Panel essay · Isaiah 40–49 · September 28–October 4, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
I read these chapters every summer, but not in order and not in a study group. I hear them chanted. On the ninth of Av we sit on the floor and read Lamentations by candlelight for the destruction of both Temples. Five days later, on the Sabbath, the reader stands up and sings Nachamu, nachamu ʻami, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people" (40:1). That Sabbath is called Shabbat Nachamu, after its first word. For a Jew, Isaiah 40 is less a chapter than a date on the calendar. It is what you hear after the worst day of the year.
So let me take you through this block the way my tradition carries it: in the liturgy, in the midrash, in the medieval commentators, and in a few places where I think Christian readers, Latter-day Saints included, hear something different from what the Hebrew says.
Start with the doubling. God does not say "comfort" once. The rabbis of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, a collection of homilies arranged by the synagogue calendar, noticed this. Their sermon for this Sabbath (Piska 16) makes a pattern of it. Jerusalem sinned doubly ("Jerusalem hath grievously sinned," Lamentations 1:8, where the Hebrew repeats the root). She was punished doubly: she "hath received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins" (40:2). So she is comforted doubly: "Comfort ye, comfort ye" (Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 16:11). In the same piska, R. Yehoshua bar Nechemiah compares Jerusalem to Job. Job was struck double and repaid double, so Jerusalem too is consoled double (16:6).
"Double for all her sins" sounds like excess punishment. The midrash does not explain it away. It says that however much the suffering was, the comfort will match it. There is no pretending the catastrophe was small.
The piska opens with a verse from Job: "Shall mortal man be more just than God?" (Job 4:17). The rabbis tie it to Boaz. In Ruth 2:11–13 Boaz spoke kindly to a poor, foreign widow and comforted her. The midrash has God reason from there: if Boaz, a man of flesh and blood, gives comfort, how could I not? (Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 16:1). The argument for God's compassion is drawn from a decent human being's behavior. That is a very Jewish kind of theology.
Shabbat Nachamu opens a series. For the seven Sabbaths from Tisha b'Av to Rosh Hashanah, the prophetic reading (haftarah) comes from Isaiah 40–63. These are the shivʻa de-nechemta, the "seven of consolation." Pesikta de-Rav Kahana gives each one a homily, Piskaot 16 through 22. The list the Tur fixes is 40:1–26; 49:14–51:3; 54:11–55:5; 51:12–52:12; 54:1–10; 60:1–22; and 61:10–63:9. Two of the seven come from our block.
The order is not the order of the book, and a medieval liturgist, David Abudarham, passed on a midrashic explanation for it. The late Rav Yehuda Shaviv summarizes it in an essay for Yeshivat Har Etzion. The seven readings form a conversation. In the first, God tells the prophets, "Comfort ye my people." In the second, Zion answers: "The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me" (49:14). She will not be comforted by prophets. The third reading describes her as "afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted" (54:11). Then comes the turn, in the fourth: "I, even I, am he that comforteth you" (51:12). From there on, God comforts her himself.
This is one of the deepest things Judaism has done with these chapters. We read the book out of order so it becomes an argument between God and a grieving people, and the people are allowed to win the first round. Isaiah 49:14 is not a lapse of faith to be corrected. It is Zion's honest reply, read aloud in synagogue every August.
The Talmud takes up the same verse (Berakhot 32b). Resh Lakish notices that "forsaken" and "forgotten" say the same thing twice. He has Israel explain: a man who marries a second wife at least remembers the first; You have both left me and forgotten me. God answers with the stars. He created twelve constellations, and in their ranks He hung thousands upon thousands of stars, all for Israel's sake. How can she say she is forgotten? Then the Gemara reads 49:15 as a bargain about memory. "Yea, they may forget" refers to the golden calf: "these" (Hebrew elleh) recalls "These be thy gods" (Exodus 32:4). "Yet will I not forget thee" refers to Sinai, which opens with the same Hebrew word for "I," anokhi. God forgets the sin and remembers the covenant.
Keep that in mind when you reach "I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me" (49:16). In context the one engraved is Zion, a city with walls. It is not first a metaphor for an individual soul. God has a city on His hands, and He cannot put her down.
Now the question no one reading this block can dodge: who wrote these chapters?
The first Jewish reader to hint at an answer was Abraham ibn Ezra, in twelfth-century Spain, some seven hundred years before German scholarship made "Second Isaiah" standard. His comment on 40:1 is deliberately cryptic. First he says that in his view these consolations concern "our exile," and that the Babylonian material appears in the book as a reminder, via Cyrus. Then he turns sideways. The sages taught that Samuel wrote the book of Samuel, he says, and that is true up to "And Samuel died" (1 Samuel 25:1). Then he points to Chronicles, which lists generations down past Zerubbabel. Then he cites Isaiah 49:7, "Kings shall see and arise." He notes that one could reply these kings will hear the prophet's name whether or not he is present. And he closes: ve-ha-maskil yavin, "and the one who understands will understand."
His nineteenth-century translator, M. Friedländer, explains the hint in a footnote. Samuel could not have written the chapters that report his own death. Likewise, the second part of Isaiah, which treats events long after the prophet's lifetime as already past, was in Ibn Ezra's view not written by the same prophet. Ibn Ezra never says it outright. He leaves it for the careful reader.
I raise this because it shows something about Jewish reading that surprises people. A pious medieval commentator could entertain the idea that the chapters came from a later hand, and he did not think it touched their holiness. Our canon is holy because the community received it and reads it, not because we can certify each author. Modern Jewish scholarship stands in that line. Benjamin Sommer of the Jewish Theological Seminary wrote A Prophet Reads Scripture, a whole book on how the poet of chapters 40–66 reuses Jeremiah, the earlier Isaiah, and the Psalms. He also wrote the Isaiah notes in the Jewish Study Bible. He treats this prophet as someone who read Scripture and answered it.
Latter-day Saints have a stake here I do not share. Nephi's quotation of chapters 48–49 is a claim about the brass plates, and you have to work that out on your own terms. I will only say this: the question is old, it is not a modern attack, and one of the most honored names in rabbinic commentary felt the pressure of it and answered with a wink rather than an anathema.
Read the servant passages in this block and count how often the servant is named. "But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen" (41:8). "Yet now hear, O Jacob my servant" (44:1). "O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me" (44:21). "For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect" (45:4). And in the second servant song itself: "Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified" (49:3). Even the embarrassing verses belong to the same figure: "Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I sent?" (42:19). God has a servant who fails, who is robbed and spoiled (42:22), and who is still chosen.
This is why the main Jewish reading takes the servant to be Israel, and it is not a defensive move. Rashi reads "Behold my servant" in 42:1 as Jacob. He says the task promised there, to "bring forth judgment to the Gentiles," will be fulfilled when the nations come to learn God's ways, and he cites Isaiah 2:3.
But I will not hand you a Judaism with one voice, because we do not have one. The Aramaic Targum renders 42:1 as "Behold my servant, the Messiah." Radak, David Kimchi of Provence, opens his comment on 42:1 bluntly: zehu melekh ha-mashiach, "this is the King Messiah." He then describes a messiah who settles disputes between nations so that they make war no more. At 49:3, Radak reads "Israel" as a title of honor: you are the Israel in whom I glory, as a master glories in a faithful servant. Ibn Ezra, as we saw, thinks the speaker of chapter 49 is the prophet himself.
So Jewish tradition read the servant as Israel, as the prophet, and as a coming king. What it never did was read the servant as God incarnate. For us, the servant is always the one God speaks to, never the one speaking as God.
Here is what I think Christian readers most often miss. When you move 42:1–4 straight to Jesus, as Matthew 12 does, you skip over the tension the prophet builds on purpose. The servant is a whole people: deaf, blind, burned "yet he laid it not to heart" (42:25), and still told, "Ye are my witnesses" (43:10). The Sifre on Deuteronomy (Piska 346) presses that verse almost to breaking. "Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, that I am God" (43:12): when you are My witnesses, I am God; when you are not My witnesses, I am not God, so to speak. God's name in the world rides on a flawed people's testimony. For a Jew that is the servant's burden, and it is a heavy one.
"Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus" (45:1). The Hebrew is li-meshicho, "to his messiah." Christian translations capitalize and lowercase this word as theology requires. The Hebrew does neither. A mashiach is someone anointed for a task. Here the task-holder is a Persian king who "hast not known me" (45:4, 5).
The rabbis were bothered too. The Talmud (Megillah 12a) asks: was Cyrus the messiah? It reads the verse instead as God speaking to the Messiah about Cyrus: I complain to you about Cyrus. I said he would build My house and gather My exiles (see 45:13), and all he did was issue a permit, "Whoever is among you... let him go up" (Ezra 1:3). It is an unsentimental reading. Liberation by decree, without rebuilding, is not redemption.
Every morning, before the Shema, a Jew says a blessing taken from 45:7 with one change. Isaiah has God say "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil." We say: yotzer or u-voreh choshekh, ʻoseh shalom u-voreh et ha-kol, "who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates all things."
The Talmud openly admits the edit (Berakhot 11b). It asks why we don't also soften "darkness" to "brightness." It answers that we recite the verse as written, then catches itself: "evil" is written, and we say "all things" as a euphemism. Rava's final answer is that darkness is kept on purpose, so the day's prayer mentions night and the night's prayer mentions day.
So the liturgy both keeps and sands down the prophet's hardest line. The commentators do the rest. Ibn Ezra says the verb for "create" here means "decree." Darkness is no thing in itself but the absence of light, and "evil" means war as the opposite of peace, or sickness. Radak adds something more. He reports that Saadia Gaon read the verse as aimed against anyone who believes in two gods, one good and one evil. Whether or not the prophet was answering Persian dualism directly, the medieval rabbis already heard the verse as a refusal of it. There is one God, and He does not get to hand the dark half of the world to someone else.
At the end of every Jewish prayer service we say Aleinu, and it is built out of this block. We praise God that we are not like the nations who "pray to a god that cannot save." That line is mitpallelim el el lo yoshiaʻ, word for word from 45:20. We say hu Eloheinu ein ʻod, "He is our God, there is none else," the refrain of 45:5–6. And we pray that all the world will know that "to Thee every knee must bend, every tongue swear." That is 45:23, ki lekha tikhraʻ kol berekh tishavaʻ kol lashon.
Christians know 45:23 from Philippians 2:10–11, where Paul applies it to Jesus. Jews say the same verse, in a prayer whose first paragraph has us bow, to the One who says "I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God" (44:6). The midrash on that verse (Exodus Rabbah 29:5) glosses it in three strokes: "I am the first," I have no father; "I am the last," I have no brother; "beside me there is no God," I have no son. You do not need to be told who that was aimed at. I mention it so you know that, in a Jewish ear, chapters 44–45 are the charter of an undivided God. We say them aloud, bowing, every day.
One last thing Christian ears carry into this block. Handel's Messiah, following the Gospels, has "the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness" (40:3), and John the Baptist stands in that wilderness. The Masoretic accents divide the verse differently, and the Jewish Publication Society translation follows them: "A voice rings out: 'Clear in the desert a road for the LORD! Level in the wilderness a highway for our God!'" The voice is not in the wilderness. The road is. A highway runs across the desert between Babylon and Zion, and the exiles are going home on it. God is at their head, as the shepherd who "shall gather the lambs with his arm" (40:11).
That is the comfort of these chapters as my people receive it. It is not a private assurance for the individual, though it is that too. It is a road home for a community that had every reason to believe it was forgotten, and a God who, in the midrash's words, will not let a human being out-comfort Him.