Panel essay · Isaiah 13–35 · September 21–27, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
This week's chapters arrive in an odd corner of the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur ends at nightfall on Monday, September 21, and Sukkot begins Friday evening, September 25. That is a good week for Isaiah 24–27, because Jews mostly do not meet these chapters whole. We meet them in pieces, set into the prayer book, the cemetery, and the sukkah. Only one passage in your block is a regular haftarah: the Ashkenazi reading for Parashat Shemot (27:6–28:13, then 29:22–23). Isaiah 26:4, "Trust ye in the LORD for ever," is said every weekday morning in Uva le-Tziyon. The "great trumpet" of 27:13 is one of the Shofarot verses of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf, and it gives the weekday Amidah its plea, tekaʻ be-shofar gadol, "sound the great shofar for our freedom." Isaiah 25:8 is said at the grave. Leviathan from 27:1 is invoked on the last day in the sukkah.
The siddur is itself a commentary, and an old one. Here is how the tradition reads these chapters, and a few places where I think Christian readers, Latter-day Saints included, pass over what the Hebrew is saying.
Isaiah 14:4 tells you what the poem is: "thou shalt take up this proverb (mashal) against the king of Babylon." It is a taunt-song over a dead tyrant, and some of the best mockery in the Bible. The cedars of Lebanon celebrate because "no feller is come up against us" (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 man "that made the earth to tremble" (14:16) gets no tomb. He is "cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch" (14:19).
In verse 12 the Hebrew is heilel ben shaḥar, "shining one, son of dawn." That is the morning star, the planet Venus. Rashi says so plainly: "This is Venus, which gives light as the morning star." Ibn Ezra agrees, noting that nothing in the heavens shines as brightly before dawn. Radak reads it as a simile: in life the king was like the brightest star, and now he has fallen to earth. The Latin Vulgate translated heilel as lucifer, "light-bearer," the ordinary Latin word for the morning star, and the King James translators kept the Latin. A description became a proper name, and the name became a person.
The rabbis never read this chapter as Satan's backstory. For them it is Nebuchadnezzar. In the Talmud (Chagigah 13a), Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai answers the boast of 14:14, "I will be like the most High," on heaven's behalf. A human life lasts seventy years, and the heavens stretch five hundred years' journey, layer upon layer: "and you, Nebuchadnezzar, say: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds?"
This is not rabbinic stubbornness. In Hebrew scripture ha-satan is the accuser in God's court (Job 1–2), not a rebel against it. No rebel-angel story existed for Isaiah 14 to attach to until later writers built one. The imagery of verses 13–14 is borrowed from a different myth. Ugaritic texts tell of ʻAthtar, a god associated with Venus, who climbs Mount Zaphon to sit on the dead Baal's throne. His feet do not reach the footstool, and he comes down again (KTU 1.6, discussed by Aaron Demsky at TheTorah.com). Isaiah's "mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north" is har moʻed be-yarkhetei tsafon, the recesses of Zaphon, the mountain of the gods. Hugh Rowland Page Jr. has studied this "myth of cosmic rebellion" at book length. The prophet takes a Canaanite story about a small god who reached too high and uses it to mock a great king.
Latter-day Saints have their own scripture on Lucifer (Moses 4; D&C 76:25–27), and I will not argue your canon. 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. Empires end. The man who "opened not the house of his prisoners" (14:17) goes into the ground like everyone else, and the trees sing. Turn him into a fallen archangel and the poem loses its hold on history, which is where Isaiah aimed it.
The same care applies to the darkened stars of 13:10. Maimonides uses this exact verse in the Guide of the Perplexed (II:29) to show 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. I will not soften the horrors of 13:15–18. But the Talmud puts its own brake on celebrating them. When the Egyptians drowned, God silenced the angels: "The work of My hands are drowning at sea, and you wish to say songs?" (Megillah 10b).
In Hebrew, Isaiah 25:8 is billaʻ ha-mavet la-netsaḥ. Much of its hold on Jews comes from where we say it. The Mishnah's laws of mourning (Moʻed Katan 3:9) lay out when women may wail and lament, and then end on hope: "But with regard to the future, the verse states: He will destroy death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces." Some Jews still recite 25:8 as they wash their hands leaving the cemetery. The last thing we do at a grave is quote Isaiah against death.
What does the verse mean? The tradition gives several answers, and you should hear all of them. The Talmud (Pesachim 68a; Sanhedrin 91b) takes it literally and hits a problem. Isaiah 65:20 says the child "shall die an hundred years old," so death still exists. Ulla resolves it uncomfortably: chapter 25 applies to Israel, and chapter 65 to the nations, who will live long lives and still die. I report that because it is there. Radak goes the other direction. He says the verse means violent death, "not natural death": the killing of Jews in exile. God will wipe the tears from a people who have wept among the nations. Ibn Ezra reads the grammar another way: "Death will destroy them," meaning the oppressors of the preceding verses. The Targum renders it "Death shall be forgotten forever." A note in the modern JPS translation suggests the verse may allude to Assyrian mass killings, which lands close to Radak.
So the Jewish readings run from national rescue to the end of mortality itself, and the Hebrew allows both. La-netsaḥ usually means "forever," but the root can also mean victory. Theodotion's Greek chose nikos, "victory." Paul followed it in 1 Corinthians 15:54, "Death is swallowed up in victory," and the King James Isaiah reads "in victory" too. David J. Larsen's article in BYU Studies traces how the Book of Mormon uses that whole range (Mosiah 16:8; Alma 22:14; 27:28).
Here is one thing Christian readers usually miss. Your lesson reads the "feast of fat things" for "all people" (25:6) as a gospel banquet. The Targum and Rashi read it as a trap: the nations who march on Jerusalem expect a feast in their honor and get "a feast of dregs." The universal reading still has a place. Tractate Taʻanit (31a) ends with Isaiah 25:9: God will lead the righteous in a circle dance, and each will point and say, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him." But the banquet image mostly went to Leviathan.
Isaiah 26:19 is one of the pillars of Jewish belief in resurrection. The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 10:1) says whoever denies that resurrection comes from the Torah loses his share in the World to Come. Maimonides made it the thirteenth of his principles of faith. Three times a day the Amidah blesses God as meḥayeh ha-metim, "who revives the dead."
The Talmud is also honest about how much weight the verse can bear. In Sanhedrin 90b, heretics ask Rabban Gamliel for proof of resurrection, and he cites 26:19 as his proof from the Prophets. They reply that it may refer to the dry bones Ezekiel revived, and the Talmud records that they were not persuaded. Ibn Ezra is just as candid. "Generally," he writes, the verse is believed to refer to resurrection. He also reports a national reading: Israel, as good as dead, lives, while the foreign masters of verse 14 ("they are dead, they shall not live") stay dead. Radak affirms bodily resurrection "at the time of salvation" and adds, with the rabbis, that it is for the righteous.
The line I love most is tal orot tallekha. The KJV has "thy dew is as the dew of herbs," and Radak agrees that orot means greens. But orot also means "lights," and the rabbis heard "a dew of lights." Chagigah 12b stores in the highest heaven "the dew that the Holy One, Blessed be He, will use to revive the dead." Berakhot 33a explains that rain is mentioned in the Amidah's resurrection blessing "because it is equivalent to the resurrection of the dead." Whenever we pray for rain, and in many rites for summer dew, we are echoing this verse. In Ketubot 111b Rabbi Elazar pushed further: "Anyone who uses the light of Torah, the light of Torah will revive him," which implies the unlearned will not rise. Rabbi Yoḥanan rebuked him: "Their Master is not pleased that you say this." The tradition keeps its sharpest claims on record, and it keeps the rebuke too.
One note on your edition. The chapter heading, "Jehovah will die and be resurrected," reads "my dead body" in 26:19 as God's. The headings are modern editorial summaries, not scripture. The Hebrew nevelati yequmun is grammatically difficult; the JPS marks it "unclear." Radak takes "my" as the prophet himself, a righteous man sure he will rise with the others.
"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 naḥash bariaḥ and naḥash ʻaqallaton, "fleeing serpent" and "twisting serpent," are nearly the same epithets the Ugaritic Baal cycle gives Lotan, the seven-headed sea monster (KTU 1.5). Isaiah takes the old chaos dragon and gives the victory to Israel's God alone.
The rabbis turned it into a banquet. In Bava Batra 74b, Rav teaches that God made Leviathan male and female. Had they bred, they would have destroyed the world, so God killed the female "and salted the female to preserve it for the banquet for the righteous in the future," citing this verse. On the next page (75a), Rabbi Yoḥanan says God will make the righteous a sukkah from Leviathan's skin. So on the last day of Sukkot, in the first days of October, Ashkenazi Jews will stand in their booths and pray: "so may I merit next year to dwell in the sukkah (made from the skin) of the Leviathan." 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 comes 27:13: "the great trumpet shall be blown," shofar gadol. Rosh Hashanah counts it among the ten shofar verses, and the weekday Amidah prays in its words for the gathering of the exiles. When you read this verse, remember that Jews sounded the ram's horn over it eight days ago. This year the first day of Rosh Hashanah fell on Shabbat, so the shofar was blown only on Sunday, September 13.
Isaiah 29:13 is where Jewish and Christian readers part most sharply, because Jesus quotes it against the Pharisees in Mark 7:6–7, and Christians have often heard it as a verdict on rabbinic law. The Hebrew is mitsvat anashim melummadah. The JPS translates it well: their worship "has been a social obligation, learned by rote." Ibn Ezra glosses melummadah as "accustomed," the word Jeremiah 31:18 uses for a calf broken to the yoke. Rashi says their fear of God came "by the command of the people who teach them."
Jews have always turned this verse on themselves. The Mishnah (Berakhot 4:4) quotes Rabbi Eliezer: "One whose prayer is fixed (qevaʻ), his prayer is not supplication." The Talmud (Berakhot 29b) argues over what "fixed" means. It may be prayer that feels like a burden to set down. It may be prayer said without the voice of pleading. Rabba and Rav Yosef say it is prayer to which a person cannot add anything new of his own. 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, the densest day of our liturgical year, I hear it as aimed at me.
The same honesty applies to 28:10, tsav la-tsav, qav la-qav, which Latter-day Saints read as the pattern of revelation. Radak and Ibn Ezra read it as teaching method, the way a child learns one line at a time. Rashi hears mockery: the drunken priests of 28:7 throw the prophet's words back at him, "We have a precept for your precept." The context supports Rashi. Verse 11 speaks of "stammering lips," and verse 13 ends with "that they might go, and fall backward."
Your lesson ties the sealed book of 29:11–12 to the Book of Mormon. That is your tradition's reading to make. For the record: Jewish readers take Ariel as Jerusalem or, with the Targum and Rashi, as the altar hearth (Ezekiel 43:15–16). The voice "out of the dust" (29:4) is the humbled city whispering like a ghost called up by a medium. For Rashi, the sealed book stands for the vision that has been hidden from the people. In his reading, the fault lies with the readers, not the book.
Isaiah 30:15: be-shuvah va-naḥat tivvasheʻun, "in returning and rest shall ye be saved." After the Days of Awe, a Jewish ear hears teshuvah, repentance, in shuvah. Rashi, reading for the plain sense, resists. Here shuvah means rest, as in "Return (shuvah), O LORD" in Numbers 10:36. Isaiah was telling Hezekiah's court to stop sending money to Egypt, to sit still, and to trust. Both readings fit the chapter. Politically, the counsel is quiet trust. Spiritually, the return is the rest.
Chapter 35 closes the week with the redeemed walking home on "the way of holiness": u-feduyei YHWH yeshuvun, "the ransomed of the LORD shall return" (35:10), a line repeated almost word for word in Isaiah 51:11. The verb is shuv again. 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.