Panel essay · Isaiah 40–49 · September 28–October 4, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona that surfaces the hard questions honestly — not a real person.
Isaiah 40–49 is some of the most loved poetry in the Bible, and it is also where many careful readers first hit problems they cannot talk themselves out of. The problems come from the text itself: a Persian king named a century and a half early, a God who says he creates evil, a flat denial that any other god exists, a servant who is Israel and also the one sent to rescue Israel, and a mocking portrait of idol-worship that the worshippers themselves would not have recognized. For Latter-day Saints there is an extra layer, because the Book of Mormon quotes chapters 48–49 as brass-plates text carried out of Jerusalem around 600 BCE.
What follows sets out each question as its strongest advocates would, then the range of answers. Some of these knots loosen. Some do not.
The authorship question starts with two verses. "That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid" (44:28). Then: "Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus" (45:1). The word is mashiach. Cyrus the Great ruled Persia from about 559 to 530 BCE and took Babylon in 539. Isaiah son of Amoz was active in the late 700s.
The strongest version of the critical case is not simply "prophets can't predict." It is a claim about audience. These chapters do not predict an exile; they talk to people already in it. Jerusalem's "warfare is accomplished" (40:2); Judah's ruined cities need rebuilding (44:26). Babylon is the power of the day (47), and the order is to leave now: "Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans" (48:20). Cyrus is already on the move (41:2). Chapters 1–39 speak to Hezekiah's Jerusalem about Assyria; chapters 40–55 speak to exiles about Babylon, and Isaiah the man never appears in them. That is why most scholars since the late eighteenth century have credited these chapters to an anonymous exilic prophet, "Second Isaiah."
There is a sharp twist here. Deutero-Isaiah's own argument for the LORD rests on prediction. The gods of the nations are put on trial and lose because they cannot "shew the things that are to come hereafter" (41:22–23). The LORD, by contrast, is the one "declaring the end from the beginning" (46:10), who announced things beforehand "lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them" (48:5). If the chapters postdate Cyrus's rise, that argument is prophecy after the fact offered as proof of foreknowledge. If they predate it, dating them late cancels the very argument the text makes.
Several faithful responses are on record, and they differ from one another. Sidney B. Sperry's "The 'Isaiah Problem' in the Book of Mormon" defends a single Isaiah and says the critical division depends on ruling out predictive prophecy. Kent P. Jackson's "Isaiah in the Book of Mormon" puts the issue as a question: "Can a prophet see beyond his own time?" He also sets a limit. The Book of Mormon, he writes, "cannot be used as proof that all of 'Second' Isaiah comes from Isaiah son of Amoz"; it vouches only for the chapters it quotes. Joshua Sears's "Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon" maps four Latter-day Saint approaches: treat the Book of Mormon as a trump card; defend Isaiah's unity; engage the scholarship and ask whether the quoted chapters could have been written in the century between Isaiah's death and Lehi's departure; or appeal to divine intervention somewhere in transmission or translation. Sears treats the question as finally theological. Blake Ostler's "expansion" model proposes an ancient core that Joseph Smith expanded under revelation.
The critical side is represented most fully by David P. Wright's "Isaiah in the Book of Mormon: Or Joseph Smith in Isaiah." Wright calls the problem a double anachronism. The chapters are exilic, and the Book of Mormon's changes to them respond to the English of the King James Version rather than to any Hebrew original.
The Church's own lesson for this week takes a side without discussing it. It says these prophecies "were meant to comfort the Jewish people over 150 years in the future." That is a legitimate faith position. It is not the position of most biblical scholarship, and readers deserve to know that.
The second LDS problem is more concrete. 1 Nephi 20–21 is essentially the King James text of Isaiah 48–49, early-modern English included, with changes.
Then there are the italics. The KJV italicizes words its translators supplied for readable English. As summarized by FAIR, Skousen's figures are that about 23 percent of the differences in the Book of Mormon's biblical quotations involve italicized words, and about 38 percent of the KJV's italics are changed in some way. Critics see a text worked out from an English Bible. Stan Spencer's "Missing Words" proposes a revealed text lacking the italicized words, with Joseph Smith supplying words where gaps appeared. Skousen reads the same numbers as evidence that Joseph did not know what the italics meant. Others read them the opposite way.
Nephi's own framing may be the most useful fact. He says openly that he "did liken all scriptures unto us" (1 Nephi 19:23). The 1 Nephi 21:1 preface and the 1840 baptism gloss (one in the 1830 text, one a later gloss) both read like likening: applying the text to a new audience. Whether likening explains the rest depends on which model of translation a reader already holds.
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things" (45:7).
This is the verse most often quoted to show that the Bible makes God the author of evil. The Hebrew word is raʻ, whose range runs from moral wickedness to misfortune and disaster. The pairing with "peace" (shalom) points toward calamity: well-being against catastrophe. Many modern translations render it that way. The same root turns up two chapters later: "therefore shall evil come upon thee" (47:11), where it plainly means disaster falling on Babylon.
That helps, but only partly. A God who creates catastrophe rather than sin is still a God who creates catastrophe, and 45:7 claims all of it, darkness included. The verse sits inside the Cyrus oracle, addressed to a Persian king who "hast not known me" (45:4–5). Morton Smith's "II Isaiah and the Persians" argued that Deutero-Isaiah's Cyrus passages closely parallel the propaganda of the Cyrus Cylinder, which presents Cyrus as chosen by Marduk. Against that Persian backdrop, many readers hear 45:7 as deliberately denying any second power behind darkness. There is no rival god of darkness because the LORD made the dark.
Jewish tradition felt this long ago. The morning blessing before the Shema is built on 45:7, but it does not say "creates evil." The Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 11b) says so openly: the verse is written "evil," and the liturgy says "all things" instead, as a euphemism. The honest summary is that 45:7 describes an absolute sovereignty that does not fit neatly with a God who only allows suffering. Readers who are bothered by it are reading it correctly.
No scripture denies other gods more insistently. "Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me" (43:10). "I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God" (44:6). "Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any" (44:8). "I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me" (45:5).
Mark S. Smith's The Origins of Biblical Monotheism is among the studies placing the full step from "worship only the LORD" to "no other god exists" in this very period, the exile. The conservative evangelical scholar Michael S. Heiser pushed back in "Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism?" His argument is that Hebrew texts, including late ones, keep a council of divine beings, and that the denials are claims that the LORD is incomparable and unique in kind, not claims that no other divine being exists. Latter-day Saint writers such as Daniel C. Peterson ("'Ye Are Gods': Psalm 82 and John 10") have built on that divine-council material.
The text itself gives a small piece of evidence here. Babylon is mocked for saying "I am, and none else beside me" (47:8, 10). That is the LORD's own formula in her mouth, and Babylon was not claiming to be the only city in existence, only to have no equal. If the formula can mean "without rival" when Babylon says it, it can mean that when God says it.
The tension does not go away, though. Isaiah 43:10 says no God will be formed after the LORD. Readers who know the Restoration teaching that God's children can become like him will feel that verse press. The Church's Scripture Helps for this week faces it directly. It reads the verses as aimed at idols, which "could do nothing for the people." It then points to the Gospel Topics essay "Becoming Like God," which insists that "God's children will always worship Him." That is a coherent answer, but it comes from outside the text; Isaiah's poet shows no sign of imagining the question.
Christians have long read the servant songs as Christ; Matthew 12:18–21 quotes 42:1–4 that way, and this week's lesson follows. The text complicates any single answer. The servant is named: "Thou art my servant, O Israel" (49:3; see also 41:8; 44:1, 21). The servant is also blind: "Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I sent?" (42:19). And in 49:5–6 the servant, called Israel, is sent "to bring Jacob again to him." Israel restores Israel.
Jewish interpreters have long read the servant as the people of Israel. That reading sits at the center of centuries of Jewish-Christian argument, surveyed in Christopher R. North's The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah. Critical scholars have also proposed the prophet himself, or Cyrus, whose hand the LORD also holds (compare 42:6 with 45:1).
Latter-day Saint readers have one more thing to see. The Joseph Smith Translation rewrites 42:19 so that the servant is no longer blind: "For I will send my servant unto you who are blind." This week's Scripture Helps cites that change. A faithful reader can take the JST as inspired clarification. A critical reader will notice that it removes a tension the Hebrew seems to hold on purpose: a servant who fails and is still chosen.
The canon itself refuses to pin down a single referent. In Acts 13:47, Paul and Barnabas apply 49:6 ("a light of the Gentiles") to themselves. Doctrine and Covenants 86:11 applies the same phrase to priesthood holders. The servant keeps moving, and scripture moves with him.
Isaiah 44:9–20 is brilliant satire. A man burns half a log to bake bread, says "Aha, I am warm," and bows down to the other half: "Deliver me; for thou art my god" (44:16–17). No Mesopotamian worshipper would have recognized this. The mīs pî ("washing of the mouth") ritual, edited by Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick in The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, was designed to deal with exactly this issue. Through ritual the statue was ceremonially cut off from its human makers, and the craftsmen denied having made it. In Mesopotamian theology the god was "born in heaven" even though the image was made on earth. The parody leaves out the doctrine the worshippers actually held.
Dick's essay "Prophetic Parodies of Making the Cult Image" traces how deliberately the biblical writers did this. Nathaniel Levtow's Images of Others argues that the parodies were political speech by a defeated people, a way of claiming power over the empire's gods when Judah had no army. That makes the satire understandable, not fair.
Any religion whose rituals outsiders could caricature should feel that point: the Babylonian would have said what a Christian says about a crucifix, that the object is not the god. Isaiah 46:1–2 is sharper and more accurate. Bel and Nebo are carried off on weary animals while the LORD says, "I will carry you" (46:4). As the Cyrus Cylinder presents it, Cyrus the "anointed" won Marduk's favor partly by returning cult images to their shrines (per Nathan Steinmeyer's summary). The same Cyrus of 45:1.
The wilderness in 40:3. The KJV reads "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way." That fits the Gospels' use of the verse for John the Baptist in the desert (Mark 1:3; John 1:23). The Hebrew poetic parallelism favors "In the wilderness prepare the way… make straight in the desert." The Dead Sea Scrolls' Community Rule reads it that way, explaining why its members went "into the wilderness to prepare the way" (1QS 8:13–14). The punctuation carries a theology with it.
Ethics. Chapter 47 humiliates "virgin daughter of Babylon" by stripping her: "uncover the thigh… thy nakedness shall be uncovered" (47:2–3). Chapter 49 ends with oppressors "drunken with their own blood" (49:26). Readers may still notice that the judgment is pictured as the sexual shaming of a woman's body, and that the "comfort ye" chapters close with enemies made to eat their own flesh.
Isaiah 48 has a verse worth keeping in view through all of this. The LORD says he held back some things and revealed them only now: "They are created now, and not from the beginning… lest thou shouldest say, Behold, I knew them" (48:7). The chapters that insist on God's foreknowledge also say he deliberately tells people things they did not know, so that no one can claim to have had it figured out. That applies to defender and critic alike.