem with what follows. But how do the ending phrases of the passage relate to the beginning?
Nephi states that former prophets have prophesied “of them”—meaning Jerusalem. He next notes that the prophets “did show unto many concerning us.” Nephi is certain that the prophets foretold his people’s existence. He does not name any particular prophet but one was almost certainly Zenos, whose phrase “isles of the sea” Nephi assumes means his people. (See commentary accompanying 1 Nephi 19:10.) His last phrase is: “it must needs be that we know concerning them.” Is Nephi saying that because prophecies about his people are written on the brass plates, his people should know their future, just as those at Jerusalem would have known theirs, had they listened to the prophets? This interpretation supports the possibility that he refers to Zenos, as Zenos’s record is preserved on the brass plates where Nephi indicates they will find these important prophecies.
Text: This is the end of a chapter in the 1830 edition and presumably the end of a concept as Nephi had envisioned his text. Even though there are more chapters in the 1879 and subsequent editions, those editions usually preserve the location of the original breaks, even while they create more of them. That does not happen here, however. Instead of a chapter break, our current text (from the 1879 edition to the present) continues the chapter without marking what Nephi probably had as a full stop in his plate text.
At this point Nephi shifts topics. He begins to introduce a citation from Isaiah. For Nephi, this material from verses 22–24 is introductory. Orson Pratt removed it from the beginning of the Isaiah citations to preserve Isaiah 48 as a complete chapter with versification identical to the King James Version of that text.
While this rearrangement provides clear correlation between the Book of Mormon Isaiah passages with those in the Bible, it does obscure Nephi’s decision. Nephi wrote his explanatory material to introduce his Isaiah quotation. (See Behind the Text: Chapter 5, “The Organization of the Plates” for more information on the chapter breaks on the plates.) That introduction properly belongs with the quotation.