Panel essay · Isaiah 13–35 · September 21–27, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
A Latter-day Saint reading these chapters carefully meets two books at once: the Isaiah that scholarship reconstructs, a collection that grew over centuries around an eighth-century Jerusalem prophet, and the Isaiah that Nephi reads on the brass plates and Joseph Smith dictates in 1829. The real work lies where the two meet.
Isaiah 13 names Babylon as the target (13:1, 19) and the Medes as the instrument (13:17). Most critical commentators read that as a sixth-century situation, the Medes and Persians closing in on Neo-Babylonia, and assign the chapter's present form to a later hand (for a representative critical treatment, see Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible Isaiah 1–39). Chapter 14 complicates the picture. After the taunt against "the king of Babylon" (14:4) comes an oracle plainly about Assyria ("I will break the Assyrian in my land," 14:25) and a date: "In the year that king Ahaz died" (14:28). The taunted king is "cast out of thy grave" and "not joined with them in burial" (14:19–20). H. L. Ginsberg argued in 1968 that this fits Sargon II, who also ruled Babylon and who died on campaign in 705 BC, his body never recovered. On that reading an Assyrian-era poem, very possibly Isaiah's own, was later reframed against Babylon. Seth Erlandsson's 1970 dissertation went further and argued that the whole unit 13:2–14:23 fits the eighth century, when Babylon was a rebel center against Assyria and the Medes were a frontier people Assyria had to reckon with.
This matters because Nephi quotes both chapters nearly word for word (2 Nephi 23–24), and his brass plates must predate about 600 BC. A late composition would be a real problem; an eighth-century core with a light Babylonian reframing, a much smaller one. Joshua M. Sears states the difficulty candidly: scholars think Isaiah 2–14 and 29 underwent significant editing after 597 BC, yet the Book of Mormon quotes them very close to their current form. He sorts Latter-day Saint responses into four kinds: rejecting critical dating, arguing for Isaiah's unity, working within scholarship toward a workable chronology, and appealing to divine involvement in how the text reached Joseph Smith. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (Victor Ludlow) took the first route; Nicholas Frederick and Joseph Spencer more cautiously note that we cannot know exactly what Nephi's plates contained. Erlandsson and Ginsberg, neither a Latter-day Saint, lend real support to an early core.
Three variants between Isaiah and 2 Nephi are worth setting side by side:
Neither added reading in 2 Nephi 23 is in the Masoretic Text. David P. Wright reads the pattern as Joseph Smith revising the King James Version, pointing to places like 14:4 where the Book of Mormon keeps King James wording against the older manuscript evidence. John Tvedtnes's 1981 FARMS study catalogued variants that do line up with ancient witnesses. Both sets of data exist. The changes in 2 Nephi 23:15 and 23:22 are not text-critical evidence at all but interpretation: a moral reading of Isaiah 13 that separates the proud from the innocent, a distinction Isaiah's own text does not make.
"Lucifer" is not a Hebrew word. The Hebrew of 14:12 is helel ben shaḥar, "shining one, son of Dawn," the morning star Venus; the Septuagint rendered it heōsphoros, the Vulgate lucifer, "light-bearer," and the King James translators kept the Latin. The imagery is Canaanite. The climber would sit "upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north" (14:13), har moʻed in yarkete tsaphon: the divine council on Zaphon, the mountain of the gods in the Ugaritic texts. Scholars long compared the Ugaritic ʻAthtar, who tries Baal's throne on Zaphon, proves too small, and descends to rule the earth (see John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan). The poem takes an old story of a star that climbed toward the council and fell, and applies it to a human tyrant: "Is this the man that made the earth to tremble?" (14:16).
In its original context, then, 14:12 is not about Satan; that identification came later in Jewish and Christian interpretation. The Book of Mormon repeats the King James wording (2 Nephi 24:12), which proves little either way. The distinctive Latter-day Saint development is Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–27, which describes "an angel of God who was in authority in the presence of God" who rebelled: "he was Lucifer, a son of the morning." Moses 4:1–4 narrates the premortal rebellion. These revelations borrow Isaiah's language, but the Restoration's teaching about Satan's fall does not depend on reading Isaiah 14 that way. A Latter-day Saint can let the taunt be a satire on a dead king built from Canaanite myth and still see why later scripture found in it words for a deeper rebellion. The lesson's pairing of Isaiah 14:4–20 with Moses 4:1–4 is typology, not exegesis.
"Ye have numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses have ye broken down to fortify the wall" (22:10). 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. The "ditch between the two walls for the water of the old pool" (22:11) likewise recalls Hezekiah's waterworks. Isaiah's point is theological: "ye have not looked unto the maker thereof."
Shebna, "which is over the house" (22:15), is rebuked for cutting himself a showy tomb in the rock (22:16). In 1953 Avigad deciphered a tomb lintel from Silwan, across the Kidron: the tomb of "...yahu who is over the house," with a curse on whoever opens it. The name is broken, so identification with Shebna (Shebanyahu) is possible, not proven, but title, place, and date (about 700 BC) all fit.
The lesson reads 22:22–23 as pointing to Christ, and Revelation 3:7 applies "the key of David" to him. But read on to 22:25: the same "nail that is fastened in the sure place" will "be removed, and be cut down, and fall," apparently because Eliakim's relatives hang on him too heavily (22:24). The office passes from a failed steward to a better one, who then fails too. That is exactly why a Christian reading is typological: the pattern points past any human holder of the key.
For much of the twentieth century chapters 24–27 were called the "Isaiah Apocalypse" and dated after the exile, sometimes very late, because of their cosmic scope, the monster of 27:1, and above all the resurrection language of 26:19. Christopher B. Hays's The Origins of Isaiah 24–27 (Cambridge, 2019) challenges each ground: the Hebrew shows no late features, and the images of divine feasting and conquered death have old Near Eastern cognates. 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. For Latter-day Saints the stakes are lower, since 2 Nephi does not quote these chapters.
The imagery is old whatever the date of composition. "Leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent" (27:1) is very close to the Baal Cycle from Ugarit (KTU 1.5 I 1–3). There Baal strikes Lotan, "the fleeing serpent," "the twisting serpent," "the mighty one with seven heads." Isaiah's naḥash bariaḥ and naḥash ʻaqallaton match the Ugaritic bṯn brḥ and bṯn ʻqltn nearly word for word (see John Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea). Likewise "He will swallow up death in victory" (25:8) inverts the Canaanite picture of Mot, Death, the great swallower: now Death is swallowed.
On resurrection the text is in deliberate tension. Of the "other lords" who ruled Israel, 26:14 says: "They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise" ("deceased" is rephaʼim, the shades). Five verses later: "Thy dead men shall live... Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust... the earth shall cast out the dead" (26:19), and that last "dead" is again rephaʼim. Whether 26:19 promises individual bodily resurrection or, like Ezekiel 37, a nation revived is a real exegetical question. Its afterlife is clear: Daniel 12:2 ("many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake") echoes it, Paul quotes 25:8 in 1 Corinthians 15:54, and Abinadi's "the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ" (Mosiah 16:8) stands in the same line. One caution: the chapter heading's "Jehovah will die and be resurrected" rests on the King James "together with my dead body shall they arise," where "together with" is italicized as a translators' addition. The Hebrew nevelati yequmun is closer to "my corpse(s), they shall rise." Headings are study aids, not scripture.
In Isaiah, "precept upon precept" is scornful. Drunken priests and prophets (28:7–8) mock the prophet's teaching as fit for toddlers "weaned from the milk" (28:9). The Hebrew, tsav latsav tsav latsav, qav laqav qav laqav, is probably nonsense syllables imitating baby talk or a child's alphabet drill; the NET Bible renders it "meaningless gibberish, senseless babbling." Isaiah turns the mockery back: because they would not hear plain speech, God will speak "with stammering lips and another tongue" (28:11), the foreign speech of Assyrian soldiers, and that babble is what they will hear as they "fall backward, and be broken" (28:13).
2 Nephi 28:30 makes the phrase a positive statement about how revelation comes: "I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept." That is a new use of Isaiah's words, and it is better to say so. The New Testament does the same, applying 28:11 to tongues (1 Corinthians 14:21) and 28:16's "tried stone" to Christ (Romans 9:33).
In its own setting Isaiah 29 is about Jerusalem: "Ariel... the city where David dwelt" (29:1) will be besieged and, brought low, speak "out of the ground" like "one that hath a familiar spirit" (29:4). The Hebrew ʼob is a necromancer's ghost (compare 8:19); the humbled city will whisper like the dead. The sealed book (29:11–12) is a simile: the whole vision has become "as the words of a book that is sealed" to leaders whom God has put into "deep sleep" (29:10).
The Book of Mormon rereads this chapter openly. In 2 Nephi 26:15–16 Nephi applies the siege and the voice from the dust to his own descendants: "those who shall be destroyed shall speak unto them out of the ground." Isaiah's ghostly whisper of humiliation becomes the voice of a people surviving in their record. 2 Nephi 27 then expands Isaiah 29 into a narrative: "Take these words which are not sealed and deliver them to another, that he may show them unto the learned" (27:15). The learned man will ask for it "because of the glory of the world and to get gain" (27:16) and will say, "I cannot bring the book, for it is sealed" (27:17). The one who is not learned will read it by God's power (27:19–20).
The historical episode sits beside this. In February 1828 Martin Harris took a transcript of characters to Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia College in New York. By Harris's account, as later written in Joseph Smith's history (composed in 1838–39), Anthon approved the characters, tore up his certificate when he heard about the angel, and said, "I cannot read a sealed book" (Joseph Smith—History 1:64–65). Anthon's own letters, to E. D. Howe in 1834 and to T. W. Coit in 1841, deny that he ever endorsed anything, and they contradict each other on details, as Stanley B. Kimball's careful 1970 study in BYU Studies documents.
Chronology sharpens the question. The small plates, and so 2 Nephi 27, were most likely dictated around June 1829 (John W. Welch), more than a year after Harris's trip. A skeptic will say the Anthon visit shaped 2 Nephi 27; a believer, that the prophecy recovered in translation explained an event already past. Both must reckon with the fact that the canonical Anthon account was written after the text that interprets it. The evidence forces neither reading. It rules out only the naive picture of Harris setting out in 1828 consciously fulfilling a verse he already knew.
The interpretive practice itself is not unusual. Jesus quotes 29:13 against the Pharisees in a form close to the Septuagint (Mark 7:6–7), and Paul turns 29:14 against worldly wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:19); neither cares about the siege of Ariel. Joseph Spencer's The Vision of All treats Nephi's Isaiah chapters as a deliberate interpretive project, and Nephi names his own method: "I did liken all scriptures unto us" (1 Nephi 19:23). That is not failed historical exegesis; it is a different act. It asks Latter-day Saints to give up two claims: that Isaiah's first audience could have heard 29:11 as a reference to Palmyra, and that a text's original meaning exhausts what it can say.
The week ends with the desert blossoming "as the rose" (35:1), the blind and deaf healed (35:5), and a "way of holiness" on which "the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs" (35:8–10). The vocabulary, a highway through the wilderness, water in the desert, the redeemed coming home, is that of Isaiah 40 and following. Odil Hannes Steck's influential 1985 study called chapter 35 a redactional bridge joining First and Second Isaiah, placed just before the Hezekiah narratives of 36–39 to anticipate chapter 40, which would date it after the exile.
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" (29:14) as describing its own day, it does, by its own account through revelation, what the Isaiah tradition did first. A Latter-day Saint scholar can say that without claiming later readings are the original meaning, and without apologizing for them.