October 5–11, 2026 · Come, Follow Me
"He Hath Borne Our Griefs, and Carried Our Sorrows" · the Church's lesson page
This week the hosts bring in the panel's rabbi, who starts with the synagogue calendar: these chapters are chanted as comfort after the fast for the destroyed Temples, and Isaiah 50:1 says God never wrote Israel a bill of divorce. Then the conversation takes on Isaiah 53 directly: who the servant is and the long Jewish–Christian dispute over that, why the chapter is never read as a haftarah, the Qumran “light” missing from Mosiah 14, the brass-plates dating problem, and whether “it pleased the LORD to bruise him” can be read as anything but troubling.
This week's eight chapters open with a legal question and close with a verdict. The first verse asks, "Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away?" (50:1). The last says, "There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked" (57:21). Between them come a disciple who is woken "morning by morning" to listen, a city told to shake off the dust and dress, a runner on the hills with good news, a barren woman told to enlarge her tent, a free banquet, a eunuch promised a name, and a chapter of idolatry so graphic the King James translators softened it. At the center stands the poem that gives the lesson its title: "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows" (53:4).
The LDS scholar opens the panel with a blunt sentence: these eight chapters raise every hard question a Latter-day Saint reader of Isaiah has to face. They contain the most argued-over poem in the Hebrew Bible (52:13–53:12). They include the point where most critical scholars hear one prophetic collection end and another begin (chapter 56). And no run of Isaiah is quoted more heavily in the Book of Mormon: chapters 50–51 in 2 Nephi 7–8, chapter 53 in Mosiah 14, chapter 54 in 3 Nephi 22, and pieces of chapter 52 in Mosiah 12 and 15 and 3 Nephi 16, 20, and 21. The doctrinal connector draws the consequence. A doctrinal reading of this block need not be bolted on. Jacob, Abinadi, the risen Jesus, and Joseph Smith already did that work, and they did not all do the same thing with the text.
The lesson takes a clear position: "Few chapters in scripture describe Jesus Christ's redemptive mission more beautifully than Isaiah 53." It adds, "Where some expected a lion, He sent a lamb," and "He does not save us from a distance." The academic scholar starts from the other end. Mainstream scholarship cannot tell you who wrote them or who the suffering servant was. It can show what the text says and where the Hebrew is uncertain, which matters more in chapter 53 than almost anywhere else in the Bible. The rabbi reminds Christian readers that Jews meet most of these words first in the synagogue, chanted in the weeks after mourning the destroyed Temple; for him, comfort is not announced; it is administered. The honest questioner knows that anyone who reads Isaiah 53 seriously will meet the arguments over it. Better to meet them here first, at full strength, with the serious responses alongside. And the practical disciple warns that a poem this towering can become a portrait we admire and leave in the chapel. But these chapters keep turning toward the reader with instructions.
The five sessions follow the block's own movements. Session 1 (chapters 50–51) asks where the divorce papers are, hears the third servant song with its "face like a flint," and watches Jerusalem drink the cup of fury; it also faces the brass-plates problem where it bites, since Jacob reads these very chapters to the Nephites. Session 2 (chapter 52) dresses Zion, sends the runner over the mountains, and ends with a capstone that reads 52:7 six ways. Session 3 (chapter 53, beginning at 52:13) gives the fourth servant song a sitting of its own: its structure, its textual knots, the long Jewish reading with real room to speak, Abinadi's question "who shall be his seed?", and a Wrestle over what the servant's suffering actually accomplished. Session 4 (chapters 54–55) follows the forsaken wife back home and opens the free market of chapter 55. Session 5 (chapters 56–57) crosses the seam into what scholars call Third Isaiah: a law rewritten for eunuchs and foreigners, the darkest chapter in the block, and the God who lives in two places, eternity and the contrite heart.
The questions at the end of each session are not a quiz. Most have more than one defensible answer, and several ask about your own week rather than the text.
The block opens like a cross-examination. "Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you?" (50:1). Under Deuteronomy 24:1, a husband who divorces must write his wife a document, a sefer keritut or bill of severance. The rabbi lays out the logic. God demands that Israel produce one. They cannot, because none was ever written. The LDS scholar adds the prophetic background: Jeremiah 3:8 has the LORD say he gave faithless Israel "a bill of divorce." Isaiah 50:1 seems to answer Jeremiah: show me the document. There isn't one.
The Talmud turns the verse into a scene. In Sanhedrin 105a, ten men come to the prophet Ezekiel with a legal argument: if a master sells his slave, or a husband divorces his wife, does either still have a claim on the other? In other words, we are in exile, the covenant is finished, leave us to be like the nations. The Talmud's answer is Isaiah 50:1. There is no bill of divorce. There was no sale. The people were sent out for their sins ("for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves"), but the marriage stands.
The rabbi then says something a Christian reader should hear plainly. For most of Christian history, the dominant theology taught that God had divorced Israel and taken a new bride, the church. Isaiah 50:1 is the text that says, in God's own voice, that no such document exists. Jews have read it that way for millennia, and we survived on it.
Jacob read this same verse to the Nephites, and his text is not identical to the KJV. The Book of Mormon versions are not word-for-word copies of the King James Version. Second Nephi 7:1 opens with a question the KJV lacks: "Yea, for thus saith the Lord: Have I put thee away, or have I cast thee off forever?" Verse 2 states as fact what the KJV asks ("when I came, there was no man"), and adds "O house of Israel." The doctrinal connector reads the addition in light of its audience, a small band of exiles on the far side of an ocean. A question about paperwork becomes a question about permanence, which a people stranded across an ocean would ask. The answer is the same in both texts: no bill exists, the separation is self-inflicted, and the hand that could redeem is not "shortened" (50:2).
Keep this question open. The forsaken wife comes back in Session 4, and chapter 54 gives the answer in full.
"The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned" (50:4). In 1892 Bernhard Duhm marked out four "servant songs" in Isaiah 40–55, and this is the third. The academic is careful about the label. His proposal shaped a century of research, but it is a proposal. Many scholars now read the songs as part of their surrounding chapters and keep the name only as a convenience.
The KJV's "the learned" hides the more interesting Hebrew. The word is limmudim, "those who are taught," that is, disciples, and it appears twice in the verse: the tongue of the taught, the ear that hears as the taught hear. The academic notes that the same word comes back in 54:13, "all thy children shall be taught of the LORD." The LDS scholar draws the consequence for the speaker. The speaker is a pupil before he is a teacher.
The practical disciple reads the same order as a description of how comfort actually works. The servant's skill is a tongue, but the tongue depends on an ear, and the ear is woken daily. His ability to say the right thing to an exhausted person is not a talent for comforting phrases; it is the overflow of being taught every day. And what he says is fitted to the person. A "word in season" is a word fitted to its moment. It is rarely a lecture or advice. The practical disciple points to Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's "Like a Broken Vessel" (October 2013), which asked members to be "merciful, nonjudgmental, and kind" toward people who are struggling, as a corrective to the reflex of fixing people with words.
Then the song darkens. "I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting" (50:6). The Gospels' spitting and striking (Matthew 26:67; 27:30) echo the verse, and the Church's chapter heading reads the speaker as the Messiah. In its own setting the song is an unnamed first-person voice, and many critics hear the prophet's own testimony of persecution. The academic explains why. The language turns legal: "He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me" (50:8). The speaker imagines a lawsuit in which God acts as his advocate. That mix of personal lament and confidence resembles the individual laments of the Psalms and the "confessions" of Jeremiah. That is one reason a prophetic individual remains a strong candidate for the speaker. The LDS scholar sums up the scene in one line: the servant expects to be acquitted in God's court even while he is being abused in the human one.
"For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint" (50:7). The practical disciple knows this verse can be misused to tell people to stay in situations that are destroying them. But the flint is not self-erasure. The servant sets his face because God will help him, and he immediately goes on the offensive in courtroom language. He knows who his judge is, so other verdicts lose their power: "they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up" (50:9).
Luke uses the same posture of Jesus: "he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). Flint is about direction, not about absorbing every blow. In ordinary life it might mean keeping a covenant after it stopped feeling romantic, or telling the truth at work when a softer version would be easier. It does not mean accepting abuse. The servant's confidence that a just judge stands beside him is exactly what lets a person say "this is wrong" out loud.
The chapter closes with a choice. The one who "walketh in darkness, and hath no light" is told to "trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God" (50:10). The alternative is to "kindle a fire" and "walk in the light of your fire," which ends with lying "down in sorrow" (50:11). The practical disciple names the modern versions of those sparks: busyness, control, a constructed certainty, a resentment that at least feels warm. The question is whether I can sit in the dark for a while without lighting something that will burn me.
Chapter 51 opens with three calls to "hearken." The first sends the hearers backward: "look unto the rock whence ye are hewn... Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him" (51:1–2). For a small, defeated people, the reminder is that the whole nation began with one childless couple.
Then the poet reaches further back. "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD... Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep?" (51:9–10). Chapter 51 shows how freely this poet uses older material. This is combat myth, the storm god's victory over the chaotic Sea. The Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra show it in Canaanite form, where Baal defeats Yamm (Sea) and a coiling sea-serpent, and John Day argues that the Bible's Rahab and Leviathan imagery descends from that Canaanite source. The poet then merges three victories. The primeval victory over the sea becomes the Exodus ("a way for the ransomed to pass over," 51:10), and the Exodus becomes the coming return from Babylon ("the redeemed of the LORD shall return, and come with singing unto Zion," 51:11). Creation, Exodus, and return become one act.
Jacob, reading these chapters to his people, makes a further merger. When his quotation ends at 52:2 (2 Nephi 8:24–25), he does not turn to Jerusalem's restoration. He turns to death, to an "infinite atonement" without which "this flesh must have laid down to rot" (2 Nephi 9:7), and to "that monster, death and hell" (9:10). Isaiah's divorced mother becomes the human condition after the Fall, and the arm that "dried the sea" becomes the Redeemer who "suffereth the pains of all men" (9:21). Jacob reads Isaiah's consolations as one argument that ends at the plan of salvation. The doctrinal connector is careful about what kind of reading this is. That is a theological reading, not a historical one, and Jacob says openly that he is likening.
The third movement of the chapter is God's own voice: "I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die?" (51:12). In the synagogue, this verse opens the haftarah read with the Torah portion Shofetim, one of the seven readings of consolation after the fast of the ninth of Av. The rabbi notes that the cycle is not read in order, and quotes the medieval Machzor Vitry: you comfort a mourner slowly, by stages.
The second "awake" is addressed not to God's arm but to the city. "Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out" (51:17). The cup of fury is a stock prophetic image of judgment as forced drunkenness (compare Jeremiah 25:15–29). Her sons "lie at the head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net" (51:20). Then the reversal: "I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling... But I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee" (51:22–23). Here the cup is taken from Jerusalem and handed to her tormentors.
The rabbi asks readers not to flatten one feature of this scene. The figure who has drunk the cup, and who "laid thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over" (51:23), is a woman: Jerusalem, Zion, the mother. Hold her in mind. In Session 2 she is told to get up and dress, and in Session 4 she is the barren wife whose tent must be enlarged.
These two chapters bring the hardest historical question in the block to the surface, because Jacob reads them aloud (2 Nephi 7–8) from the Isaiah that Nephi says was on the brass plates (1 Nephi 19:22–23), carried out of Jerusalem around 600 BC.
What the text itself implies. Critical scholarship since Duhm assigns chapters 40–55 to an anonymous prophet among the Judean exiles in Babylon, around 550–539 BC. The LDS scholar points to evidence inside this very session. Jerusalem "hast drunk... the cup of his fury," and is told the cup has now been taken away (51:17, 22). That is the voice of someone writing after the city fell in 586 BCE, not before. The people are a "captive exile" (51:14), and in the next chapter they are told "Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence" (52:11). The consequence is stark. If those chapters were composed among the exiles half a century later, they could not have been on plates taken from Jerusalem before the exile. The honest questioner puts it in one line: if the consensus is right, those chapters did not yet exist.
The responses. David P. Wright calls Book of Mormon Isaiah a "double anachronism": it contains Second Isaiah, and it reads Isaiah through a nineteenth-century lens. Joshua Sears of BYU lays out four Latter-day Saint responses: dismiss the scholarly dating; defend the unity of Isaiah (for instance, by challenging the assumption that predictive prophecy is impossible); accept much of the scholarship but argue the material was composed or edited in the century between Isaiah and Lehi; or posit divine intervention in transmission or translation. Sears holds that none of this need undermine faith. The honest questioner gives the other side its full force. Critics reply that the second option rejects the overwhelming consensus, the third pushes the dates earlier than most scholars will allow, and the fourth explains anything and therefore nothing. The LDS scholar's verdict is the most candid line in the panel on this subject. Neither persuades the field, and nothing in these chapters solves the problem.
The English underneath. A second question runs alongside the dating. The Book of Mormon's Isaiah follows the King James wording closely, including its translation choices. Royal Skousen's work and Stan Spencer's "missing words" study show that the Book of Mormon disproportionately alters or omits the words the KJV prints in italics, the words the 1611 translators supplied. Spencer reads this as a translation process interacting with an English text Joseph Smith saw; critics read it as evidence that Joseph worked from a printed Bible and adjusted the italicized words. Session 3 adds one more piece of evidence from Mosiah 14.
Nothing here asks you to settle the question today. It asks you to know what the question is, so that when you read 2 Nephi 7 you know what is at stake in the variant at its first verse.
Think deeply.
"Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city... Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem: loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion" (52:1–2). The woman who drank the cup in 51:17 is now told to get up, wash, and dress.
Jews sing these verses every Friday night. The middle stanzas of Lekha Dodi, composed in the sixteenth century by Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz among the kabbalists of Safed, are built from this week's chapters: hitnaʻari me-ʻafar kumi, "shake thyself from the dust; arise" (52:2); livshi bigdei tifartekh, "put on thy beautiful garments" (52:1); hitʻoreri hitʻoreri, "awake, awake." The bride Zion, captive and dusty, is told to rise and dress, and the Sabbath itself becomes a weekly rehearsal of her redemption.
Latter-day Saints have their own revelation on the same verses. When Elias Higbee asked what "Put on thy strength, O Zion" means, the answer came in terms of priesthood: "to put on her strength is to put on the authority of the priesthood, which she, Zion, has a right to by lineage; also to return to that power which she had lost" (D&C 113:8). The "bands of her neck" are "the curses of God upon her," and loosing them means returning to the Lord, who promises to "give them revelation" (113:10). A city dressing itself becomes restored authority and restored revelation. The LDS scholar names the kind of reading this is: that is Restoration application of an ancient text, not a claim about what exiles heard. Both readings, the Sabbath bride and the priesthood, take a woman rising from dust as a picture of something still being restored.
The next verses are short and pointed. "Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without money" (52:3). The divorce-and-debt question of 50:1 returns: no creditor ever paid for Israel, so no price is owed to buy her back. The LORD reviews the history, down to Egypt and then the Assyrian who "oppressed them without cause" (52:4), and complains that "my name continually every day is blasphemed" (52:5). The section ends with a promise of recognition: "my people shall know my name... in that day... behold, it is I" (52:6). The risen Jesus will place 52:7 directly after that "day."
"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!" (52:7). The capstone at the end of this session reads this verse six ways. Here, the essentials.
The message is three Hebrew words, malak ʼelohayikh, "your God has become king." The academic places it beside the enthronement psalms ("The LORD reigneth," Psalm 93:1; 97:1). In a world where Marduk of Babylon had seemed victorious, the poet proclaims YHWH's kingship at the moment of Babylon's fall. The watchmen on the walls "lift up the voice... for they shall see eye to eye, when the LORD shall bring again Zion" (52:8), and even the ruins are told to sing: "Break forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem" (52:9). The LDS scholar is plain about the first meaning. In the original setting, the good news was simply that the exile was over: "Thy God reigneth."
The verse also had a long career in other hands. A Qumran text, 11QMelchizedek, quotes it and identifies the herald as "the anointed of the spirit." In the Book of Mormon, the priests of King Noah quote it to Abinadi as a challenge (Mosiah 12:20–24), and he answers two chapters later by reciting the whole of Isaiah 53. The doctrinal connector draws the lesson. The point: you cannot have the beautiful feet of 52:7 without the marred visage of 52:14 and the man of sorrows of 53:3.
"Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the LORD" (52:11). In context, the vessels are the temple vessels carried home from Babylon (compare Ezra 1:7–11), and the LDS scholar reads the order as an exit from Babylon. The Doctrine and Covenants applies the same verse twice to latter-day Saints leaving their own Babylon (D&C 38:42; 133:5). Unlike the first exodus, this departure will not be a flight: "ye shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight: for the LORD will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rearward" (52:12).
That last line is where the synagogue's Shofetim haftarah ends. The next consolation reading begins at 54:1. Session 3 opens in the gap.
The most surprising reading of this chapter in Restoration scripture belongs to Jesus. The most surprising reading is the Savior's own. At Bountiful he quotes 52:8–10 (3 Nephi 16:18–20), and the next day he walks through most of the chapter out of order and with his own changes (3 Nephi 20:32–45). The watchmen who "see eye to eye" are the scattered Jews after they "believe in me, that I am Jesus Christ" (20:31–32). "The salvation of our God" (52:10) becomes "the salvation of the Father; and the Father and I are one" (20:35). He then recites 52:13–15, the opening of the fourth servant song (20:43–45), and in the next chapter applies its language to a latter-day "servant" who "shall be marred" and healed (21:8–10). Session 3 takes up that servant.
The six-outlooks essay takes 52:7 as its test case, and for good reason. The verse was already a stock phrase before Second Isaiah used it; a Qumran commentator turned it into a prophecy about his own sect; Paul quoted it; Abinadi spent most of a sermon answering a hostile question about it; Jesus recited it to the Nephites; and Joseph Smith applied it to baptism for the dead. The method comes from Donald W. Parry of BYU, who teaches six outlooks for reading Isaiah: the historical near view, the distant view, dual or multiple fulfillment, likening, personal reading, and reading for doctrine. The essayist is careful about his relation to Parry. This essay applies his framework. It does not claim to speak for him.
1. The near view. Picture a city waiting for news, watchmen on the wall, and a single figure running on the hills. Dana M. Pike points to the clearest biblical parallel, 2 Samuel 18:24–27, where a watchman over Jerusalem's gate sees "a man running alone," recognizes the gait of Ahimaaz, and David concludes, "He is a good man, and cometh with good tidings." The Hebrew word in 52:7 is not the usual word for messenger but mebasser, "one who brings news." The word itself is neutral. In 1 Samuel 4:17 a mebasser reports a massacre. Isaiah insists three times that this news is good: peace, good, salvation.
The line had a history. Nahum used nearly the same words to celebrate the fall of Nineveh: "Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!" (Nahum 1:15). Second Isaiah redirects it from an enemy's fall to Jerusalem's own restoration. And "Thy God reigneth" is the formula used when a king is proclaimed: "Absalom reigneth in Hebron" (2 Samuel 15:10), "Jehu is king" (2 Kings 9:13). For exiles whose king had been blinded and carried to Babylon, the herald's news is that the throne in Zion is occupied again, and its occupant is the LORD.
The near view also has to be honest about how the story turned out. Verse 9 still addresses the "waste places of Jerusalem." When Judeans did return under Persian rule, Judah remained a province of someone else's empire; Pike himself notes that Jerusalem "was hardly redeemed" by the return. That gap between the herald's announcement and what the returnees found is where every later reading of this verse begins.
2. The distant view. The Book of Mormon reads the verse as looking past the sixth century. Jesus places it after the Lord's people "shall know my name" in "that day" (3 Nephi 20:39–40), in the context of the latter-day gathering, and adds "unto them" twice: the news is addressed to a gathered people who have not yet received it. D&C 113 points the same way for 52:1–2. And 52:10 promises that "all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God." No sixth-century event fits that description.
3. Multiple fulfillment. The best example is already in scripture, and it comes from Abinadi. The priests of Noah ask what the verse means (Mosiah 12:20–24); Pike reads the question as a trap, since the verse praises a messenger of good news and Abinadi has brought only bad news. Abinadi delays two chapters. Then, building on Isaiah 53's "he shall see his seed," he names the prophets and their followers as Christ's seed, and turns the priests' verse into tenses: "how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet!... are the feet of those that are still publishing peace!... of those who shall hereafter publish peace" (Mosiah 15:14–17). Then a fourth step: "the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that is the founder of peace, yea, even the Lord" (15:18). Abinadi does not choose between fulfillments. He sets them in order, and the last one includes all the others. Every prophet is a herald. The Lord is the herald behind all of them. The priests, meanwhile, are watchmen who have seen nothing. Isaiah 56:10, which Session 5 reaches, has a harsher word for watchmen like that: "His watchmen are blind... dumb dogs, they cannot bark."
4. Likening. Nephi asked his people to "liken all scriptures unto us" (1 Nephi 19:23), and 52:7 may be the most likened verse in the Bible. The comparison of likeners is instructive. At Qumran, 11QMelchizedek reads the verse as pesher, coded prophecy about the interpreter's own community: Zion is the congregation, the messenger is "the anointed of the spirit," and "your God" is Melchizedek, a heavenly deliverer. Pesher does not say the verse resembles the community's situation. It says the verse was written about the community. Paul likens more gently. In Romans 10:15 he quotes, "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace." Isaiah's single herald becomes "them," the preachers sent out by the church. Joseph Smith applied the verse to the gospel's "glad tidings for the dead" (D&C 128:19), and Pike notes that the Hebrew word for "beautiful" here, naʼwu, is the source Joseph drew on in naming Nauvoo. The essayist judges between the methods. Pesher claims the text was always secretly about us. Likening admits it was about someone else and asks what follows if we stand where they stood.
5. The personal reading. Parry's fifth outlook lets a passage occasion instruction it may not itself contain, and the discipline is to label it honestly. It is not exegesis, and it should not be presented as what Isaiah meant. The detail that catches readers is the feet. Feet are dusty and calloused, and in Israel they had to be washed at the door. The watchmen on the wall cannot see the runner's face at that distance. They see the feet moving, and call them beautiful because of what is coming. A reader might take from that a truth the verse never states: that the plain work of walking toward someone with good news is lovely to the people waiting for it. Another reader might stop at the watchmen and ask whether they are watching for a messenger already on the road. These readings are real and can be revelatory, but they belong to the reader.
6. Reading for doctrine. In the Greek Septuagint the herald of 52:7 is euangelizomenos, "one who brings good news," the verb behind "evangel" and "gospel." The content of the good news is not a technique or a feeling. It is "Thy God reigneth," and Mark's summary of Jesus' preaching, "the gospel of the kingdom of God... the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:14–15), keeps Isaiah's pairing of good news with kingship. The herald arrives while Jerusalem is still "waste places." That is a doctrine of faith in the most concrete sense: the watchmen sing over ruins because they trust the messenger. In Abinadi's exposition the Lord is both the herald and the King whose reign is announced. And those whose sins the servant bore become his seed, and the seed are the ones whose feet are beautiful. In this reading, discipleship takes the form of announcement.
The essay ends by pointing to what comes next in the chapter. The verse that follows the herald is the fourth servant song (52:13–53:12), and the order is deliberate: first the news that God reigns, then the account of what that reign cost. Read from all six distances, a runner's news to a ruined city became a statement about who the Messiah is and who belongs to him. That news outlived its first fulfillment.
Think deeply.
Begin at 52:13, three verses back, where the poem actually starts: "Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high." Read 52:13–53:12 straight through once before anything else, ideally aloud.
Session 2 ended at 52:12, where the synagogue's Shofetim haftarah stops. The next reading of consolation, for Ki Tetze, begins at 54:1. The fourth servant song, 52:13–53:12, is never read as a haftarah. A claim that circulates widely says the rabbis removed it because it points too clearly to Jesus.
The rabbi asks for care. The same cycle also skips 51:4–11, including "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD," and it skips 56:9–57:13. Haftarot are chosen to console Zion or to echo the Torah portion, and a dirge for a disfigured, dying figure does neither under any interpretation. No one can prove intent either way, but "the rabbis hid Isaiah 53" outruns the evidence. The chapter is printed in every Hebrew Bible and commented on by every major medieval exegete. The honest questioner, quoting Brettler and Levine ("perhaps the verses dropped out of Jewish liturgical readings under Christian pressure; perhaps they were never included"), lands in the same place. The gap is real; the motive is unproven either way.
The rabbi also notices what surrounds the gap. Chapter 51 ends with a humiliated mother lying in the street; chapter 54 begins with an exalted mother told to sing. Jewish readers have long noticed that the servant song is bracketed by the suffering and vindication of the people. Keep that frame in view as you read.
The academic recommends one observation above the rest. David Clines showed in I, He, We, and They (1976) that the poem is built from shifting pronouns. God speaks at the start (52:13–15) and the end (53:11b–12), framing everything with "my servant." In between, an unnamed "we" confesses (53:1–6): "we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions." "They" are the nations and kings who are startled into silence. "He" is the servant, who never speaks a word. The poem's drama is a change of perception. The "we" had read his suffering as proof of divine disfavor, the logic of Job's friends, and now recognize that it was for them.
Notice how much the poem depends on that "we." Who is speaking is the single biggest question in the history of reading this chapter, and almost everything below is an answer to it.
Here the KJV rests on uncertain ground. Five places matter most.
Then the Book of Mormon test. Shon D. Hopkin compared Mosiah 14 with Isaiah 53 and counts twenty variants from the KJV, fourteen of which find some support in ancient witnesses. The plural "transgressions" in Mosiah 14:8 agrees with the Septuagint, and "done no evil" for "done no violence" (14:9) has parallels in the Septuagint and the Targum. Hopkin also says the English follows the KJV so consistently that this "could not have occurred by accident." The LDS scholar then turns to what is missing. The most important test cases are what the Book of Mormon does not contain. None of the three most significant ancient readings in the song, "anointed," "tomb," or "light," appears in Mosiah 14 or 3 Nephi 20. Mosiah 14:11 reads "He shall see the travail of his soul." If the brass plates preserved an older Hebrew text, these are exactly the places where one would expect it to show. It does not show. The honest questioner states the standoff fairly. Believers can point to variants that align with ancient texts; skeptics can point out that the most important ancient variant is missing.
The rabbi's essay is the longest treatment of this chapter on the panel, and it deserves to be heard in its own order.
Start with what the book has already taught you. Isaiah has named the servant several times before 52:13: "But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen" (41:8); "Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified" (49:3). When the prophet says "Behold, my servant," the default referent in this book is Jacob-Israel. The honest questioner, arguing the case at full strength, says the same thing. A reader who meets "my servant" again at 52:13 has been trained by the book to hear Israel.
Then hear who is talking. Rashi (1040–1105) glosses 52:13 as "My servant, Jacob, [i.e.,] the righteous among him." On 53:1, Rashi and Ibn Ezra agree that the "we" are the nations, astonished at what has become of the people they despised. Read that way, chapter 53 is the confession of the kings of 52:15, who "shut their mouths" at something they never expected: "we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God" (53:4). They thought the Jews' misery proved God had abandoned them. They were wrong.
Then notice what it does not deny. Here is what Christian readers almost always miss. Rashi's reading is not a denial of vicarious suffering. On 53:4 he writes that the servant was chastised "so that all the nations be atoned for with Israel's suffering." The Jewish reading does not say the servant suffered for nothing, or only for his own sins. It says Israel has borne the sins of the nations, in persecution and exile, and that one day the nations will admit it. You may disagree with that reading. But it is not evasion. After the twentieth century, the rabbi adds, it is not an easy reading to wave away.
It is older than Rashi. A common missionary argument holds that Rashi invented the Israel reading in the eleventh century to fend off Christians. The church father Origen refutes that himself. In Contra Celsum 1.55 he recounts a debate with Jewish "wise men" who answered that the prophecies referred "to the whole people, regarded as one individual." Origen pushed back with 53:8, "for the transgression of my people was he stricken": if the servant is the people, how can he suffer for the people? Jewish commentators have answers (the speakers are the nations, so "my people" is theirs; or the righteous remnant suffers for the whole). But Origen's report proves the collective reading was in Jewish mouths a millennium before Rashi.
And it is not the only Jewish reading. Now let me be frank in the other direction. Christians who have been told that Judaism never read Isaiah 53 messianically have been told something false.
What do these show? That the rabbis read scripture with many voices at once, applying the servant to Israel, to the righteous, to Moses, to the Messiah, to any sufferer God loves. A suffering Messiah, yes, in some aggadic texts; the Messiah as God incarnate, no. Taking the midrash seriously means taking all of it, not quarrying one line.
Why the chapter still stings. At Barcelona in 1263, before King James I of Aragon, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani, a convert from Judaism, cited Isaiah 53 against Nachmanides. Nachmanides answered that in its true meaning the section speaks of the people of Israel, and that the Talmud's homiletical passages are not binding on Jews. He won the argument on the floor, published his account, and was forced out of Aragon. When Jews hear Isaiah 53 quoted at them today, they hear that history: not a Bible study but a cross-examination, conducted by people with power over them. An honest Christian conversation about it has to start there.
The honest questioner adds a piece of history that should sober Christian readers further. Brettler and Levine, drawing on Joel Rembaum's study, suggest that Rashi's national reading likely reflects the Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade: the servant song became a way to explain why faithful Jews were being slaughtered by people who called themselves followers of the servant. That history should give pause to any Christian who uses this chapter as a weapon.
Words that matter in the Hebrew. At 53:8, "for the transgression of my people was he stricken" ends in lamo, a form usually plural ("upon them"), which Jewish polemicists have pressed and Christian grammarians answer can be singular in poetry. It is a real ambiguity, not a knockout. At 53:9, "in his death" is literally "in his deaths," which collective readers take as the many deaths of a people. At 53:10, zeraʻ, "seed," elsewhere means physical offspring, which is why Jewish readers balk at applying "he shall see his seed" to a figure who died childless. Abraham ibn Ezra made that objection centuries ago. Hold it for a moment; Abinadi asked the same question.
The honest questioner gives the other side its strength too. The Christian rejoinder is also strong. In 49:5–6 the servant has a mission to Israel, "to bring Jacob again to him," so the servant cannot simply be the nation. The fourth song is unusually individual: a body, a face, a grave, a trial, a silence before accusers. And it insists on the servant's innocence, "he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth" (53:9), while Isaiah elsewhere is relentless about Israel's guilt ("for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves," 50:1). The New Testament reads the song as fulfilled in Jesus throughout: Philip to the Ethiopian (Acts 8:32–35), 1 Peter 2:22–25, Luke 22:37, Matthew 8:17.
The academic maps the scholarly field. There are four main families of answer, and none has settled the question. The servant is Israel collectively, the strongest reading from the surrounding text. Or a prophetic individual: R. N. Whybray read the poem as a thanksgiving by the prophet's followers after he was imprisoned and released, not about a death at all. Or an individual whose suffering benefits the community: Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine describe an individual among the exiles whose vicarious suffering explains how Israel can be forgiven. Or a royal figure: John Walton argues that the poem draws on the imagery of the Mesopotamian substitute-king ritual, in which a stand-in was enthroned, bore the evil threatened against the king, and was put to death. Walton does not claim that Isaiah describes an actual ritual. His claim is about the background of the poem's language of substitution, exaltation, and royal reward.
The rereading begins inside the Hebrew Bible itself. H. L. Ginsberg showed that Daniel 11–12 uses Isaiah 53 as a template for the persecuted "wise" (maskilim, from the same root as yaskil in 52:13) who "turn many to righteousness" (Daniel 12:3; compare "shall my righteous servant justify many," 53:11). In other words, by the second century BCE the servant was already being applied to a group of martyrs.
Here the Book of Mormon does something the polemics on both sides usually miss. Here the Book of Mormon does something many Latter-day Saints have not noticed.
Abinadi reads Isaiah 53 as about Christ, fully and explicitly: "as a sheep before the shearer is dumb, so he opened not his mouth" (Mosiah 15:6). Then he stops at the same puzzle that troubled Ibn Ezra. If the servant is "cut off out of the land of the living" (53:8), how does he "see his seed" (53:10)? Abinadi asks it aloud: "And now what say ye? And who shall be his seed?" (Mosiah 15:10). His answer is a community. The seed are "all those who have hearkened unto [the prophets'] words, and believed that the Lord would redeem his people," and "these are they whose sins he has borne" (15:11–12). Then he widens it: "all the holy prophets ever since the world began" (15:13). Then he returns to 52:7 and makes the feet plural, before ending with the one "founder of peace" (15:18). The individual servant and the community of servants are held together in a single reading. The rabbi notices the same thing from his side: Abinadi faces the word zeraʻ and reads it as the prophets and those who hearken, a collective reading that a Jewish commentator would recognize.
The doctrinal connector ties the idea to King Benjamin, whose covenanting people "shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters" (Mosiah 5:7). This does not settle the scholarly debate, but it shows Restoration scripture's own reading is more layered than a proof text.
Third Nephi goes further. The risen Jesus quotes 52:13–15 almost word for word (3 Nephi 20:43–45), stops before chapter 53, and in the next chapter applies the song's vocabulary to a latter-day "servant": "kings shall shut their mouths" (21:8), "the life of my servant shall be in my hand; therefore they shall not hurt him, although he shall be marred because of them. Yet I will heal him" (21:10). Latter-day Saint readers have identified that figure with Jesus, with Joseph Smith, or (Gaye Strathearn and Jacob Moody) with the Book of Mormon personified. The Book of Mormon, then, applies the fourth song to more than one figure. The doctrinal connector names the consequence. That should make Latter-day Saints slow to call the collective-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 simply wrong, while still testifying, with Abinadi and Philip (Acts 8:35), that the song finds its fullest meaning in Jesus.
The honest questioner arrives at the same place by a different road, through Nephi's rule of likening and the scriptures' habit of layered fulfillment. A faithful Latter-day Saint does not have to choose one referent exclusively. And he asks for reciprocity. Brettler and Levine, writing as Jewish scholars, argue that Christian readings need not exclude Jewish ones; the reverse courtesy is worth extending.
Even readers who agree the servant is Jesus disagree about what the song says he accomplished. Three readings are on the table.
Vicarious. Take 53:5–6 at face value: "he was wounded for our transgressions... the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Bernd Janowski describes the song as a "drama of taking another's place," in which the speakers recognize only after the servant's death that his suffering was on their behalf. Even Brettler and Levine, who do not read the servant as Jesus, grant that "his suffering has vicarious effects." The academic points to the hardest piece of evidence: the "offering for sin" of 53:10 is ʼasham, the reparation or guilt offering of Leviticus 5. This is the strongest single piece of cultic, substitutionary language in the poem, and much of the debate about "vicarious atonement" depends on how literally to take it.
Minimal. Whybray argued that vicarious punishment is almost unknown elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, which elsewhere resists the idea that one person can bear another's guilt (Deuteronomy 24:16; Ezekiel 18:20). On his view the servant suffered alongside guilty Israel and was released; the poem is a thanksgiving, not an atonement theory. Many scholars split the difference. For them the poem's main claim is about recognition: the community learns that the sufferer it despised was innocent and that his suffering was meaningful for them. The LDS scholar keeps the questions apart. Whether the poem teaches substitution is a live question, separate from who the servant is.
Penal. Penal substitution, in which God punishes the innocent in place of the guilty so that justice is satisfied, is the reading many Protestant readers assume. It is worth noticing what the Hebrew does and does not say. ʼAsham is about making restitution, not punishment as such. The "chastisement of our peace" (53:5) uses musar, a word more at home in discipline and instruction than judicial penalty. And the "griefs" and "sorrows" of 53:4 are literally sicknesses and pains, which is why Matthew 8:17 applies the verse to Jesus' healings rather than the cross.
What Restoration scripture does with it. It contains both strands. Abinadi speaks of Christ "standing betwixt them and justice" and having "satisfied the demands of justice" (Mosiah 15:9), language that sounds penal. Alma 7:11–12 reads 53:4 the way the Hebrew does: the Son will take upon him "the pains and the sicknesses of his people." "The word... which saith" marks a citation, and the doctrinal connector identifies the source as Isaiah 53:4. Alma adds a reason Isaiah does not give: "that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people" (Alma 7:12). Elder David A. Bednar built "Bear Up Their Burdens with Ease" (April 2014) on those verses. This is the strand the lesson echoes when it says Christ "does not save us from a distance." The restored scriptures do not lock Isaiah 53 into a single atonement theory.
"It pleased the LORD to bruise him." Then the hardest verse. "Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief" (53:10). The verb ḥafets can mean to will or purpose as well as to delight, and modern translations soften it toward "it was the LORD's will." But the problem does not go away with a gentler verb. Either God willed the crushing of an innocent man, or the text is wrong about God. Some critics of penal substitution call the bare version a kind of divine child abuse. Traditional Christian theology answers that the Son is God himself bearing the cost, so giver and victim are one. Latter-day Saints, with a sharper distinction between Father and Son, cannot use that answer in quite the same form, and might lean instead on Abinadi's insistence that the Son submits his will (Mosiah 15:7) and on the song's own voluntary language: "he hath poured out his soul unto death" (53:12). The rabbi has already shown you a third tradition: Berakhot 5a reads the same verse as "afflictions of love."
The honest questioner also notices the song correcting itself. The speakers confess, "we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God" (53:4), and the next verse says they were wrong. Part of the song is a confession that human beings misread suffering as divine punishment. That does not resolve 53:10, but it means the text is arguing with its own most brutal reading.
The lesson suggests reading Isaiah 53 with "I" and "my" in place of "we" and "our." Try it slowly. "All we like sheep have gone astray" (53:6) lands differently as "I have turned to my own way." It also puts you, quite precisely, in the position of the poem's "we": the one who misjudged the sufferer and now sees.
The practical disciple notices that the two great readings of the servant meet here. If the servant is a faithful people, the servant's posture is something a community is called to inhabit. If the servant is Christ, the New Testament itself turns the portrait into a pattern: Peter quotes Isaiah 53 to servants with harsh masters and tells them Christ suffered "leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps" (1 Peter 2:21–24). For a practical disciple the interesting thing is that both readings land in the same place. Either way, the servant songs are not only about someone else.
Then a necessary limit. Latter-day Saints covenant to "bear one another's burdens" and "mourn with those that mourn" (Mosiah 18:8–9), and Paul says both "Bear ye one another's burdens" and "every man shall bear his own burden" (Galatians 6:2, 5). We are called to carry for others, but we are not the servant of Isaiah 53. We do not atone. The ministering brother or Relief Society president who acts as if every sorrow rests on their shoulders burns out, or quietly resents the people served. The lesson points to David J. Wunderli's April 2026 talk, in which his young son filled his backpack with trail rocks along with a picture of Jesus and refused to lighten the load by taking the picture out. The title is the point: "Jesus Christ Is Not Our Burden; He Is Our Relief." Christ is not one more rock in the pack. Carry what is yours to carry, and hand the rest to the one who "bare the sin of many" (53:12).
Think deeply.
After the servant poem, the poet returns to the woman. "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing... for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD" (54:1). She is barren, widowed, and abandoned, and she is told to sing before anything has changed.
Remember the question that opened the block. The divorce question of 50:1 receives its answer here. "For thy Maker is thine husband" (54:5). "For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee" (54:7–8). There was no bill of divorce, only a moment of anger. Then the oath: "For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee" (54:9). The restoration is sworn like the promise after the flood (Genesis 9:11), and it ends with the line the lesson builds on: "For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed" (54:10).
In the synagogue, 54:1–10 is the consolation reading for Ki Tetze, the first reading after the gap of Session 3. It returns in the fall as the haftarah for Noach, because of "the waters of Noah." The rabbi's closing summary of the whole block starts here. The mother was not divorced. The children were not sold.
The risen Jesus recites this chapter in full to the Nephites and introduces it as fulfillment: "And then shall that which is written come to pass: Sing, O barren" (3 Nephi 22:1). He follows it with a command found almost nowhere else in scripture, to study one named prophet: "search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah" (3 Nephi 23:1). President Russell M. Nelson read 54:7 as a gathering text in "Let God Prevail" (October 2020): "For a small moment have I forsaken thee [Israel]; but with great mercies will I gather thee," adding that "the Lord is gathering those who are willing to let God prevail in their lives." The forsaken wife of chapter 54 becomes scattered Israel now being gathered.
"Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes" (54:2). The lesson's Scripture Helps ask what the verse means, and the Doctrine and Covenants has answered in an unusually concrete way. "Zion must increase in beauty, and in holiness; her borders must be enlarged; her stakes must be strengthened" (D&C 82:14) combines 52:1 and 54:2, and D&C 101:21 names the Church's basic unit from this verse: places of gathering "shall be called stakes, for the curtains or the strength of Zion." Every stake president holds an office named for a tent peg in this week's reading.
The practical disciple brings the verse down to the scale of a house. The order matters: the command comes before the children arrive. You expand the tent on faith, in a season of apparent emptiness, and you strengthen the stakes because a bigger tent puts more strain on its anchors. Enlarging might mean a standing Sunday dinner invitation to the missionaries, the widower, the international student, or a seat for the child whose own home is chaotic. Strengthening means that a family that opens its doors needs stronger private routines, not weaker ones. And he connects the tent to 54:10. People who are confident they are loved can afford to make room for others. People who feel forsaken guard their space. Part of enlarging the tent is first believing 54:10 about yourself.
The marriage that 54:5 restores has a history the honest questioner will not let us skip. It begins with the divorce question of 50:1 and continues in "thy Maker is thine husband" (54:5) and "a small moment have I forsaken thee" (54:7). God is the husband; the people are a wife who has been unfaithful and been put away. In Session 5 the same metaphor turns explicit and harsh in chapter 57.
Renita Weems argues in Battered Love that this prophetic metaphor, however powerful, scripted divine love in the shape of a husband who punishes and then woos back, with real consequences for how readers imagine both God and marriage. A defender can answer that Isaiah 54 bends the metaphor toward tenderness: the forsaking is "a small moment," the kindness "everlasting," sworn like the covenant after Noah. Whether that redeems the metaphor or merely softens it is a question each reader has to sit with.
Set the rabbi's reading beside that question. For him, the same metaphor is what kept a people alive: the marriage was never dissolved, so the covenant could not be claimed by anyone else. Both readers are looking at the same verses. One sees the danger in how the image pictures power; the other sees the promise in how the image refuses to let go. A careful disciple may need to hold both.
The second half of the chapter is addressed to the city: "O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires" (54:11). In the synagogue, 54:11–55:5 is the consolation reading for Re'eh, the one that calls Zion "not comforted." Then: "And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children" (54:13). The word for "taught" is limmudim, the same word as the disciple's tongue and ear in 50:4. The pupil of the third song has become the whole city's children.
The Talmud reads the verse once more. Berakhot 64a, the last words of the tractate, reads banayikh, "your children," as bonayikh, "your builders": those who learn Torah build peace. Jews recite it in the Sabbath liturgy. The comfort comes slowly, and those who learn are the ones who build the house again.
The chapter closes with a verse many Latter-day Saints know by heart: "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper" (54:17). Notice the line that follows it: "This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD." The singular servant of chapter 53 has become plural.
"Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price" (55:1). It sounds like a street vendor calling to shoppers, with a twist: the goods are free. The next verse asks the question. "Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not?" (55:2). That second verse is an audit question you can actually run. The practical disciple suggests looking at last month's bank statement and calendar: the subscription you resent, the overtime that bought a lifestyle no one enjoys, the hours on a feed that left you more anxious. The free things, "Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live" (55:3), keep getting crowded out by the costly ones.
Jacob closes his long sermon in 2 Nephi 9 with these verses, but changes "eat ye that which is good" to "feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted" (2 Nephi 9:51), turning the free banquet into a promise of incorruption. Nephi later puts the invitation in his own words: "doth he cry unto any, saying: Depart from me? Behold, I say unto you, Nay... buy milk and honey, without money and without price" (2 Nephi 26:25).
Then a verse the academic calls one of the most important in the block for historians. "I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David" (55:3). The "you" is plural. The promise of a permanent dynasty given to David (2 Samuel 7) is transferred to the people as a whole. No Davidic king had sat on the throne since 586 BC, and most commentators read 55:3–5 as a deliberate democratization of royal promise: what was once sworn to a king is now sworn to everyone who comes to the waters. For a reader who has just finished Session 3, the move is familiar. The servant's role passed to his seed; David's covenant passes to the people.
"Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near" (55:6). Ashkenazi Jews read 55:6–56:8 at the afternoon service of public fast days, so the rabbi hears these lines with fasting and repentance attached. "Let the wicked forsake his way... and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon" (55:7).
Then the lesson's verses: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways" (55:8–9). Read in place, the "higher ways" come right after "he will abundantly pardon." The first thing that is higher than human ways, in this chapter, is God's willingness to forgive.
And then the rain: "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth... So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void" (55:10–11). For a parent praying for a wayward child, or a teacher who never sees what becomes of students, 55:10–11 is permission to keep watering without seeing the harvest. The chapter ends with the exiles going home in joy, mountains singing and trees clapping, thorn replaced by fir and brier by myrtle, "for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off" (55:13). Hold on to that last phrase. It returns in the next chapter, attached to a eunuch.
Think deeply.
Chapter 56 opens on a new note: "Keep ye judgment, and do justice: for my salvation is near to come" (56:1). Most critical scholars hear a change of setting here. Chapters 40–55 speak to exiles in Babylon; from 56 on, the audience seems to be a community back in Judah, arguing over the temple, the sabbath, and who counts as a member. Scholars call chapters 56–66 Third Isaiah. This week's block crosses the line. The line is contested: Shalom Paul argues for continuity of authorship across chapters 40–66. Still, most scholars hear a change of voice at 56.
Whatever the authorship, the book was shaped to hold together. The last verse of this week's reading, "There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked" (57:21), repeats 48:22 almost word for word. It is one sign that whoever shaped chapters 40–66 knit the material together deliberately.
"Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree" (56:3). Then the promise: "Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off" (56:5). And for the foreigners: "their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people" (56:7).
Now set Deuteronomy beside it. Deuteronomy 23:1 says a man "wounded in the stones" shall not "enter into the congregation of the LORD," and 23:3 bars Ammonites and Moabites "for ever." Isaiah 56 speaks to exactly those people. It contains one of the boldest legal reversals in the Hebrew Bible. Prophecy here openly revises Torah. The LDS scholar thinks that should not alarm a Latter-day Saint. Latter-day Saints, whose scripture describes a God who reveals new things and changes earlier practice, should find that familiar rather than threatening.
The rabbi notices how carefully the welcome is conditioned. Three times the qualification is keeping the sabbath and taking "hold of my covenant" (56:2, 4, 6). Rabbinic law took the foreigner's path seriously; the convert is a full Jew. Isaiah's universalism is not the dissolving of the covenant into general goodwill; it is the opening of the covenant's door.
The Hebrew for "a place and a name" in 56:5 is yad va-shem. In 1953 the Knesset gave that name to Israel's memorial to the six million, many of whom left no sons or daughters to carry their names. When you read 56:5 this week, know that it now names the place in Jerusalem whose work is to gather and keep their names.
The doctrinal connector reads the same verses toward the temple. Isaiah 56:3–7 most invites a temple reading, and it raises a real ethical question. The New Testament acts it out twice. Jesus quotes 56:7 while clearing the temple (Mark 11:17). And Philip finds an Ethiopian official, a foreigner and a eunuch at once, reading Isaiah 53 in his chariot, explains it, and baptizes him (Acts 8:27–38). The kind of man Deuteronomy excluded is the one to whom Acts shows the servant song explained. The scroll that converted him promises, three chapters later, a name better than sons and daughters to men like him.
The Kirtland Temple dedicatory prayer asks that the Saints may "honorably hold a name and standing in this thy house, to all generations and for eternity" (D&C 109:24). The doctrinal connector is careful with that link. I offer that as a connection, not a claim about Isaiah's intent. But the eunuch's complaint, "I am a dry tree," meets a premise of the plan of salvation: exaltation does not depend on mortal circumstance.
The practical disciple asks who says "I am a dry tree" in a family-centered church: the single adult in their forties, the infertile couple who dread Mother's Day, the member whose circumstances make the expected path unavailable, the convert whose family will not come to the baptism. The "son of the stranger" is the immigrant, the person of a different race or class, the new member who does not know the vocabulary. The text asks for something specific: do not let them say it. Do not allow, by silence or by ward culture, the conclusion that they are cut off. The lesson asks the same thing in its own words: "What is God's message to those who feel 'utterly separated' from Him?"
Isaiah 56 does not hide the tension with Deuteronomy, and the tension does not end there. In the same period, Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13 push hard the other way. On the other side stand Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13:1–3, which apply Deuteronomy 23 to expel foreigners. Isaiah 56 takes a side in a live Persian-period debate, whether or not it consciously overturns Deuteronomy. The honest questioner states it in five words. Scripture is arguing with itself, in public.
There are two ways to describe that. A faithful reading sees progressive revelation, a God who opens a door an earlier rule had closed. A critical reading sees competing parties in post-exilic Judah, each claiming the tradition. The doctrinal connector names the middle position honestly: whether Isaiah 56 overturns Deuteronomy or narrows it, it makes covenant faithfulness outweigh lineage and physical condition. The question for a disciple is not only which description is right. It is what to do when your own canon contains both voices, and which one you let speak last.
The welcome ends abruptly. "All ye beasts of the field, come to devour" (56:9). "His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber" (56:10). The shepherds "all look to their own way, every one for his gain" (56:11) and say, "to morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant" (56:12). Set this beside 52:8, where the watchmen "lift up the voice" and "see eye to eye." The same office can sing over ruins or sleep through them. The synagogue's consolation cycle skips this passage, along with most of what follows, until 57:14.
"The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He shall enter into peace" (57:1–2). The doctrinal connector sets the verses beside Alma's teaching that the righteous dead are received into "a state of rest, a state of peace" (Alma 40:12). Isaiah's verse is too short to build an afterlife theology on, but the plan of salvation explains how it could be true.
The practical disciple reads the first clause as an accusation against the living. Most of us are not offering children on altars, but we are capable of the indifference. "Laying it to heart" might mean writing down what a good person did before the memory fades, going to the funeral of someone you did not know well, or visiting the elderly member in care whose name has dropped off every list. The righteous "shall enter into peace"; the failure the verse names is ours.
Then the darkest stretch of the week. Chapter 57 deserves a frank reading. It summons "sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore" (57:3), accuses them of "enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts of the rocks" (57:5), likely the child sacrifice condemned in 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 7:31, and describes a "bed" set up on a high mountain in covenant with other gods (57:7–8).
Chapter 57 is the most graphic text in the block, and the KJV's phrasing softens it. In 57:8, "thou lovedst their bed where thou sawest it" renders a Hebrew phrase that literally says "you gazed on a hand." The UBS translators' handbook and the NET Bible's notes explain that yad, "hand," works here, as it does in Ugaritic, as a euphemism for the genitals. The KJV's discretion hides how graphic the language is. In 57:9, some scholars read "the king" (melekh) as the god Molech, given the child sacrifice two verses earlier.
The chapter is not only sexual metaphor. W. H. Irwin proposed, and Theodore J. Lewis developed, a reading of 57:6, "Among the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion," as "the dead of the wadi": the drink and grain offerings would be offerings to the dead, and the messengers sent down "even unto hell" (Sheol, 57:9) part of a cult of the dead. Susan Ackerman treats the chapter as evidence for sixth-century Judean popular religion. In her reading, the polemic preserves real practices, including cults of the dead and fertility worship, that many Judeans may not have regarded as apostasy. The LDS scholar sums up. The sexual language is the old prophetic metaphor of Israel as an unfaithful wife, the same metaphor Session 4 wrestled with. The practices behind the metaphor, though, were real.
Why read it at all? Because 57:11 asks the question the whole indictment is built on: "of whom hast thou been afraid or feared, that thou hast lied, and hast not remembered me?" And 57:13 gives the alternative: "when thou criest, let thy companies deliver thee; but the wind shall carry them all away... but he that putteth his trust in me shall possess the land."
The tone breaks at 57:14: "Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumblingblock out of the way of my people." From this verse through 58:14 is the prophetic reading on the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Then the lesson's verse: "For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones" (57:15). The academic calls it one of the Bible's most striking pairings of transcendence and nearness. The LDS scholar notes that Lehi's "broken heart and a contrite spirit" (2 Nephi 2:7) shares its vocabulary, and is careful about what that means. That is a thematic parallel, not proof of borrowing.
The practical disciple reads the verse as a map. God has two addresses: eternity, and the person who is crushed. A disciple looking for God this week should look in both places: morning prayer, and also the weary coworker, the dry tree on the back row, the old man nobody visits.
God then explains himself: "I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth: for the spirit should fail before me" (57:16). "I have seen his ways, and will heal him: I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him and to his mourners" (57:18). The lesson pairs these verses with chapter 54 for anyone who has "given up hope" of forgiveness, and points to Elder Patrick Kearon's "God's Intent Is to Bring You Home" (April 2024), which says the Father's plan "is designed to bring you home, not to keep you out."
Then 57:19: "Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the LORD; and I will heal him." Rabbi Abbahu, in Berakhot 34b, notices the order. The far one is greeted first. Therefore, he says, in the place where penitents stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand. This is the Yom Kippur chapter, and that is its Yom Kippur message: the one who comes back from far away outranks the one who never left.
The block ends with the other side: "But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked" (57:20–21). The doctrinal connector hears Alma's "wickedness never was happiness" (Alma 41:10). The sea that God "dried" in 51:10 is back, and the wicked are now its waves.
The panel does not end in one place, and the endings belong together. The doctrinal connector returns to Abinadi's question and to Elder Holland's "Behold the Lamb of God" (April 2019), which carried the sacrificial lamb of Isaiah 53 to the sacrament table. In Restoration scripture's answer, the seed are the people who come to that table, which means the contrite of 57:15, the eunuch and the foreigner of 56:3, and the prophets of every period. The LDS scholar weighs the evidence of the whole block. The evidence cuts both ways. The Book of Mormon's Isaiah rests on the King James text and lacks the ancient readings that matter most, and the exilic setting is a real problem; yet its handling of the servant, Abinadi's plural seed and the marred servant of 3 Nephi 21, matches what the scrolls show, a text read and reread across centuries. He ends with the disciple of 50:4. Read slowly, the servant's own pattern in 50:4 is a fair model for the student: be woken "morning by morning" to listen, before claiming to speak.
The honest questioner ends with the posture of the poem's own "we," a community that looked at a suffering figure, got him wrong, and then changed its mind. That is not a bad posture for reading difficult scripture. And the practical disciple ends with the one question that rises out of all eight chapters, from the servant whose face was spat on to the eunuch who hides on the back row. The practical question that rises out of the whole block is a simple one: whose face am I hiding mine from?
Think deeply.