September 21–27, 2026 · Come, Follow Me
"A Marvellous Work and a Wonder" · the Church's lesson page
In this front-door episode, Nathan and Eli are joined by the panel's doctrinal connector to trace how Restoration scripture reuses this week's Isaiah: Lucifer in Moses 4 and D&C 76, the key of David as sealing power, the feast of fat things in D&C 58, and Isaiah 29 in 2 Nephi 27. He's the guest because the lesson reads “a marvellous work and a wonder” as a Restoration text — and the hosts use the questioner's and scholar's research to press him on the hard parts: Lucifer's Latin origin, the dating of the Babylon chapters, the violence of chapter 13, the italicized “together with” in 26:19, and the timing of the Anthon visit, without forcing any of them to a resolution.
This week's eleven chapters are a sampler taken from three different collections inside Isaiah, and it helps to know which drawer each one comes from. Chapters 13–14 and 22 belong to the "oracles against the nations" (13–23), a standard prophetic genre in which Israel's God passes sentence on the empires around Judah and, pointedly, on Jerusalem itself. Chapters 24–27 drop the named nations for cosmic poetry, the unit nineteenth-century scholars labeled the "Isaiah Apocalypse." Chapters 28–30 are woe oracles, mostly tied to Hezekiah's crisis with Assyria and his court's bet on Egypt. And chapter 35 stands apart, a desert-in-bloom poem that reads like a preview of Isaiah 40. Nearly all critical scholars regard the book of Isaiah as the product of some three centuries of composition, and this block is where that question presses hardest on Latter-day Saints, because Nephi copied two of these chapters from brass plates that left Jerusalem around 600 BC.
So there are two books on the desk this week: the Isaiah that scholarship reconstructs and the Isaiah that Nephi reads and Joseph Smith dictates in 1829. The real work lies where the two meet. Neither book is asked to disappear here. The goal is to see each clearly enough that the places where they rub are visible, and then to think.
There is also a calendar. For Jewish readers these chapters land in an unusual week: Yom Kippur ends at nightfall on Monday, September 21, and Sukkot begins Friday evening, September 25. Jews rarely read Isaiah 24–27 straight through. We meet them in pieces, set into the prayer book, the cemetery, and the sukkah. Several verses you will read this week were said aloud in synagogues a few days ago. And for anyone trying to live this material rather than only parse it, the scale is misleading. Isaiah is talking to kings and cabinets, but the sins Isaiah names at the scale of a nation (vanity projects, panic alliances, religion that is all mouth, a taste for comfortable preaching) turn up at the scale of a household budget and a Sunday.
The five sessions follow the block's own seams. Session 1 (chapters 13–14) takes the burden of Babylon and the taunt over the fallen Day Star, including the hardest ethical passage of the week and the long history of the name "Lucifer." Session 2 (chapter 22) stands in Jerusalem during a siege, watches a steward carve his own tomb, and closes with a capstone that runs Donald W. Parry's six reading methods across the key and the nail of 22:22–23. Session 3 (chapters 24–27) is the so-called apocalypse: a broken covenant, a feast on the mountain, the dead who rise, and Leviathan. Session 4 (chapters 28–29) covers "precept upon precept," the covenant with death, the sealed book, and the Anthon episode, which is the week's sharpest historical question. Session 5 (chapters 30 and 35) runs from the embassy to Egypt to the highway home, and ends with an instruction addressed to you rather than to God.
The questions at the end of each session are not a review quiz. Most of them have more than one defensible answer, and a few are questions the text itself leaves open.
The superscription is clear: "The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see" (13:1). The trouble is the target. In Isaiah's lifetime the great enemy was Assyria, and Babylon was a restless Assyrian province. The poem names the Medes as Babylon's destroyers (13:17), which fits the mid-sixth century, when Babylon was the empire that had destroyed Jerusalem. Most critical scholars therefore date the oracle, in its present form, to the exile.
Chapter 14 complicates that picture from the inside. Right after the taunt over "the king of Babylon" comes an oath that has nothing to do with Babylon, "I will break the Assyrian in my land" (14:25), and then a date, "In the year that king Ahaz died" (14:28). The taunt also has a strange detail. The fallen king gets no tomb; he is "cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch" (14:19). No Babylonian king is known to have died that way. The Assyrian Sargon II was killed in battle in 705 BC, his body never recovered, and he had also ruled as king in Babylon. H. L. Ginsberg argued that the poem originally targeted Sargon and was later retitled for Babylon, and many scholars accept some version of that two-stage history. Seth Erlandsson's 1970 dissertation went further, arguing that the whole unit 13:2–14:23 fits the eighth century, when Babylon was a rebel center against Assyria.
That matters because 2 Nephi 23–24 quotes both chapters nearly word for word. Joshua M. Sears states the difficulty candidly: scholars think Isaiah 2–14 and 29 were significantly edited after 597 BC, yet the Book of Mormon quotes them very close to their current form. A late composition would be a real problem; an eighth-century core with a light Babylonian reframing would be a much smaller one. Believers have several responses, and they are not all compatible. Some start from predictive prophecy. Some note that a Babylon oracle is not out of place in the eighth century at all, since Merodach-baladan's Babylon was courting Hezekiah in Isaiah's own lifetime. Some accept later authorship and propose other routes into the Book of Mormon. None of these closes the question, and it is better to know that going in.
Before the famous taunt comes the hardest passage of the week. "Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished" (13:16); the soldiers "shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb" (13:18). God is the speaker, and he calls those soldiers "my sanctified ones" (13:3). The academic reading is blunt: this is the real texture of ancient siege warfare, the same acts Assyrian kings boasted of in their inscriptions, here imagined by a victim nation as falling on its oppressor. It should not be softened into allegory.
History adds a second problem. When Babylon fell in 539 BC, the Nabonidus Chronicle says that the army of Cyrus "without battle... entered Babylon", and the temple rites went on without interruption. Babylon stayed a major city for centuries and emptied slowly. The massacre of 13:15–18 did not happen when the city fell. Readers answer that in different ways. One reads it as stock war poetry, which explains the language without endorsing it. Eric Seibert goes further, arguing that believers should separate the text's portrait of God from the God revealed in Jesus. The Latter-day Saint chapter heading reads Babylon as a type of "the world," which moves the oracle into end-time symbolism.
The Book of Mormon's version reworks the moral logic. Where the KJV has "Every one that is found shall be thrust through" (13:15), 2 Nephi 23:15 has "Every one that is proud," and 2 Nephi 23:22 adds a line the Hebrew does not have: "for I will be merciful unto my people, but the wicked shall perish." The LDS scholar is careful about what kind of thing those changes are. They are not text-critical evidence at all but interpretation, a moral reading that separates the proud from the innocent, a distinction Isaiah's own text does not make. And the softening is partial. The children of 2 Nephi 23:16 are still "dashed to pieces", and a doctrinal reading should not soften what the Book of Mormon leaves standing. One more variant cuts the other way. At 14:4 the KJV's "golden city" renders a Hebrew word found nowhere else, while the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran reads "oppression," which fits the parallel line. Here 2 Nephi 24:4 keeps "the golden city." Both kinds of variant exist in Nephi's Isaiah, and an honest reader keeps both on the table.
Jewish tradition supplies two brakes worth carrying. On the darkened stars of 13:10, Maimonides treats the verse as prophetic hyperbole: he does not think anyone is "so foolish and blind" as to believe the stars changed when Babylon fell. To the conquered, all light turns dark. And on celebrating an enemy's destruction, the Talmud remembers that when the Egyptians drowned, God silenced the angels: "The work of My hands are drowning at sea, and you wish to say songs?"
The taunt proper begins at 14:4, and the text tells you its genre: "thou shalt take up this proverb (mashal) against the king of Babylon." It is a satire over a dead tyrant, and some of the best mockery in the Bible. The cedars celebrate because no woodcutter has come up since he fell (14:8). In Sheol the dead kings rise from their thrones to greet the newcomer: "Art thou also become weak as we?" (14:10). The onlookers ask, "Is this the man that made the earth to tremble?" (14:16).
Then 14:12: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" The Hebrew is helel ben shachar, "shining one, son of dawn," the morning star, Venus. Verse 12's "Lucifer" does not come from the Hebrew. It comes from Jerome's Latin Vulgate, where lucifer was the ordinary word for the morning star, and the King James translators kept it as a proper name. The imagery is Canaanite. The climber wants to sit "upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north" (14:13), which is the language of Zaphon, the mountain of the gods in the Ugaritic texts, where ʻAthtar, a god associated with Venus, climbs onto Baal's empty throne, finds his feet do not reach the footstool, and comes back down. Scholars debate which myth exactly lies behind the poem, but the setting of divine mountain, star god, and failed ascent is unmistakably Canaanite. In the poem the fall is into Sheol, where the dead kings jeer. This is ancient underworld imagery put to work as political satire.
The Satan reading came later. Tertullian, around AD 200, was already putting "I will be like the Most High" (14:14) into the devil's mouth. Jewish readers never followed. The rabbis never read this chapter as Satan's backstory. For them it is Nebuchadnezzar. The rabbi explains that this is not stubbornness: in Hebrew scripture ha-satan is the accuser in God's court, not a rebel against it, and no rebel-angel story existed for Isaiah 14 to attach to until later writers built one.
For Latter-day Saints the question has an extra edge. The Book of Mormon repeats the KJV wording, "O Lucifer" (2 Nephi 24:12), so a Latin-derived word appears in a text said to come from brass plates older than any Latin Bible. A common believing explanation is that where the plates matched the familiar biblical text, the translation used KJV English. Critics reply that this is exactly the evidence of dependence on the KJV. That argument is not settled.
The faithful reading does not require Isaiah to have written about Satan. The Church's own footnote to 14:12 glosses the Hebrew as "morning star, son of dawn" and says the ruler of wicked Babylon "is spoken of as Lucifer." That is a two-layer reading: a historical king described in the language of archetypal rebellion. The doctrinal connector makes the stronger point. Latter-day Saint doctrine does not need to force the Hebrew, because it reached the premortal rebellion by a separate path. Moses 4, received in 1830, tells the story of the council with no reference to Babylon; only in 1832 does D&C 76 name the rebel in Isaiah's words, "Lucifer, a son of the morning." So the lesson's pairing of Isaiah 14 with Moses 4 is, in the LDS scholar's phrase, typology, not exegesis. The rabbi's request is fair, and a Latter-day Saint can grant it without giving anything up: I only ask that you not trade the first meaning for the second. Read plainly, Isaiah 14 belongs to everyone who has lived under a tyrant.
Whichever layer you read, the poem turns on one grammatical habit. "I will ascend... I will exalt my throne... I will sit also upon the mount... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High" (14:13–14). The doctrinal connector sets this beside Moses 4, where Satan says "I will redeem all mankind... surely I will do it," and the Beloved Son answers, "Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever." Only the Son puts the glory somewhere else.
The practical disciple brings it closer. The tyrant's inner speech is five sentences of "I will", and most of us have said a smaller version about a promotion or an argument we meant to win. And he notices who is singing the taunt: people given "rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve" (14:3). It is the relief of the oppressed. That makes the test uncomfortable. If I enjoy someone's downfall, did they ever oppress me, or do I just dislike them?
Hold on to one line before moving on: the tyrant "opened not the house of his prisoners" (14:17). It comes back in Session 3.
Think deeply.
Chapter 22 is the one place in this block where the oracles against the nations turn on Jerusalem, and it puts you on the ground. The city is celebrating on the housetops (22:1) while the prophet weeps and refuses to be comforted (22:4). Enemy chariots fill the valleys. The defenses are itemized with a quartermaster's precision: the armory in "the house of the forest" (22:8), the waters of the lower pool (22:9), houses numbered and torn down "to fortify the wall" (22:10), "a ditch between the two walls for the water of the old pool" (22:11).
That verse has a physical echo. In the 1970s Nahman Avigad excavated in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter a massive late-eighth-century wall, the Broad Wall, built over the foundations of demolished houses and generally tied to Hezekiah's preparations against Sennacherib. Most commentators set 22:1–14 in or just after 701 BC, when Sennacherib's annals boast of shutting Hezekiah up in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage."
Notice what Isaiah does not say. Isaiah's charge is not that the engineering was wrong. His charge is about where the city looked: "ye have not looked unto the maker thereof" (22:11). Then God calls for weeping and sackcloth, and gets a party: "let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die" (22:13). The city survived, and the prophet rages at its revelry when it should be mourning.
The practical disciple translates the scene without much effort. The modern version rarely looks like debauchery; it looks like scrolling at midnight after a hard diagnosis, or a weekend of noise so that a hard conversation does not have to happen. Isaiah is not against feasting; chapter 25 is a feast. He is against using the feast to skip the grief that would have led to repentance or to God. The self-examination he offers is simple: when something frightening happened in my life this year, what did I do in the first forty-eight hours? Did I do the practical work, the wall and the water, and also turn to the maker? Or only one of the two?
Then the oracle narrows to one man: "Go, get thee unto this treasurer, even unto Shebna, which is over the house" (22:15). "Over the house" was the formal title of the royal steward, the highest palace official. The charge is not bribery or idolatry. It is a construction project: "What hast thou here... that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre here, as he that heweth him out a sepulchre on high, and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock?" (22:16).
A stone from Silwan, across the Kidron from the City of David, deciphered by Avigad in 1953, marks the tomb of "[...]yahu who is over the house," with a curse on whoever opens it and a note that there is no silver or gold inside. It is tempting to call it Shebna's tomb. The six-outlooks writer is careful: Avigad himself called that identification "highly conjectural," and the name is broken away. What the lintel does establish is that officials with this exact title cut rock tombs on that hillside in Isaiah's period.
The doctrinal connector notices an echo across the week. Shebna hewing a tomb "on high" is a smaller version of the king's "I will ascend." The sentence on him is that he will be tossed "like a ball into a large country" and die there (22:18). The monument will not even hold his body.
Eliakim son of Hilkiah is installed in the language of investiture. "I will clothe him with thy robe, and strengthen him with thy girdle, and I will commit thy government into his hand: and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem" (22:21). The robe and sash are the insignia of the office, moved from one man to another. Then: "the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open" (22:22). In its near setting that is the palace key; whoever held it controlled who could enter the king's house and who could not.
History partly confirms the oracle. When the Assyrian Rab-shakeh stands outside Jerusalem, it is Eliakim "which was over the household" who goes out, with "Shebna the scribe" beside him (2 Kings 18:18). Shebna had been demoted, but he had not yet been exiled.
The lesson lists 22:22–23 among the passages that point to the Savior, and Revelation 3:7 gives Christ "the key of David." But read two more verses. The family hangs on Eliakim "all the glory of his father's house... from the vessels of cups, even to all the vessels of flagons" (22:24), and then: "shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall" (22:25).
Every essay that touches this chapter stops here, and they don't agree. The plainest reading is that Eliakim himself fell under his relatives' weight. That is the plainest near-view reading, and it should be stated plainly. Critical scholars mostly read 22:25 as a later addition: a promotion oracle revised in light of later events. The LDS scholar puts it in one line: the office passes from a failed steward to a better one, who then fails too, which is exactly why a Christian reading has to be typological. The honest questioner agrees: the typology is old and legitimate, but the text ends with the peg giving way. Honest reading keeps both.
The practical disciple draws a warning out of the collapse that most readers skip. The good steward can fail too, not from vanity but from being made the load-bearing point for a whole extended family's hopes and patronage. Shebna's question is what I am building "here," and for whom. Eliakim's question is what is hanging on me that should not be. A nail can hold cups; it cannot hold the whole house.
The six-outlooks essay takes 22:22–23 as a test case for a method. The method comes from Donald W. Parry, professor of Hebrew Bible at BYU, whose chapter "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks" names six approaches: the historical near view, the distant view, dual fulfillment, likening, personal reading, and reading for doctrine. Parry recommends starting with the near view. One caution comes first: the readings below are mine, not his, and he does not discuss Isaiah 22 in that chapter. The passage suits the method because they can't be read well at only one level.
1. The near view. Everything above: a steward, a tomb, a siege, a palace key, a wall peg (Hebrew yated) where household vessels hang, and a peg that falls.
2. The distant view. The New Testament has already read this passage forward. The risen Christ tells the church in Philadelphia that he "hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth" (Revelation 3:7). John uses Isaiah's exact open/shut formula and gives it to Christ as the holder of the Davidic key. Isaiah's own wording invites this in one small way: the "shoulder" of 22:22 is the same word as the messianic "the government shall be upon his shoulder" of 9:6. The words for "government" differ, but the picture of authority carried on one person's shoulder is shared, and a careful reader of the whole book will notice it.
3. Dual fulfillment, and the problem of verse 25. Parry cites Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's observation that Isaiah's prophecies can be fulfilled in more than one way. Eliakim really did take Shebna's office, and John really did read the key as Christ's. But what does the falling nail mean for the type? Three answers get a hearing. Terry B. Ball reads the nail as Christ fastened to the cross, with the burden cut off in 22:25 being the sin and pain he carried, and Spencer Kraus reports that Elder Holland reads it the same way. In this reading the fall is fulfillment, not failure. Kraus himself proposes a different route: he translates 22:25 as a condition, "should the nail... be removed," making it a covenant curse that depends on unfaithfulness. He also notes an 1844 Times and Seasons editorial that called the nail "a mystery to the world." The third answer is the near view: Eliakim fell. The six-outlooks writer's conclusion is the most interesting of all: the typology may be strongest where the type fails and the antitype does not. Eliakim was a peg that could slip. Revelation's key-holder opens what "no man" can shut.
4. Likening. Nephi "did liken all scriptures unto us" (1 Nephi 19:23). The six-outlooks essay compares that with the Qumran pesharim, which quoted a prophet and explained it as a coded reference to the community's own history. The difference is important. Pesher claimed that the application was the hidden meaning of the text. Likening applies the text to us openly, without claiming that Isaiah had us in mind. Likened, the Shebna–Eliakim contrast becomes a question for anyone who holds a trust, and for Latter-day Saints the word key adds another level. The keys are the king's, not the steward's. They come with insignia that can be taken away, and the holder is expected to be a father to those he serves. The doctrinal connector follows the open/shut formula into Restoration sealing language (D&C 132:46; 128:14) and quotes President Dallin H. Oaks on the function of priesthood keys that "both enlarges and limits". The falling nail keeps that application honest: keys in mortal hands are held in trust and can be lost.
5. The personal reading. Someone facing a door that seems permanently closed may read "he shall open, and none shall shut" as a direct word, and someone uprooted may hold on to "a nail in a sure place." Nothing in the steward oracle intends that, and the reader should know it. But the personal outlook is not exegesis and does not claim to be. It is one of the ways scripture has always been used by the people who read it.
6. Reading for doctrine. "Sure" in "a sure place" is from the Hebrew root that gives firmness, faithfulness, belief, and amen, the same root as Isaiah's pun to Ahaz ("If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established," 7:9) and as "he that believeth" in 28:16. The doctrine is about where security comes from. A peg is only as sure as the wall it is driven into and the faithfulness of the one it represents. Jerusalem trusted its walls and water, Shebna his tomb, Eliakim's family Eliakim. Each was a peg, and each came loose. Only Zion is promised to be a tabernacle whose stakes will never be removed (33:20), and the word there is the same, yated. The essay ends on the paradox the chapter builds: when a peg falls, as in 22:25, that failure shows what a sure place actually is.
Think deeply.
In chapters 24–27 the named nations are gone. The earth is emptied and turned upside down (24:1), a nameless "city of confusion" falls (24:10), the sun and moon are shamed (24:23), and a sea dragon is slain (27:1). For most of the twentieth century these chapters were called the "Isaiah Apocalypse" and dated very late, largely because of their cosmic scope and the resurrection language of 26:19.
That consensus has broken down. Christopher B. Hays argues that the Hebrew shows no late features and that the images of divine feasting and conquered death have old Near Eastern parallels. He dates the unit to the late seventh century, a Josianic celebration of Assyria's retreat. The question is unsettled and should be presented that way. One survey of the field summarizes the theories about these chapters' layers and dates, which range from the eighth to the sixth century, as having "achieved no consensus". And the label itself has slipped: "apocalypse" is now widely considered a misleading label, since these chapters lack the visionary guides and periodized history of real apocalypses like Daniel 7–12. For Latter-day Saints the stakes here are lower than in Session 1, since 2 Nephi does not quote these chapters.
Why is the earth emptied? "Because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant" (24:5). Berit ʻolam, "everlasting covenant," is the phrase of the covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:16), and "the windows from on high are open" (24:18) is flood language (Genesis 7:11). The poet imagines creation undone a second time.
The doctrinal connector points to where Restoration scripture picks up this verse. The Lord's preface to the Doctrine and Covenants says the world has "strayed from mine ordinances, and have broken mine everlasting covenant," each following an idol that "shall perish in Babylon" (D&C 1:15–16), and the very next verse is the call of Joseph Smith. The Restoration presents itself as the answer to Isaiah 24:5.
Now the thread from Session 1. The tyrant of chapter 14 "opened not the house of his prisoners." Chapter 24 pictures "the host of the high ones" and the kings of the earth "gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit... and after many days shall they be visited" (24:21–22). Restoration scripture reads that visit as the redemption of the dead: the Son "visited, and preached the gospel" to spirits in prison (D&C 76:73), and in his 1918 vision President Joseph F. Smith saw Isaiah among the spirits as the prophet who foretold "the opening of the prison to them that were bound" (D&C 138:42). The one who grasped the throne would not open the prison; the one given the key does. The manual never puts these chapters side by side, but they belong together.
"In this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things... of wines on the lees well refined. And he will destroy in this mountain... the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces" (25:6–8). This is the week's richest passage, and each tradition sits down to it differently.
For the doctrinal connector, the Doctrine and Covenants takes this passage almost directly. The Doctrine and Covenants lifts the menu word for word: Zion is founded "that a feast of fat things might be prepared for the poor... a supper of the house of the Lord... unto which all nations shall be invited" (D&C 58:8–9). The rent veil has its counterpart in D&C 38:8 and 88:68, and a feast on the Lord's mountain where a veil is removed and death is overcome has, for Latter-day Saints, the shape of the temple. He is candid about the kind of claim that is: that is association rather than exegesis, though the pilgrim of 30:29 going "into the mountain of the LORD" invites it.
For the academic, the key is the verb. In the Ugaritic Baal cycle, Death (Mot) is a god with an enormous gullet who swallows Baal himself. Isaiah turns that around: the God of Israel swallows the swallower. The KJV's "in victory" reflects a later sense of the Hebrew netsach; the older meaning is "forever." The rabbi traces that ambiguity into the Greek, which chose "victory," and so into Paul (1 Corinthians 15:54), and he notes that David J. Larsen has followed the whole range of meanings into the Book of Mormon.
For the rabbi, the verse is said at a grave. The Mishnah's laws of mourning end with it, and some Jews still recite it as they wash their hands leaving the cemetery. The last thing we do at a grave is quote Isaiah against death. But he wants you to hear the full range of Jewish readings. The Talmud takes it literally and wrestles with Isaiah 65:20. Radak goes the other direction and reads it as violent death, "not natural death": the killing of Jews in exile. And the feast that the lesson reads as a gospel banquet, the Targum and Rashi read as a trap: the nations who march on Jerusalem expect a feast in their honor and get "a feast of dregs." The universal reading has a place too; Taʻanit 31a ends with the righteous dancing in a circle, pointing and saying, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him" (25:9).
Chapter 26 sets two verses against each other. Of the "other lords" who ruled Judah: "They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise" (26:14). Then: "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust" (26:19). The same Hebrew words, now reversed.
Is this bodily resurrection, or national revival like Ezekiel's dry bones? The Yale Bible Study course cited by the honest questioner takes the majority view that resurrection here is a metaphor for the people's revival; clear individual resurrection appears only with Daniel 12:2, whose "sleep in the dust of the earth" echoes this verse. The academic adds an observation that is useful to keep in mind: scholars who date chapters 24–27 late tend to read 26:19 literally; those who date them early tend to read it nationally. On the other side, Jon Levenson argues that restoring the nation and raising the dead were never cleanly separate hopes, which blunts the "only a metaphor" objection.
The Talmud knew the verse could not carry everything. In Sanhedrin 90b Rabban Gamliel cites 26:19 as his proof of resurrection from the Prophets, and his opponents answer that it may refer to Ezekiel's dry bones. The Talmud records that they were not persuaded. And yet the verse became one of the pillars of Jewish belief in resurrection, blessed three times a day in the Amidah. The line the rabbi loves most is "thy dew is as the dew of herbs." Orot can mean greens, but orot also means "lights," and the rabbis heard "a dew of lights." The Talmud stores in the highest heaven the dew God will use to revive the dead, and every prayer for rain echoes this verse. It also records Rabbi Elazar's claim that only those who used the light of Torah would rise, and Rabbi Yoḥanan's rebuke of it. The tradition keeps its sharpest claims on record, and it keeps the rebuke too.
One caution for your edition. The chapter heading says "Jehovah will die and be resurrected," reading "my dead body" as God's. But the KJV prints "men" and "together with" in italics because the translators supplied them. The Hebrew reads roughly "your dead shall live; my corpse(s) shall rise." The claim that God's dead body rises with them rests largely on two supplied words. Radak, for his part, takes "my" as the prophet himself, a righteous man sure he will rise with the others. The LDS scholar gives the general rule: headings are study aids, not scripture. None of this rules out a Christ-centered reading. Paul quoted 25:8 as a resurrection text, and Abinadi's "the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ" (Mosiah 16:8) anchors it to a risen Christ. But a careful reader should not build the Savior's resurrection on "together with," which is italicized for a reason. The doctrinal connector says what is actually at stake: if 26:19 is only national, Isaiah is a poet of hope; if literal, a witness. The Book of Mormon treats him as a witness.
"In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent" (27:1). The Hebrew epithets, "fleeing serpent" and "twisting serpent," match almost word for word the Ugaritic epithets of Lotan, the seven-headed sea monster Baal defeats. Leviathan and Lotan are the same name. Israel's poets moved the old dragon-fight from creation to the end of days and gave the victory to Israel's God alone.
The rabbis turned the monster into dinner. In Bava Batra 74b God salts the female Leviathan for the banquet of the righteous, and the next page says he will make the righteous a sukkah from its skin. On the last day of Sukkot, in the first days of October, Ashkenazi Jews will pray in their booths to merit next year's sukkah of Leviathan's skin. A monster from Isaiah's apocalypse becomes the roof of the messianic sukkah, and the feast of 25:6 reaches the Jewish table by way of 27:1.
Then the chapter ends with a gathering. "Ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel" (27:12), and "the great trumpet shall be blown" for those ready to perish in Assyria and the outcasts in Egypt (27:13). That shofar gadol is one of the ten shofar verses of the Rosh Hashanah service and the source of the weekday prayer "sound the great shofar for our freedom." When you read this verse, remember that Jews sounded the ram's horn over it eight days ago. For the rabbi this is the ordinary way scripture lives. The siddur is itself a commentary, and an old one. President Russell M. Nelson, for his part, quoted 27:6 ("Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit") in the same talk in which he tied the Book of Mormon to the gathering, which is where Session 4 goes next.
Think deeply.
Chapter 28 opens with a woe on "the drunkards of Ephraim" (28:1), whose capital Samaria sat like a garland on its hill until it fell in 722 BC. Then Isaiah turns on Jerusalem: "the priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink... all tables are full of vomit" (28:7–8). And the drunks mock him. "Whom shall he teach knowledge?... them that are weaned from the milk" (28:9). Then comes the most debated Hebrew in the block: tsav latsav tsav latsav, qav laqav qav laqav, "precept upon precept... line upon line" (28:10).
Most likely these are near-nonsense syllables, the prophet's opponents mocking him as a nursery teacher. William W. Hallo noted that tsade and qof are consecutive letters and suggested schoolchildren reciting the alphabet; Karel van der Toorn proposed instead the chirping of spirits consulted by necromancers. Jewish commentators split too. Radak and Ibn Ezra read it as teaching method, but Rashi hears mockery: the drunken priests throw the prophet's words back at him. The context supports Rashi. God answers that he will speak "with stammering lips and another tongue" (28:11), the foreign speech of Assyrian soldiers, and the same syllables become a sentence of doom: "that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken" (28:13).
Latter-day Saints know this line as a principle of revelation, and the doctrinal connector says plainly what that involves. One reuse needs a warning label. Nephi turns it into a blessing: "I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept... and blessed are those who hearken" (2 Nephi 28:30). That is sound doctrine about incremental revelation, but it is not what Isaiah 28 means. The LDS scholar agrees: that is a new use of Isaiah's words, and it is better to say so. The New Testament does the same with this chapter, applying 28:11 to tongues and 28:16 to Christ.
"We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement... for we have made lies our refuge" (28:15). This is the prophet's sarcastic paraphrase of Jerusalem's foreign policy, almost certainly the Egyptian alliance of chapter 30. Against it God lays "in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste" (28:16). The last clause is better translated "the one who trusts will not panic," perhaps imagined as the stone's inscription.
Then Isaiah reaches for an image anyone who has slept in a bad guest room will know: "the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it" (28:20). The practical disciple makes it a diagnostic. A false refuge rarely fails all at once. It fails the way a short bed does, with a constant low-grade discomfort you keep adjusting to. The small dishonesty on a timesheet, the story that has to be kept consistent, the workaround that keeps a problem out of sight: none of them collapses, and none of them ever lets you rest. The honest arrangement lets you stop scrambling; the dishonest one requires you to keep adjusting the blanket all night. Put the two verses together and "shall not make haste" becomes the promise of a full-length bed.
The chapter that holds the short bed ends with a gentle parable (28:23–29). The plowman does not plow forever without sowing. He puts each crop "in their place." Delicate dill and cummin are beaten out with a staff and rod, not run over with a threshing sledge. Even bread grain is threshed only so far: "he will not ever be threshing it" (28:28). And the farmer's discretion comes from God, "wonderful in counsel" (28:29).
For someone under the Lord's discipline, that is comfort: the threshing has a purpose and an end. For a parent or a supervisor, it is instruction: match the tool to the crop. And no one needs to be threshed forever.
"Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt!" (29:1). Ariel plays on a word for the altar hearth, and the pun is grim: the city "shall be unto me as Ariel" (29:2), a burning altar. Besieged and humbled, Jerusalem "shalt speak out of the ground... as of one that hath a familiar spirit" (29:4). The Hebrew ʼob is a ghost called up by a medium, a practice Isaiah condemns (8:19). The proud city will whisper like the dead.
Nephi rereads this openly. In 2 Nephi 26:15–16 he applies the siege and the voice from the ground to his own descendants, and Moroni carries the image to his last page ("as one speaking out of the dust," Moroni 10:27). Isaiah's ghostly whisper of humiliation becomes the voice of a people surviving in their record. That is a real transformation of the image, and it is worth noticing that the Book of Mormon does it knowingly.
The sealed book of 29:11–12 is, in its own setting, a simile: "the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed." The learned cannot read it because it is sealed; the unlearned cannot read at all. It is an image from a society where literacy belonged to a scribal elite. The rabbi reports Rashi's reading, which puts the blame where the chapter puts it: the fault lies with the readers, not the book.
This is where the Restoration's claims about Isaiah are strongest and most contested, and the essays lay out the evidence carefully.
2 Nephi 27 is far longer than Isaiah 29. It expands the sealed-book simile into a narrative: a sealed portion kept for the Lord's own time, three witnesses, words "not sealed" delivered "to another, that he may show them unto the learned," and a learned man who says, "I cannot bring the book, for it is sealed" (2 Nephi 27:15–17). Beside that sits the historical episode. In February 1828 Martin Harris took a transcript of characters to Charles Anthon in New York. By the account in Joseph Smith's 1838 history, Anthon certified the characters, tore up the certificate when he heard about an angel, and said, "I cannot read a sealed book" (Joseph Smith—History 1:64–65). Anthon's own letters of 1834 and 1841 deny that he authenticated anything, and the Church's history topic page acknowledges that.
The critical argument turns on sequence. The small plates, including 2 Nephi 27, were most likely dictated around June 1829, more than a year after Harris's visit. Both must reckon with the fact that the canonical Anthon account was written after the text that interprets it. The earlier 1832 history already tells the story in Isaiah's words ("thus the Propicy of Isiaah was fulfilled"), and critics argue that the memory itself was shaped by the text.
The faithful responses are real, too. Anthon had strong motives to distance himself once the Book of Mormon was published, and his own two letters contradict each other: in 1834 he said he declined to give a written opinion, and in 1841 that he gave one "without hesitation." The 1832 history says Harris went because "the Lord had shown him" he must, which could explain why the trip was framed in Isaiah's terms from the start.
The honest questioner then states the limits on both sides. What a believer cannot honestly claim is that the Anthon episode is independent evidence for the Book of Mormon. The witnesses are interested parties who contradict each other, and the prediction was written down afterward. But what a critic cannot honestly claim is that reapplying Isaiah is automatically fraud, or Matthew and Paul are guilty too. Jesus applies 29:13 to the Pharisees and Paul applies 29:14 to the Corinthians, and neither is interested in the siege of Ariel. The real disagreement is whether Nephi's expansion of Isaiah 29 is revelation or invention, and documents alone cannot settle that.
The LDS scholar and the doctrinal connector both reach for the same frame. Nephi names his own method: "I did liken all scriptures unto us." Reading Isaiah 29 that way is not failed historical exegesis; it is a different act. Monte S. Nyman observes that Joseph Smith's own Bible revision of Isaiah 29 keeps Jerusalem as the subject. The Restoration itself practices likening. It does not claim Isaiah was thinking of Palmyra; it claims the same God is doing a like work again. Putting it that way costs something. It means letting go of the idea that Isaiah's first audience could have heard 29:11 as a reference to New York, and letting go of the opposite idea that a text's original meaning is all it can ever say.
The lesson's title verse sits right after the sealed book: "this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men: therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder" (29:13–14). D&C 4:1 echoes it ("a marvelous work is about to come forth"), and Joseph Smith recorded hearing a version of 29:13 in the First Vision (Joseph Smith—History 1:19). President Nelson tied the Book of Mormon to this work directly: if there were no Book of Mormon, the promised gathering of Israel would not occur.
This verse is also where Jewish and Christian readers have parted most sharply, because Jesus quotes it against the Pharisees, and Christians have often heard it as a verdict on rabbinic law. The rabbi answers by turning it on himself. The JPS renders the phrase "a social obligation, learned by rote," and the Mishnah warns that "one whose prayer is fixed, his prayer is not supplication." A people that prays from a fixed text three times a day has worried about Isaiah 29:13 for two thousand years. Reading it the morning after Yom Kippur, he hears it as aimed at himself.
The practical disciple suggests Latter-day Saints do the same before reading it as a prophecy about anyone else. Every regular practice drifts toward mouth-only: the family prayer on autopilot, the sacrament hymn sung while checking a phone, the ministering visit that is a box checked. His exercise is to slow one prayer down enough that you could say afterward what you actually asked for or promised. If you cannot, the lips are doing the work alone.
Think deeply.
Chapter 30 names the policy chapter 28 mocked. Judah's envoys have gone "down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth" (30:2), to Zoan and Hanes in the Delta, carrying "their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, and their treasures upon the bunches of camels, to a people that shall not profit them" (30:6). Egypt was then ruled by the Kushite dynasty, which backed revolt against Assyria. The verdict in 30:7 is a pun lost in the KJV's "Their strength is to sit still"; the Hebrew means roughly "Rahab, sitting still." Rahab is the chaos dragon, and Egypt is a monster that will not move.
The practical disciple's translation is one of the most usable lines of the week. Most of us do not negotiate with pharaohs, but everyone has an Egypt: the thing we run to when frightened that we did not ask God about first. It might be a line of credit, a relationship, a substance, or overwork meant to make us feel in control. The test of 30:1–2 is simple: did I "take counsel, but not of me"? Did I ask at the Lord's mouth before I loaded the camels?
Isaiah is told to "write it before them in a table, and note it in a book" (30:8), a dated written witness, one of the ways a prophetic book begins. What he is to record is a people who "say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits" (30:10). They want the Holy One of Israel to go quiet (30:11).
We ask for smooth things too. We call the friend who will agree, tune out a spouse's concern, reward the employee who brings good news. Isaiah's image for where that leads is "a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant" (30:13). The collapse seems sudden, but the bulge was visible for years to anyone not told to look away.
Then the verse many readers underline: "In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not" (30:15). The word for "returning," shuvah, appears only here in the Hebrew Bible. A lexicon glosses it "retirement, withdrawal," especially from war, and some translations render it "repentance." The rabbi, reading this week after the Days of Awe, hears teshuvah, repentance, in it, but notes that Rashi, reading for the plain sense, resists and takes it as rest. Isaiah was telling Hezekiah's court to stop sending money to Egypt and sit still. Both readings fit. Politically, the counsel is quiet trust. Spiritually, the return is the rest.
That does not make the verse a call to passivity. "Quietness and confidence" is not passivity; it is deciding from trust rather than from panic. The court's answer, "No; for we will flee upon horses" (30:16), is the answer of panic. And the chapter does not end with the refusal. "Therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you" (30:18), and "thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it" (30:21). The lesson's call to see the Lord restoring what is broken rests on these verses: he "bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound" (30:26).
The week ends in a poem. "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose" (35:1). The blind see and the deaf hear (35:5), the lame leap (35:6), the parched ground becomes a pool (35:7), and "an highway shall be there... The way of holiness" (35:8), on which "the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads" (35:10).
Critical scholars read chapter 35 as a bridge. Its lines anticipate chapters 40–55 closely: the desert highway of 40:3, the watered wilderness of 41:18–19, and 35:10 appears almost word for word at 51:11. Odil Hannes Steck argued it was written to join an earlier Isaiah collection to Second Isaiah. And the academic notices what the bridge accomplishes. The blind who see and the deaf who hear reverse the commission in 6:10 to make ears heavy and eyes shut, and they complete the promise of 29:18 that "the deaf [shall] hear the words of the book." Isaiah's editors read their scroll as a story of hardening followed by healing, and they wrote chapter 35 to make that arc explicit.
The LDS scholar finds in that a point of kinship. Isaiah is a book that was reread, and chapter 35 is where its own tradition heard restoration in older words. When the Restoration reads "a marvellous work and a wonder" as describing its own day, it does, by its own account through revelation, what the Isaiah tradition did first. And Restoration scripture leans on chapter 35 heavily: pools of living water in barren deserts (D&C 133:29), and the ransomed "singing with songs of everlasting joy" (D&C 45:71; 66:11).
The rabbi hears one verb running through the whole block. "The ransomed of the LORD shall return" uses shuv again, the verb of 30:15. For a people who have been "outcasts in the land of Egypt," return to Zion, return to the land, and return to God have never been three separate hopes.
In the middle of the poem is an instruction: "Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not" (35:3–4). The imperative is addressed to people, not to God. Before the lame leap and the dumb sing, someone has to go and steady the knees that are shaking now. The line comes back in Hebrews 12:12 and D&C 81:5. The practical disciple asks you to name one person whose hands are weak this week, and notes a detail in 35:8: this highway is one where "the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein." The road home is built for people who get things wrong, so we steady each other by walking alongside, not by demanding competence first.
The doctrinal connector closes the block by bringing it back to where Session 1 began. The king who said "I will ascend" was "brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit" (14:15). No one climbs the way of holiness by force; "the redeemed shall walk there" (35:9), and Isaiah 27:12 has already said how they arrive: "gathered one by one." The block moves from a throne seized to a road given, from a prison left shut to a key that opens. Chapter 14 opened with one person reaching for a throne. Chapter 35 ends with a crowd walking home, some of them fools, all of them carried by something other than their own "I will."
Think deeply.