The high towers and fenced walls represent the great foreign cities that Judah so admires. The Lord emphasizes that these cities and their wealth (the “ships of Tarshish” and the “pleasant pictures”) shall be brought down in his day of judgment. According to Ludlow, “‘The ships of the sea’ (v. 16) represent the people’s commercial enterprises, especially the ‘ships of Tarshish,’ which were noted for their ability to travel long distances, their strength as war vessels, and their large storage capacity as commercial carriers. The ‘beautiful craft’ (NAS) or ‘pleasant pictures’ (King James Version) were apparently the pleasure crafts or ships in which the wealthy traveled throughout the Mediterranean.”
Comparison:The Book of Mormon adds: “And upon all the ships of the sea,and upon.… ” BYU professors of ancient scripture Dana M. Pike and David Rolph Seely did an extensive analysis of this variant. They note that: “While a few commentators on the book of Isaiah and 2 Nephi 12 make no mention of this variation, most consider the extra line found in Nephi 12:16 to be significant, claiming, for example that this is ‘incidental evidence that the Book of Mormon had the complete original text [of Isaiah 2:16] from the plates of brass’ and that ‘the Book of Mormon contains the most complete retention of the original structure of this verse.’” Sidney B. Sperry compared the King James Version with the Septuagint and noted that those two texts and the Book of Mormon all share the line the Book of Mormon translates as “and upon all pleasant pictures.” The KJV and the Book of Mormon both have “and upon all the ships of Tarshish.” The Septuagint lacks that line, but has one that may be translated “and upon all the ships of the sea,” as in the Book of Mormon. He concluded that the original Isaiah had all three lines and that the Septuagint lost one and the KJV the other.
Pike and Seely note that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls allows scholars to check the text of the much later Masoretic text upon which the King James Version was based. The Great Isaiah scroll contains the full passage of Isaiah 2:16 and 4Qisa fragment 2 has a few letters, all of which read the same as the Masoretic text. In these much earlier attestations of Isaiah, there is no support for the Book of Mormon’s three-line translation (as opposed to the two lines in both the KJV and the Septuagint).
Pike and Seely also note that the “repetitive, formulaic nature of the synonymous parallelisms in verses 13–15 (‘against all/every… and all/every… ’) clearly continues into verse 16 mentioned in 16a in order to complete the parallel form.” The poetic structures suggest that the two-line form is the original, regardless of the way it is translated. David P. Wright specifically notes this passage in his discussion of the Isaiah variants. He indicates: “It has been argued that the corresponding Book of Mormon verses, which have significant variants, are ancient because they manifest poetic parallelism. This argument does not hold. The truth is, the Book of Mormon variants break up the neat parallelistic structure of the Hebrew.”
For the Book of Mormon, the issue has become one of faith, where the possibility that the Book of Mormon preserves an original text becomes an indicator of the divine hand in its translation. For other scholars, the Book of Mormon does not reflect an accurate picture of the original languages. Pike and Seely say of them: “People who do not accept the authenticity of the book of Mormon will likely accept the primacy of the synonymous couplet found in the Masoretic Text and Septuagint over the three-line form of 2 Nephi 12:16 and will suggest that Joseph Smith erred or accepted outside influences when he ‘composed’ this verse.” Pike and Seely do not take issue with the conclusion about the passage, for they clearly state that “Latter-day Saint explanations regarding this matter cannot now be substantiated by the available comparative biblical textual evidence alone.” Their issue is with the rejection of the text as an inspired translation on this basis.
As with all other issues of translation, we cannot determine whether or not the text was translated based on the translation issues. Those data can only tell us something about how it was done. In this case, I side with Pike, Seely and the other scholars who see textual support for the two-line parallel rather than the three-line Book of Mormon text. I also side with Pike and Seely in accepting that Book of Mormon as a divine translation. The issue is what kind of translation it is, and the data collected throughout this commentary indicate that Joseph Smith interacted with the material he was translating. In the case of the long passages of Isaiah, that interaction often took the form of clarification. I see the third line as an addition to clarify the KJV passage.