In this chapter, we see a particularly strong example of how the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph work together. Chapters 12 and 14 of the book, The Allegory of the Olive Tree, discuss the allegory of the olive tree and related figurative language in the ancient Near East (chapter 12), and the relationship of Zenos to the texts of the Old Testament (chapter 14). These two chapters show that there are allusions to this allegory in Exodus, Hosea, and Ezekiel. As David Seely and I went through these biblical passages and pseudepigraphic and other texts, we felt that a significant argument could be made that the reason that Hosea and those other writers could use specific tree imageries the way they did was because they presumed that their readers were familiar with some bigger picture.
Their poetic allusions assumed that their audience understood the whole story. If you take all of those Old Testament allusions to olive trees together, you find that they, as a composite whole, have remarkable similarities to the Allegory of the Olive Tree. Although Zenos’ writings do not appear in the Old Testament, there is an interesting argument to be made that many people in ancient Israel, along with Lehi and Nephi, knew this general prophecy. Indeed, Lehi at one point spoke "much concerning the Gentiles, and also concerning the house of Israel, that they should be compared like unto an olive-tree, whose branches should be broken off and should be scattered upon all the face of the earth" (1 Nephi 10:12). Nephi reports this as if everyone knows the story about the broken branches being scattered all over the earth. Maybe Nephi suggested to Jacob that he should tell and preserve that story.
David Rolph Seely, "The Allegory of the Olive Tree and the Use of Related Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East and the Old Testament," in The Allegory of the Olive Tree: The Olive, the Bible, and Jacob 5, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and John W. Welch (Provo and Salt Lake City, UT: FARMS and Deseret Book, 1994), 290–304.
David Rolph Seely and John W. Welch, "Zenos and the Texts of the Old Testament," in The Allegory of the Olive Tree: The Olive, the Bible, and Jacob 5, eds. Stephen D. Ricks and John W. Welch (Provo, UT/Salt Lake City: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies/Deseret Book, 1994), 322–346.
Book of Mormon Central, "Did Prophets Such As Ezekiel Know The Writings Of Zenos? (Jacob 5:24)," KnoWhy 440 (June 12, 2018).
Book of Mormon Central, "Was Lehi Familiar with Zenos’s Allegory of the Olive Tree? (1 Nephi 10:12)," KnoWhy 466 (September 11, 2018).