Panel essay · Isaiah 50–57 · October 5–11, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
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 think one prophetic collection ends and another begins (chapter 56). And they are quoted more heavily in the Book of Mormon than any other run of Isaiah: chapters 50–51 in 2 Nephi 7–8, chapter 53 in Mosiah 14, chapter 54 in 3 Nephi 22, and 52:1–15 spread across Mosiah 12, Mosiah 15, and 3 Nephi 16, 20, and 21. Below I set out what the evidence shows, mark where it touches Restoration claims, and say plainly where it makes those claims harder to hold.
Since Bernhard Duhm's 1892 commentary, critical scholarship has divided the book into three parts. Isaiah 1–39 is largely tied to the eighth-century prophet. Isaiah 40–55 ("Second Isaiah") is addressed to Judean exiles in Babylon around 550–539 BCE. Isaiah 56–66 ("Third Isaiah") belongs to the community in Judah after the return. Duhm also picked out four "servant songs," two of which fall in this week's reading: 50:4–9 and 52:13–53:12. Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible volumes fairly represent the mainstream.
The internal evidence in our chapters points the same direction. 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 called a "captive exile" (51:14). They are told "Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence" (52:11), which reads naturally as an exit from Babylon.
For Latter-day Saints this is the hard part. Nephi's record has his brother Jacob reading Isaiah 50–51 aloud (2 Nephi 6:4–5; 7–8) from the Isaiah text Nephi says was on the brass plates (1 Nephi 19:22–23), carried out of Jerusalem around 600 BCE. 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. David P. Wright has pressed this point most directly. He calls Book of Mormon Isaiah a "double anachronism": the text contains Second Isaiah, and it reads Isaiah through a nineteenth-century lens. The usual Latter-day Saint responses are to argue that the book is a unity, or that a prophet in the eighth century could speak to an exile that had not yet happened. Neither persuades the field, and nothing in these chapters solves the problem.
The Book of Mormon versions are not word-for-word copies of the King James Version. The KJV text of 50:1 begins: "Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away?" Second Nephi 7:1 opens with a new question: "Yea, for thus saith the Lord: Have I put thee away, or have I cast thee off forever?" The addition fits the biblical background well. Deuteronomy 24:1 requires a written bill of divorce. 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 Nephite addition, "cast thee off forever," spells out that reading. Verse 2 changes in a similar way. The KJV asks, "when I came, was there no man?" Second Nephi 7:2 states it as fact ("when I came, there was no man") and adds a direct address, "O house of Israel."
Shon D. Hopkin has studied Mosiah 14 against Isaiah 53 closely. He counts twenty variants and finds that fourteen "find support in an ancient manuscript witness." For example, the plural "transgressions" in Mosiah 14:8 agrees with the Septuagint's plural. "Done no evil" in place of the KJV's "done no violence" (14:9) has parallels in the Septuagint's "lawlessness" and the Targum's "sin." Hopkin also states the other side honestly. The English follows the KJV's renderings so consistently, he writes, that this "could not have occurred by accident." Royal Skousen's comparison of the 1829 manuscripts with the KJV reaches the same basic conclusion: the King James text is the base the Book of Mormon Isaiah works from.
The most important test cases are what the Book of Mormon does not contain. The three most significant ancient readings in the fourth servant song, all discussed below, are missing from Mosiah 14 and 3 Nephi 20. Mosiah 14:11 reads "He shall see the travail of his soul." It drops the KJV's "of," but it does not have the "light" found in the Great Isaiah Scroll. 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. One can hold that Joseph Smith rendered meaning through the Bible his readers knew rather than reproducing a Hebrew original, but the evidence should be stated as it is.
The KJV's "tongue of the learned" (50:4) hides a sharper Hebrew phrase, lᵉshon limmudim: "the tongue of those who are taught," that is, of disciples. The same word closes the verse: he wakens "mine ear to hear as the learned," as disciples hear. The speaker is a pupil before he is a teacher. His authority comes from being woken "morning by morning" to listen. Only then does he speak "a word in season to him that is weary." Because the Lord GOD "hath opened mine ear," he "was not rebellious." He "gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair" (50:6). The scene of the trial, "who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary?" (50:8), is legal language. The servant expects to be acquitted in God's court even while he is being abused in the human one.
The Gospels' spitting and striking (Matthew 26:67; 27:30) echo 50:6. In its own setting the song is an unnamed first-person voice, which many critics read as the prophet's testimony of persecution; the Church's chapter heading reads it as the Messiah. The Book of Mormon, as we will see, gives reason not to force a choice.
52:14, "marred." The Masoretic Text reads mishḥat, "disfigurement," which the KJV renders "marred." The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) adds one letter to make mashaḥti, "I anointed." The line then reads: "I anointed his appearance beyond any man." William H. Brownlee drew attention to the variant in The Meaning of the Qumran Scrolls for the Bible (1964). Most text critics treat it as an interpretive scribal change, reflecting the scribe's own view of the servant as the anointed one, rather than the original wording. Even so, it shows that someone before the time of Jesus was already reading this servant as messianic.
52:15, "sprinkle." The Hebrew yazzeh usually means "sprinkle," as with sacrificial blood. That is why the KJV, and 3 Nephi 20:45, read "So shall he sprinkle many nations." The parallel line, "the kings shall shut their mouths at him," points to a reaction of shock. Hence modern renderings such as the NET Bible's "startle." The Septuagint reads "many nations shall wonder at him." The Book of Mormon keeps the priestly "sprinkle," which suits an atonement reading but does not settle the philology.
53:9, "with the rich in his death." The Masoretic plural bᵉmotayw, "in his deaths," is odd, and "rich" does not obviously parallel "wicked." Some scholars have emended "rich" to "evildoers." The Great Isaiah Scroll instead reads bomto, which Peter J. Gentry argues means "his tomb" or "his burial mound." That would give: "his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man his tomb." Gentry, an evangelical, notes the fit with Matthew 27:57–60; judged on its Hebrew alone, it is still a serious proposal.
53:11, "he shall see." The Masoretic Text has "he shall see" with no object. Three Qumran manuscripts (1QIsaᵃ, 1QIsaᵇ, 4QIsaᵈ) and the Septuagint add "light": "out of the travail of his soul he shall see light." John Meade points out that 1QIsaᵇ otherwise stands close to the Masoretic tradition, so its agreement matters. The likeliest explanation is that a scribe accidentally dropped the word because it looked like the next one. The servant who "was cut off out of the land of the living" (53:8) then sees light, which reads as vindication after death. As noted above, Mosiah 14:11 does not have it.
Within Second Isaiah, the servant is sometimes plainly the nation: "thou, Israel, art my servant" (41:8; compare 49:3). Medieval Jewish commentators such as Rashi read chapter 53 that way: the nations finally recognize that Israel's suffering was not what they had assumed. Christian readers have applied it to Jesus since the New Testament (Acts 8:32–35; 1 Peter 2:22–25; Matthew 8:17; Luke 22:37). The long dispute between these readings is traced in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, edited by Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher. The seven "haftarot of consolation" read in synagogues before Rosh Hashanah go from 52:12 straight to 54:1. Whether the song was removed in response to Christian use or simply never included in a cycle that skips many chapters is disputed; the second is the safer claim.
The modern academic picture does not split neatly along religious lines. Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar and a Jewish New Testament scholar, argue that the servant was first an individual among the exiles whose vicarious suffering explained how Israel could be forgiven. They also show how Daniel 12:3 already reworks the song: "they that turn many to righteousness" echoes "shall my righteous servant justify many" (53:11). R. N. Whybray, by contrast, read the poem as a thanksgiving for a prophet released from prison. In his view the servant shares the people's suffering but does not take their punishment in their place. Whether the poem teaches substitution is a live question, separate from who the servant is.
Here the Book of Mormon does something many Latter-day Saints have not noticed. Abinadi reads Isaiah 53 as being about Christ, fully and explicitly: "as a sheep before the shearer is dumb, so he opened not his mouth" (Mosiah 15:6). Then he takes up "he shall see his seed" (53:10) and asks, "who shall be his seed?" His answer is a group. The seed are all who "have hearkened unto" the prophets, and the prophets themselves (Mosiah 15:10–13). Abinadi then moves straight to 52:7 and makes the feet on the mountains plural: "how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet!" Only after that does he come back to the one "founder of peace" (15:14–18). The individual servant and the community of servants are held together in a single reading.
Third Nephi goes further. The risen Jesus quotes 52:13–15 almost word for word (3 Nephi 20:43–45). The next chapter returns to the same verses, "kings shall shut their mouths," and applies them to a latter-day "servant" who "shall be marred because of them. Yet I will heal him" (3 Nephi 21:8–10). Latter-day Saint interpreters have often identified that figure with Joseph Smith, though the text does not name him. The Book of Mormon, then, applies the fourth song to more than one figure. A Latter-day Saint reader has scriptural grounds to treat the Jewish collective reading, the christological reading, and the critics' exilic-prophet reading as layered claims on one passage, not simply errors to refute.
Doctrine and Covenants 113:7–10 reads "put on thy strength, O Zion" as a call to priesthood holders "to bring again Zion." It reads the "bands of thy neck" as the curses of a scattered people, to whom revelation will be restored if they return. That is Restoration application of an ancient text, not a claim about what exiles heard. The messenger of 52:7 has a comparable history. A Qumran text, 11QMelchizedek (11Q13), quotes the verse and identifies the herald as "the anointed of the spirit." Abinadi, answering the priests of Noah, who had quoted this same verse to him (Mosiah 12:20–24), likewise turns the one herald into a line of messengers and a redeemer. Both read the "good tidings" messianically. In the original setting, the good news was simply that the exile was over: "Thy God reigneth."
Chapter 56 is generally dated to the Persian-period community back in Judah. It contains one of the boldest legal reversals in the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 23:1 excludes a man "wounded in the stones" from "the congregation of the LORD," and 23:3 bars Ammonites and Moabites. Isaiah 56 promises eunuchs who keep covenant "a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters" (56:5). Foreigners will have their sacrifices "accepted upon mine altar" (56:7). Prophecy here openly revises Torah. Latter-day Saints, whose scripture describes a God who reveals new things and changes earlier practice, should find that familiar rather than threatening.
Chapter 57 deserves a frank reading. The NET Bible's notes explain that "hand" (yad) in 57:8 works, as it does in Ugaritic, as a euphemism for the genitals. The NET therefore translates the end of the verse "gaze longingly on their genitals." The KJV has "thou lovedst their bed where thou sawest it." The NET notes also record that some scholars emend "king" (melekh) in 57:9 to the god Molech, given the child sacrifice "in the valleys" in 57:5. Theodore J. Lewis has argued that the passage also attacks rites for the dead. In his reading, the "smooth stones of the stream" (57:6), the offerings poured out to them, and the envoys sent down "even unto hell" (Sheol, 57:9) belong to a cult of the dead. The chapter's sexual language is the old prophetic metaphor of Israel as an unfaithful wife. The practices behind the metaphor, though, were real.
After all that comes 57:15. The God who "inhabiteth eternity" lives "with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit." Lehi's "broken heart and a contrite spirit" (2 Nephi 2:7) shares the vocabulary; that is a thematic parallel, not proof of borrowing.
The evidence cuts both ways. The Book of Mormon variants are more interesting than critics usually allow, but its Isaiah is built on the King James text and lacks the ancient readings that matter most, and the exilic setting of chapters 50–55 is a real problem for plates carried from Jerusalem around 600 BCE. Yet the Book of Mormon's own 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. 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.