Panel essay · Isaiah 40–49 · September 28–October 4, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
Isaiah 40 does not announce itself as a new book, but it reads like one. Chapters 1–39 are dated to Uzziah, Ahaz, and Hezekiah and fear Assyria; chapter 40 has no date and no Assyria. It speaks to a Jerusalem whose "warfare is accomplished" and who "hath received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins" (40:2). By chapter 44 the LORD promises to "raise up the decayed places" of Judah (44:26) and names the builder: "Cyrus, He is my shepherd... saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid" (44:28). Chapter 45 calls Cyrus the LORD's "anointed," his mashiaḥ (45:1). Chapter 48 ends with a marching order: "Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans" (48:20).
This week's Come, Follow Me lesson takes a clear position: these prophecies "were meant to comfort the Jewish people over 150 years in the future." Mainstream biblical scholarship takes the opposite position, and has for about two centuries. It assigns chapters 40–55 to an anonymous prophet writing among the exiles in the 540s BCE, shortly before Cyrus took Babylon. Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible commentary is a standard statement of that view. For Latter-day Saints the question has more at stake than for most readers, because the Book of Mormon quotes Isaiah 48 and 49 in full as 1 Nephi 20–21. Nephi says he read those chapters from brass plates his family carried out of Jerusalem around 600 BCE (1 Nephi 19:22–23; 22:1). That is roughly sixty years before Cyrus.
The strongest argument for an exilic setting isn't that the text names Cyrus. A believer can answer that with predictive prophecy, and Kent P. Jackson does exactly that (see below). The harder argument is about who the chapters are addressed to and how they argue. They are not written to Hezekiah's Jerusalem about a distant future. They talk to people who already feel forgotten: "My way is hid from the LORD" (40:27); "The LORD hath forsaken me" (49:14). They treat Cyrus's rise as something already happening: "Who raised up the righteous man from the east... gave the nations before him?" (41:2); "I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come" (41:25).
The courtroom scenes also depend on that timing. The LORD summons the gods of the nations: "Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods" (41:23; compare 43:9; 45:20–21). His own evidence is that he announced "the former things" before they happened and is now announcing "new things" (42:9; 48:3–7). Critical scholars read this as an exilic prophet pointing back to older prophecies, including First Isaiah's, that have already come true, and pointing forward to Cyrus as the next case. A unity reading has to hold that Isaiah of Jerusalem wrote the whole lawsuit ahead of time, including the defendants' failure to foresee Cyrus. Either reading is coherent. They are not equally simple, and a candid reader should admit which one needs the extra assumption.
The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaᵃ), copied about 125 BCE, is the oldest complete Isaiah: 54 columns, more than seven meters long. It shows no break at chapter 40. It does divide into two halves of 27 columns, but the division falls after chapter 33, and in 2021 Mladen Popović, Maruf Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker used computer-based handwriting analysis to argue that two scribes split the copying there.
That fact is real, but it is modest. John W. Welch, who defends Isaianic authorship, says so himself: the scrolls "present Isaiah as one complete book," yet "no one doubts" the book reached its final form by the fifth century BCE, so this evidence "does not go back far enough to be of much use to the Book of Mormon." The scroll shows the book was already one book in the second century BCE. It doesn't tell us who composed its parts.
The scroll's value lies in its text. At 40:6 the Masoretic Text, followed by the KJV, reads "And he said, What shall I cry?" The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition reads "And I said," noting that a Qumran manuscript, the Greek, and the Vulgate support the first person. The small change turns 40:1–8 into a prophetic call, a counterpart to Isaiah 6, whoever the "I" is. In the next verses, the same edition notes that the Qumran manuscript and the Greek lack the words "because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it" through a repeated line of 40:7–8. In the scroll, the longer Masoretic wording was added by a later hand. For a book whose theme is "the word of our God shall stand for ever" (40:8), the evidence shows its scribes still adjusting that very verse.
The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay barrel inscription made after Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE and now in the British Museum, is the most striking outside parallel to these chapters. In the Cogan translation hosted by Livius, Marduk searches for a ruler and "took a righteous king, his favorite, by the hand, he called out his name: Cyrus, king of Anšan." Compare Isaiah: "Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden" and "I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name" (45:1, 3). Cyrus also says he "returned the images of the gods... to their places."
The Nabonidus Chronicle adds one more detail. Before the Persian advance, Nabonidus had the gods of other Babylonian cities brought into the capital, and after the conquest they were sent back. Read Isaiah 46:1–2 with that in mind: "Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts... they are a burden to the weary beast." These are cult statues being carted around in a crisis. Against them the LORD sets his own claim: "even to hoar hairs will I carry you" (46:4).
In 1963 Morton Smith argued in the Journal of the American Oriental Society that Second Isaiah and the Cylinder draw on the same pro-Cyrus propaganda from the years before Babylon fell. You need not accept all of Smith's argument to see how the Hebrew text answers the Babylonian one. Marduk did not choose Cyrus; the LORD did, "though thou hast not known me" (45:4–5). Whatever one decides about authorship, the chapters fit the political language of the 540s closely.
The satire of the idol-maker (44:9–20) is funny and unfair, and it helps to know how. Mesopotamian temples consecrated a new cult statue through the mīs pî ("mouth-washing") ritual, edited by Christopher Walker and Michael Dick in 2001. Assyriologist Uri Gabbay explains that during the rite the craftsmen's hands were symbolically cut off with a wooden sword while they declared that they had not made the statue. Mesopotamian priests knew exactly what Isaiah 44:19 mocks, that a person had made the image, and they had built a ritual to deal with that problem. Isaiah is arguing past the practice rather than misunderstanding it.
Isaiah 45:7 ("I make peace, and create evil") troubles readers. The Hebrew raʻ here is the opposite of shalom, so it means disaster rather than moral wickedness, and the NRSVUE translates "I make weal and create woe." In the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Shaul Shaked notes that the verse sounds like a Gathic hymn (Yasna 44:5) that credits Ahura Mazda with both light and darkness. But he adds that calling God the creator of evil goes further than a Zoroastrian could accept. The verse may take in Persian ideas and push back against them in the same line.
The claims "beside me there is no God" (44:6; compare 43:10–11; 45:5, 21) raise a real question for a Restoration theology that affirms more than one divine being. Michael S. Heiser, an evangelical scholar, has argued that such statements in the Hebrew Bible are claims of incomparability, not denials that any other heavenly beings exist. The courtroom setting supports him: the charge against the gods is that they cannot predict or save (45:20). Still, "Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any" (44:8) is as absolute as the Hebrew Bible gets. Latter-day Saint readers should face that sentence directly.
The Book of Mormon does not quote Isaiah 48–49 at arm's length. It quotes them as scripture Nephi read aloud from the brass plates so that his brothers could "liken" them to themselves (1 Nephi 19:23–24). The quotation includes the Cyrus-and-Babylon lines. 1 Nephi 20:14 keeps "he will do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall come upon the Chaldeans," and 20:20 keeps "Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans." Nor is it simply the KJV: 20:14 adds "he will fulfil his word which he hath declared by them." 1 Nephi 21:1 opens Isaiah 49 with a whole added address to those "broken off and... driven out because of the wickedness of the pastors of my people."
Other differences are later additions and should be treated that way. The words "or out of the waters of baptism" in 1 Nephi 20:1 first appeared in the 1840 edition. Royal Skousen, editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project, explains that Joseph Smith put the phrase in parentheses as a comment on "the waters of Judah." The 1920 edition removed the parentheses, and some later writers then treated the gloss as original Isaiah. Ironically, the NRSVUE emends that same Hebrew phrase: it prints "the loins of Judah" and notes that the Hebrew reads "waters." The phrase Joseph Smith glossed is itself a textual problem.
The KJV italics are a separate issue. In a long 2002 essay, David P. Wright argued that the Book of Mormon's Isaiah variants respond to the English of the 1611 KJV, especially its italicized words, and not to any Hebrew source. For Wright this places both Deutero-Isaiah and a nineteenth-century reading of Isaiah inside the Book of Mormon. In Interpreter (2020), Stan Spencer granted the pattern: a disproportionate share of the variants involve dropping or replacing words the KJV italicizes. He explained it differently, with a "Missing Words" model in which a prior translation left out the italics and Joseph Smith, dictating that text, sometimes supplied the missing words.
Joshua M. Sears's chapter in the BYU Religious Studies Center volume They Shall Grow Together (2022) is currently the most useful map of the field. He sorts Latter-day Saint responses into four approaches.
Each option has a cost. The unity approaches have to explain why the chapters address exiles and argue from Cyrus's rise as something under way, not only how a prophet could know a name ahead of time. Welch's editing window runs from Isaiah's death to about 600 BCE, and it does not easily hold oracles that call exiles out of Babylon. Hamblin's timeline is very tight, and mainstream dating puts these chapters closer to 540 than to 597. The expansion and intervention models keep the critical dating, but they sit uneasily with Nephi's statement that he read these words from the plates (1 Nephi 22:1). Sears ends by treating the matter as finally theological and says it need not unsettle faith. That may be the honest place to stand, but it is a statement of faith, not a solution, and neither Sears nor Welch claims otherwise. Welch's own conclusion admits that "several puzzles remain unsolved."
What 1 Nephi does with these chapters is clearer than where it got them. In 1 Nephi 22 Nephi reads the servant of Isaiah 49 as a group, the way 49:3 itself does ("Thou art my servant, O Israel"). He applies the Gentile "nursing fathers" and the children "carried upon their shoulders" (49:22–23) to his own scattered descendants and "a mighty nation among the Gentiles, yea, even upon the face of this land" (1 Nephi 22:6–8). This is not historical-critical exegesis. It follows the way the New Testament uses the same chapters. Matthew applies the first servant song to Jesus (Matthew 12:18–21, quoting Isaiah 42:1–4). In Acts 13:47, Paul and Barnabas apply "a light to the Gentiles" (49:6) to their own mission. The servant in these chapters is Israel (41:8; 44:1), a figure with a mission to Israel (49:5–6), and, in Christian and Latter-day Saint reading, Christ.
Near the end of this week's reading Zion says she has been forgotten and the LORD answering that a nursing mother might forget her child, "yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands" (49:15–16). Whoever first wrote those lines, in Hezekiah's Jerusalem or on the canals of Babylon, wrote them for people who believed God had lost track of them. The Book of Mormon places a scattered family in the same position, on the far side of an ocean. Latter-day Saint scholarship does not need to solve the authorship question to see that, but it should stop pretending the question is already solved.