Panel essay · Isaiah 40–49 · September 28–October 4, 2026 · Six outlooks · the Parry method
Written by an AI persona applying Donald W. Parry's six-outlooks framework. Professor Parry did not write, review, or endorse this essay, and no words are attributed to him that are not cited to a published source.
The passage this week is three verses near the end of the block:
But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:14–16)
I chose it for three reasons. First, it is short enough to read closely but long enough to have a structure: a complaint (v. 14), a question (v. 15), and an answer with a picture attached (v. 16). Second, the lesson points readers here twice, once for comfort in affliction (49:13–16) and once for children (49:14–16), so it is a passage many readers will already know. Third, and most useful for this exercise, it sits in the part of Isaiah where the hard questions come up. It speaks to a Jerusalem that is already in ruins. Nephi copied it from the brass plates, with changes, as 1 Nephi 21:14–16. And Latter-day Saints almost always read verse 16 as a reference to the nail wounds of Christ. A method that separates the ways of reading is a real help with a verse that carries this much.
The method comes from Donald W. Parry, a professor of Hebrew Bible at BYU. In "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks," a chapter in Search Diligently the Words of Isaiah, Parry describes six approaches. They are the historical near view, prophecy as a distant view, dual or multiple fulfillment, likening, personal reading, and reading for doctrine. He advises readers to begin with the near view, so that is where this essay begins. Parry does not discuss Isaiah 49 in that chapter. The readings below apply his framework and are my own.
The first thing to notice is who is speaking. Zion is the city of Jerusalem pictured as a woman, and she talks. The whole chapter up to this point has been triumphant. The servant is made "a light to the Gentiles" (49:6), prisoners go free (49:9), highways are raised (49:11), and people come "from far" (49:12). Verse 13 then calls on heaven, earth, and mountains to sing, "for the LORD hath comforted his people." Verse 14 starts with "But." Zion does not join the song. Her complaint uses both divine titles, "the LORD" (YHWH) and "my Lord" (ʼadonai), and it is made of two verbs: ʻazavani, "he has forsaken me," and shekhekhani, "he has forgotten me."
Those two verbs have a history. Lamentations, the book of poems about the fall of Jerusalem in 587/586 BCE, ends with nearly the same complaint and uses the same two roots in the same pairing: "Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?" (Lamentations 5:20). Lamentations also keeps repeating that Zion "hath none to comfort her" (Lamentations 1:2). Isaiah 40 opens with "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people." Patricia Tull Willey, in Remember the Former Things: The Recollection of Previous Texts in Second Isaiah, and Rachel Adelman, in a 2024 essay on Daughter Zion for TheTorah.com, both read Isaiah 40–55 as a deliberate answer to Lamentations. On their reading, Zion in 49:14 is quoting her own lament, and 49:15–16 is the reply she did not get in Lamentations.
This is also where the authorship question comes in. The verses assume a destroyed city. Zion is "desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro" (49:21), and her walls exist only as something the LORD keeps in view (49:16). Mainstream scholarship dates chapters 40–55 to the Babylonian exile, around 550–539 BCE, just before Cyrus took Babylon in 539. Latter-day Saints face a real problem here, because Nephi quotes this very chapter from brass plates his family took out of Jerusalem around 600 BCE. That is before the city fell, not only before Cyrus. The Latter-day Saint reading therefore has to hold that Isaiah of Jerusalem wrote to a ruin he had not yet seen. The majority reading holds that a later prophet wrote in the ruin's shadow. Both readings agree on the setting the text imagines, and the near view starts there. The audience is a city that has been leveled, a people in exile, and an unanswered lament.
Verse 16 also belongs to that world. The image is of something marked into the skin of the hand. Isaiah 44:5 has a close parallel: "another shall subscribe with his hand unto the LORD." The Hebrew literally says he will write on his hand, "belonging to YHWH." Nineteenth-century commentators already saw the connection. Albert Barnes reports Robert Lowth's view that the verse alludes to a Jewish practice of marking the hands or arms with a sign of the city or the temple. Barnes also reports Campegius Vitringa's alternative: the image is of an architect who keeps a building's plan in front of him. The second half of the verse, "thy walls are continually before me," fits Vitringa's reading. The verb in "I have graven thee," ḥaqqotikh, comes from ḥqq, a root used for cutting or inscribing. The marking is permanent, not written in ink. Leviticus 19:28 forbids Israelites to "print any marks upon you," and that gives the image an edge. God does to himself what Israelites were forbidden to do, and the name he marks there is Zion.
Parry's second outlook reads Isaiah as speaking to events long after the prophet's lifetime. Read that way, the verses that follow 49:16 describe a restoration larger than a return from Babylon. Zion's children "make haste" (49:17). Kings become "nursing fathers" and queens "nursing mothers" (49:22–23). The land is "too narrow by reason of the inhabitants" (49:19). The return under Cyrus was small and hard, as Ezra and Nehemiah describe it. Readers who want a fulfillment matching the size of the language have usually looked forward rather than back.
Nephi is the earliest reader we can name who does this. When his brothers ask what these chapters mean, he answers that "the house of Israel, sooner or later, will be scattered upon all the face of the earth" (1 Nephi 22:3). He then reads the nursing fathers and the gathering as events of the latter days, in which God will "make bare his arm in the eyes of all the nations" (1 Nephi 22:11). His copy of the text already leans this way. His version of 49:1 speaks to Israel "broken off and... driven out because of the wickedness of the pastors of my people" (1 Nephi 21:1). His version of 49:15 names who is being remembered: "yet will I not forget thee, O house of Israel" (1 Nephi 21:15). The addressee changes from a single city to a scattered people.
Parry's third outlook allows a prophecy to be fulfilled more than once, or to support more than one legitimate reading. He discusses what is sometimes called a "layer-cake" model of prophecy. Isaiah 49:14–16 has at least three layers, and they should be kept separate rather than merged.
The first layer is the city. Jerusalem was rebuilt, and its walls were raised again under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 6:15). The walls that were "continually before" God became walls again.
The second layer is the people. Nephi's addition to 1 Nephi 21:14 makes the scope explicit: "The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me—but he will show that he hath not." The words "he will show" point to a demonstration that is still to come.
The third layer is the one most Latter-day Saints reach for first, and it is the one that most needs to be marked as a layer. In the Christian reading, the marks on God's palms become the nail wounds of the risen Christ. Jeffrey R. Holland put it this way in a 2008 BYU devotional, "Lessons from Liberty Jail": what the Lord has graven there is "permanently written right there in scar tissue with Roman nails as the writing instrument." The scriptures of the Restoration develop the image of wounds that are shown and recognized. In Doctrine and Covenants 45:51–52 the Jews ask, "What are these wounds in thine hands and in thy feet?", which reuses the wording of Zechariah 13:6. In 3 Nephi 11:14–15 the multitude is invited to "feel the prints of the nails in my hands."
The honest point is that Isaiah 49:16 itself says nothing about wounds or nails. It speaks of engraving and of walls. The Christological reading is a later layer that Latter-day Saints accept as inspired. It is not the near-view meaning. Keeping the layers apart makes the third one stronger, not weaker. In 49:16 the permanent mark on the hand is God's act of devotion to a ruined city. The Christian reading takes the same kind of mark, a permanent cut in the hand made for someone else, and finds it in the body of Christ.
Nephi said he "did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23). Isaiah 48–49 is the text he chose to liken, and the lesson this week sends readers to 1 Nephi 22 for that reason. It is useful to compare this with the pesher commentaries found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. A pesher quotes a prophetic verse and then says what it "means," usually as a coded description of the community's own history. Likening resembles pesher because both apply an ancient text to present readers. It differs in its claim.
Likened, Zion's complaint becomes one that many readers will recognize. It is the complaint of someone who hears everyone else singing (49:13) and cannot join in. The structure of the passage matters for this reading. God does not rebuke Zion for saying "The LORD hath forsaken me." He answers her with a question, an admission, and an image. The admission is the surprising part: "yea, they may forget." The text does not pretend that the strongest human bond cannot fail. Anyone who has watched a family break down knows the text is being honest. The promise is given on the far side of that honesty, not in place of it.
Parry's fifth outlook is reading for comfort, guidance, or personal revelation. He gives examples such as turning to 40:31 when a reader needs strength. A reading of this kind may have little to do with a verse's original setting. That is allowed, as long as the reader knows it is a different kind of reading.
Isaiah 49:16 is one of the most personally read verses in the book. The lesson offers it to children as a promise that the Lord will never forget them. Its pull is that it answers the fear of being forgotten with something physical and permanent, not with an argument. A reader may take "thy walls are continually before me" as a promise about a home, a marriage, or a life that seems to have come down. Nothing in the verse limits it to those uses, and nothing in it intends them. The personal reading does not need to claim that it does. It needs to keep "thee" singular, as the Hebrew and the KJV both have it.
Parry's sixth outlook asks what gospel truths a passage teaches. In his chapter he pays close attention to Isaiah's Hebrew vocabulary for redemption and ransom. This passage rewards the same kind of attention, because its doctrine rests on one Hebrew root.
"That she should not have compassion on the son of her womb" contains meraḥem, "having compassion," and bitnah, "her womb." The root rḥm supplies both reḥem, the ordinary word for womb, and raḥamim, compassion or mercy. Hebrew ties mercy to the body of a mother. Adelman states the point directly: God's compassion, raḥamim, "surpasses the womb, reḥem." The logic of verse 15 moves from lesser to greater. If the love most rooted in the body can fail, the love that exceeds it cannot.
The phrase "they may forget" also has a history. Lamentations remembers what happened when that love failed during the siege: "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children" (Lamentations 4:10). The word translated "pitiful" is raḥmaniyyot, "compassionate," from the same root. Adelman notes these starvation scenes (Lamentations 2:20; 4:10) in her discussion of 49:15. Isaiah is not using a pleasant greeting-card comparison. He is writing to people who had seen compassionate mothers fail under a siege. The doctrine this teaches is not that suffering never happens. It teaches that God's memory of his people outlasts even the worst failure of human love.
Three doctrinal claims follow, each tied to the text. First, God is described in maternal terms. This is not unusual in Isaiah 40–49. The LORD carries Israel "from the womb" and "even to hoar hairs" (46:3–4), and later comforts "as one whom his mother comforteth" (66:13). Second, God's remembering is presented as a covenant act, not a feeling. In the same chapter the servant is given "for a covenant of the people" (49:8), and the engraving on the palms functions like a signature on that covenant. Third, divine memory is shown as costly. A mark cut into the hand is permanent and involves pain. That is why the Latter-day Saint layer in section 3 fits so well. The belief that the risen Christ still carries his wounds (3 Nephi 11:14–15; Doctrine and Covenants 45:51–52) develops a claim Isaiah had already made: God's remembering is marked on his own body.
Zion said she was forgotten. The answer did not deny that forgetting happens, or that her walls had fallen. It said that her name and her walls were cut into the hands of the one she was accusing.