The botanical image is that of successful surgery. A drastic step was taken to save the tree, a step without which “the tree thereof would have perished.” Yahweh is announcing that adopting the Gentiles into the Abrahamic covenant was an essential part of preserving the promises of the covenant. At this point in the allegory, all is well. As Hoskisson correctly notes, this point of the parable refers to the time of Jesus and the decades immediately following. Nevertheless, the theme of grafting in Gentiles is authentic to Zenos’s time period. We have seen it in Isaiah 49:22–23, which is quoted in 2 Nephi 21:22–23, and 2 Nephi 6:7.
Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.
And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me. (Isa. 49:22–23)
The most important historical grafting in of Gentiles occurred in the Old World when early Christianity became primarily a Gentile church rather than a Jewish sect. However, I have suggested that Nephi and Jacob saw their own situation as a fulfillment of this part of Isaiah’s prophecy (see commentary accompanying 2 Nephi 6:13), and Jacob no doubt would have been quicker to see his own people in Zenos’s allegory than the distant Christian church.