And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord. (Isa 2:2-5)
Latter-day Saints often take this passage as a direct prophecy about the then-future temple in Salt Lake City. However, there are many exegetical problems with this common interpretation, including the fact that, from the context, Isaiah is speaking of the eschatological temple in Jerusalem. In verse 1, we read:
The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
Is there a way that Latter-day Saints can use this as an allusion to the Salt Lake temple in light of this? It is possible, especially within the realm of pesher and other like-methods of interpretation. We see that the New Testament authors allowed for a prophetic expansion of sorts beyond the historical-grammatical meaning of a passage. For instance, in Matt 2:15, we read the following:
And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.
However, when one examines the text Matthew quotes from (Hos 11:1), we find that, contextually, it is not a prophecy about the Messiah and his family, but is about the nation of Israel and how Yahweh rescued them from Egyptian bondage:
When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images. (Hos 11:1-2)
Evangelical scholar, Robert Gundry, offered the following commentary on Matthew’s use of Hos 11:1:
The formula of fulfillment introducing the quotation from Hos 11:1 reads exactly as 1:22b . . . The preceding mention of Egypt has united with “Son of God” and “Son of the Highest” in the tradition of Jesus’ nativity (Luke 1:32, 35) and with Matthew’s own interest in Jesus’ divine sonship . . . to suggest the statement in Hos 11:1. There, the Lord addresses the nation of Israel as his son. The multiplicity of parallels drawn between the history of Israel and the life of Jesus suggests that Matthew saw that history as both recapitulated and anticipated in the “king of the Jews”; like Israel in the messianic age Jesus receives homage from the Gentiles (2:11); as a son he, like Israel, receives God’s fatherly protection in Egypt (2:15); his oppression brings sorrow as the oppression of Israel brought sorrow (2:17-18); like Israel he is tempted in the wilderness (4:1-10). The messianic reference preceding the statement “God brought him [the Messiah] out of Egypt” in Num 24:7-8 LXX may also have facilitated quotation of the similar statement in Hos 11:1, for Matthew has recently used Numbers 24. (Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982], 33-34)
In a similar fashion, armed with modern revelation and recent events in “salvation history,” Latter-day Saints can appeal to Isa 2:2-5 as perhaps having a secondary fulfillment with the Salt Lake temple, as well as the accepting the interpretation, based on the historical-grammatical method of exegesis, that Isaiah directly spoke of a still-future temple in Jerusalem.
