The Jews did not understand the law because they missed an essential element, a true understanding of the Messiah’s atoning mission. Their hardheartedness on this point would not have been included in the brass plates. While texts from the brass plate texts certainly contained calls to repentance, the people’s sin is never clearly identified as a rejection of the Atoning Messiah, even though for much of its history, Israel expected a conquering Messiah rather than an atoning one. Why, then, does Abinadi declare that the Jews were hardhearted about this part of the gospel? One logical source would be direct revelation. The second would be Nephi’s revelation. On the small plates, both Nephi and Lehi affirm that the Jews reject the Atoning Messiah (1 Ne. 10:11, 15:17).
Did Abinadi have access to the small plates? It seems unlikely. The plates almost certainly were given to Mosiah after the departure of Zeniff (Noah’s father) to the land of Lehi-Nephi. However, if Nephi condensed Lehi’s prophecies on his own small plates, then the book of Lehi on the large plates would have contained a fuller version. As I have already hypothesized, Zeniff and his party brought a copy of this work and the brass plates with them from Zarahemla.
Interesting, too, is the fact that Abinadi refers to the hard-heartedness as occurring in the past, even though the evidence for it lies in the future. This rhetorical device is known as the prophetic past, or prophetic perfect. According to Donald W. Parry, an associate professor of Hebrew language and literature at Brigham Young University, “The ‘prophetic perfect’ is the use of the past tense or the past participle verb forms (present and past perfect tenses) when referring to future events in prophecy. On occasion, Old Testament prophets prophesied using these forms ‘to express facts which are undoubtedly imminent, and therefore, in the imagination of the speaker, already accomplished.’”
Rhetoric: Abinadi is pounding home the essential point of his discourse—that the Messiah’s mission is essential even for the law of Moses. He stresses that the priests’ religion cannot save because it denies the Messiah, as have the Jews.