Wonder: Understanding the Hebrew
word "pele" or "wonder"
The phrase "a great and a marvelous work" appear first in the Book of Mormon 1 Nephi 14:7 and is said by the angel of the Lord to Nephi, describing the work of God in the end-time. The original idea comes from Isaiah 29:14, which the King James Version translates as like this:
Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the of their wise men shall , and the of their men shall be hid. (Isaiah 29:14).
The same verse appears in Nephi's prophecy in 2 Nephi 27:26, where Nephi is paraphrasing Isaiah 29:
Therefore, I will proceed to do a among this people, yea, a and a wonder, for the of their wise and shall perish, and the of their shall be hid.
(2 Nephi 27:26)
Because the Book of Mormon uses the KJV as a basis for the understanding of the people at the time (2 Nephi 31:7), it uses the translation of Isaiah 29:14 where the word "marvelous" is the word translated as the "marvelous work" even "the marvelous work and a wonder." That becomes the link of understanding for the people that the keywords "great and marvelous" throughout the Book of Mormon are linked to the same work in Isaiah 29:14 in the form of direct prophecies (1 Nephi 14:7, 2 Nephi 27:26, 3 Nephi 21:8) and in the types given where those works are carefully added.
That said, the Lord speaks in our own language for our understanding (2 Nephi 31:7), meaning he meat us where we are for us to make sense of things, but in any way, we should limit our language to what actually the Lord is embedded in our understanding. His ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:7), and there is always more (2 Nephi 29:30).
If Joseph and the early saints would it have a better understanding of Hebrew, then probably the translation would have been different, as the KJV