Isaiah locates his prophecy in time as occurring “in the last days.” Of course, the “last days” are undated; but grouped with similar prophecies in Isaiah, they indicate the distant future prior to the final days of the earth.
Anthropology: In the prophetic future, Isaiah says, the “mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains.” What does it mean to establish a “mountain” in the “tops of the mountains?” For the ancients, the temple was a sacred location that acted as a bridge between this world and the next. Sometimes a building was erected at that location and acquired sanctity from its location, but the structure was secondary to the location. Mircea Eliade, the premiere analyst of comparative religions, comments:
Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different. When Jacob in his dream at Haran saw a ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it, and heard the Lord speaking from above it saying: “I am the Lord God of Abraham,” he awoke and was afraid and cried out: “How dreadful is this place: this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” And he took the stone that had been his pillow, and set it up as a monument, and poured oil on the top of it. He called the place Beth-el, that is, house of God (Gen. 28:12–19). The symbolism implicit in the expression “gate of heaven” is rich and complex; the theophany that occurs in a place consecrates it by the very fact that it makes it open above—that is, in communication with heaven, the paradoxical point of passage from one mode of being to another.
It is no coincidence that Jacob sees the location of his experience not only as a “gate of heaven,” but even more importantly, as “beth-el—house of God.” For Jacob, the experience of his visionary dream made the location into the house (abode) of God even before he erected a monument to commemorate the location.
For the ancient world in which Israel and Judah participated, the correlation between sacred space and temple was paramount. Jacob’s vision on a stony plain was somewhat anomalous, since typically a mountain was seen as a suitable site for sacred communication between Yahweh and man. Yahweh put himself in Moses’s way through the medium of the burning bush: but when Moses deliberately met with Yahweh, he went to a mountaintop.
John M. Lundquist, a professor of religion and anthropology at Brigham Young University, has constructed a nineteen-point profile of the ancient Near East’s concept of a temple, using data from the Near Eastern religions in Egypt, Babylon, Israel, and Sumer from 3000 B.C. to at least 600 B.C.:
The temple is the architectural embodiment of the cosmic mountain.
The cosmic mountain represents the primordial hillock, the place which first emerged from the waters that covered the earth during the creative process. In Egypt, for example, all temples are seen as representing the primordial hillock.
The temple is often associated with the waters of life which flow from a spring within the building itself—or rather the temple is viewed as incorporating within itself such a spring or as having been built upon the spring. The reason that such springs exist in temples is that they were perceived as the primeval waters of creation. . . The temple is thus founded upon and stands in contact with the waters of creation. These waters carry the dual symbolism of the chaotic waters that were organized during the creation and of the life-giving, saving nature of the waters of life.
The temple is associated with the tree of life.
The temple is built on separate, sacral, set-apart space.
The temple is oriented toward the four world regions or cardinal directions, and to various celestial bodies such as the polar star. As such, it is, or can be, an astronomical observatory, the main purpose of which is to assist the temple priests in regulating the ritual calendar. The earthly temple is also seen as a copy or counterpart of a heavenly model.
Temples, in their architectonic orientation [architectural symbolism] express the idea of a successive ascension toward heaven. The Mesopotamian ziggurat or staged temple tower is the best example of this architectural principle. It was constructed of three, five, or seven levels or stages. Monumental staircases led to the upper levels, where smaller temples stood. The basic ritual pattern represented in these structures is that the worshippers ascended the staircase to the top, the deity descended from heaven, and the two met in the small temple which stood at the top of the structure.
The plan and measurements of the temple are revealed by God to the king or prophet, and the plan must be carefully carried out. The Babylonian king Nabopolassar stated that he took the measurements of Etemenanki, the temple tower in the main temple precinct at Babylon, under the guidance of the Babylonian gods Shamash, Adad, and Marduk, and that “he kept the measurements in his memory as a treasure.”
The temple is the central, organizing, unifying institution in ancient Near Eastern society.
The temple is associated with abundance and prosperity.…
The destruction or loss of the temple is seen as calamitous.…
Inside the temple, images of deities as well as living kings, temple priests, and worshippers are washed, anointed, clothed, fed, enthroned, and symbolically initiated into the presence of deity, and thus into eternal life. Further, New Year rites held in the temple include the reading and dramatic portrayal of texts which recite a pre-earthly war in heaven; a victory in that war by the forces of good, led by a chief deity; and the creation and establishment of the cosmos, cities, temples, and the social order. The sacred marriage is carried out at this time.
The temple is associated with the realm of the dead, the underworld, the afterlife, the grave. The unifying features here are the rites and worship of ancestors. Tombs can be, and in Egypt and elsewhere are, essentially temples.…
Sacral, communal meals are carried out in connection with temple ritual, often at the conclusion of or during a covenant ceremony.
The tablets of destiny (or tables of the decrees) are consulted in the cosmic sense by the gods, and yearly in a special temple chamber, the ubshukinna in the temple of Eninnu in the time of the Sumerian King Gudea of Lagash. It was by this means that the will of deity was communicated to the people through the king or prophet for a given year.
God’s word is revealed in the temple usually in the holy of holies, to priests or prophets attached to the temple or to the religious system that it represents.
There is a close interrelationship between the temple and law in the ancient Near East. The building or restoration of a temple is perceived as the moving force behind a restating or “codifying” of basic legal principles, and the “righting” and organizing of proper social order. The building or refurbishing of temples is central to the covenant process.
The temple is a place of sacrifice.
The temple and its ritual are enshrouded in secrecy. This secrecy relates to the sacredness of the temple precinct and the strict division in ancient times between sacred and profane space.
The temple and its cult are central to the economic structure of ancient Near Eastern society.
The temple plays a legitimizing political role in the ancient Near East.
Scripture: Isaiah covers three items in this verse, a time, a place, and an action. The time is the last days. The place is a temple built in the mountaintop, but not just an ordinary temple. It is a temple of temples, a mountain on mountains. It will be the preeminent location for sacred communication between Yahweh and man. And the action is that “all nations will flow unto it.” The divine communication will be so powerful that it will attract notice from all nations. Isaiah is being both literal (representatives of faraway nations will come to the temple) and figurative (they will receive, even afar, the word that Yahweh communicated in the sacred location).
Comparison: The Book of Mormon version of Isaiah changes one word in verse 2. In the KJV it reads “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established.… ” The Book of Mormon has “And it shall come to pass in the last days, thatwhen the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established.… ” In the KJV, the word “that” is italicized, and this is another example of a change that occurs at the location of an italicized word. In this case, the overall meaning is correct, for the verse is looking to the future. The net effect, however, is to create an ungrammatical sentence. The change to “when” sets up a dependent clause that looks forward to some conclusion with a phrase beginning with “that,” but the phrase never comes. The only explanation for this change is that it is an attempt to “correct” the italicized word. The attempt preserved the general meaning but did not preserve the grammatical sense of the verse.
2 Nephi 12:3
3 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.
This verse clarifies that “the mountain of the house of the Lord” is the “house of the God of Jacob.” “Many people” parallels “nations.” The temple will exercise a universal attraction because Yahweh’s law will be preached here. In the last days, the pure of heart will recognize this attraction and come for instruction in Yahweh’s “paths.”
Symbolism: The last two phrases of this verse form an inverted paired set: “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, // And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” The key word in both is the Lord’s “law/word.” The two locations, Zion and Jerusalem, in this case, are symbolically if not physically the same location. The paired phrases are thus an emphatic repetition. It is not unusual for Isaiah to conflate Jerusalem and Zion. The temple in the mountaintops symbolizes the center of the world, exactly the role played by the temple at Jerusalem, according to Eliade:
It follows that the true world is always in the middle, at the Center, for it is here that there is a break in the plane and hence communication among the three cosmic zones [heaven, earth, underworld]. Whatever the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it represents is always perfect. An entire country (e.g., Palestine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary (the Temple in Jerusalem), all equally well present an imago mundi. Treating of the symbolism of the Temple, Flavius Josephus wrote that the court represented the sea (i.e., the lower regions), the Holy Place represented the earth, and the Holy of Holies heaven (Antiquities of the Jews 3:7, 7). It is clear then, that both the imago mundi and the Center are repeated in the inhabited world. Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple severally and concurrently represent the image of the universe and the Center of the World. This multiplicity of centers and this reiteration of the image of the world on smaller and smaller scales constitute one of the specific characteristics of traditional societies.
For Isaiah, Jerusalem’s sacredness makes it the center—a “temple of temples,” while Latter-day Saints interpret this passage as fulfilled by the Salt Lake Temple. However, such literalism bypasses the more important symbolic function of the temple in representing communication from God. The temple on the mountains in the last days is more truly the link between heaven and earth than any building. The symbolic importance of the temple in the tops of the mountains is the restoration of the prophetic communication with God rather than the construction of an edifice.