Panel essay · Isaiah 58–66 · October 12–18, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona that surfaces the hard questions honestly — not a real person.
The last nine chapters of Isaiah hold some of the most loved lines in scripture: "Arise, shine" (60:1), "beauty for ashes" (61:3), "the wolf and the lamb shall feed together" (65:25). They also hold a God whose clothes are soaked in human blood (63:3), a picture of foreign nations working your fields (61:5), a comparison of human goodness to a menstrual cloth (64:6), and a final verse so grim that the synagogue won't end on it (66:24). A careful reader runs into all of these, and some readers have run into them first online, framed as reasons to stop believing. This essay takes the hard questions one at a time. It lays out the strongest version of each problem and the range of honest answers, and it doesn't pretend any of them is settled.
Since Bernhard Duhm's commentary of 1892, most critical scholars have treated Isaiah 56–66 as "Third Isaiah" (Trito-Isaiah), a collection from Judah after the exile, in the Persian period. The case for that date doesn't rest only on a refusal to believe in prophecy, though that is how it is sometimes described. It rests on what the chapters assume. Their temple is in ruins: "our holy and our beautiful house… is burned up with fire" (64:11). Their community is quarreling over who belongs: "Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name's sake" (66:5). And their prayer has been disowned by its own ancestors: "though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not" (63:16). Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Yale commentary reads these chapters as the record of a divided community arguing about whether religious practice works, who may claim the name Israel, and how to treat outsiders. Paul D. Hanson's The Dawn of Apocalyptic went further. He read Third Isaiah as the protest literature of a visionary group pushed out of power by the Zadokite priests who controlled the rebuilt temple. Not everyone accepts that conflict model. Brooks Schramm's The Opponents of Third Isaiah argued that the prophet sided with the priestly establishment against syncretistic cults. Still, the basic Persian-period dating is the scholarly default.
Latter-day Saints have usually seen higher stakes here than other readers, because the Book of Mormon puts "Second Isaiah" chapters (48–54) on brass plates carried out of Jerusalem around 600 BC. Victor L. Ludlow's entry in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism states the traditional position plainly: a "virtually complete Isaiah text" existed by the late seventh century BC, which "negates arguments for later multiple authorship." Kent P. Jackson made a similar case in A Reason for Faith (2016). David Bokovoy, a Latter-day Saint with a doctorate in Hebrew Bible, replied that this misstates why scholars date the material as they do.
The precise fact that matters for this week tends to get lost. The Book of Mormon does not quote Isaiah 56–66 at any length. The independent research site Mormonr's table of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon lists "N/A" for Trito-Isaiah. So these nine chapters aren't the Book of Mormon anachronism question in the strict sense. The Doctrine and Covenants, by contrast, draws on them freely: D&C 133:46–53 reworks Isaiah 63:1–9 almost line by line. For a believing reader, then, the live question in 58–66 isn't whether Nephi could have read it. It's what kind of prophecy this is. One answer says a single eighth-century prophet foresaw the burned temple. Another says later inspired voices carried Isaiah's tradition into a new crisis, with no less authority. Some faithful readers hold the second view. The mormonr.org discussion, for example, gives space to members who accept multiple authorship and still believe. Others find that view corrosive. The text itself doesn't settle it, but it supplies evidence on both sides. Isaiah 65:25 condenses 11:6–9 and ends on the same line: "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain." That echo can be read as one author's signature, or as a disciple quoting his master.
Isaiah 58 seems to dismiss the ritual it's about: "Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul?… Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness" (58:5–6). Read alone, this sounds like prophetic contempt for ritual as such, and some modern readers take it that way. Jewish practice shows another reading. The rabbis appointed Isaiah 57:14–58:14 as the haftarah for Yom Kippur morning, so it is read aloud to a congregation in the middle of a total fast. As My Jewish Learning's introduction puts it, the point is that fasting alone "is not enough," not that fasting is worthless. Latter-day Saint practice resolves it in a similar way, by tying the ritual to the poor through the fast offering. President Henry B. Eyring's April 2015 talk on this chapter says a fast offering "will heal and change hearts." The tension doesn't go away, though, and it shouldn't. The chapter's charge, "in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours" (58:3), is aimed at observant people, not lax ones.
"The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me" (61:1). Who is "me"? In the Hebrew context the most natural answer is the prophet himself, claiming a commission. The medieval Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra says so directly: the first person "refers to the prophet," and "anointed" means commissioned, as prophets are called anointed in Psalm 105:15. Others hear the servant of chapters 42–53. The Dead Sea Scroll 11Q13 (11QMelchizedek), from about 100 BC, combines Isaiah 61 with the jubilee law of Leviticus 25 and gives the proclamation of liberty to a heavenly Melchizedek. That shows Jews were already reading this passage as end-time hope before Jesus did.
Luke 4:16–21 has Jesus read the passage and say, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." The Church's lesson calls this "one of the Savior's most straightforward declarations that He was the Anointed One." Two details complicate a simple proof-text reading. First, Luke's quotation isn't Isaiah 61 as it stands. It follows the Greek Septuagint ("recovering of sight to the blind") and splices in a line from Isaiah 58:6, "to set at liberty them that are bruised." Mary Obiorah and Favour Uroko's study of the passage treats that conflation as deliberate. Second, Jesus stops mid-sentence, before "and the day of vengeance of our God" (61:2). Christians have often read the cut as a theological statement that vengeance is deferred to a second coming. Latter-day Saint scripture extends the passage in its own direction: D&C 138:42 applies 61:1 to Christ's preaching in the spirit world.
Jewish readers often experience this history differently, and their objection deserves to be stated at full strength. When "this day is this scripture fulfilled" turns into a claim that the Jewish reading was always a misreading, a text that belonged to a community in ruins is taken from it and given back to that community as evidence against it. Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington's commentary on Luke, the first major one co-written by a Jew and a Christian, shows what it looks like to read passages like this one together. Christians can confess Jesus as the Anointed One. The honest move is not to pretend that 61:1 meant only that in its own setting.
Isaiah 60–61 imagines a reversal. Foreign wealth flows in, "the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls" (60:10), and "the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish" (60:12). "Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen" (61:5); "ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles" (61:6). Read in a world shaped by colonialism and by modern Zionist and anti-Zionist arguments, these lines can sound like a charter for domination.
The strongest counterweight comes from inside the book. These lines were most likely written by a small, poor, subject people under Persian rule, and a fantasy of reversal is what the powerless write, not the powerful. The same collection also opens the doors in a startling way: "I will also take of them for priests and for Levites" (66:21). If "them" means the nations, and not the returning Israelite "brethren" of 66:20 (commentators divide on this), then foreigners would serve at the altar, which the Torah never allowed. A Latter-day Saint reader will notice that the Book of Mormon's own Isaiah has the same motif, with kings as "nursing fathers" (1 Nephi 21:23, quoting Isaiah 49:23). Both readings are in the text: nationalist triumph and radical inclusion. Choosing one and ignoring the other is a decision made by the reader, not the text.
"Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel?… I have trodden the winepress alone… their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment" (63:2–3). The speaker is God, coming from Edom, Judah's hated neighbor. He says outright that "the day of vengeance is in mine heart" (63:4). Christian art and preaching have often turned the scene into the Passion, with Christ treading the winepress of Gethsemane and the blood being his own. The text doesn't support that reading. The blood belongs to the trampled peoples: "I will tread them in mine anger" (63:3).
Latter-day Saints can't use the Passion reading to soften the scene, because modern revelation repeats the violence. D&C 133:51 reads: "I have trampled them in my fury… their blood have I sprinkled upon my garments." It even widens the scope to "judgment upon all people" (133:50). Responses fall along a spectrum. One end treats the image as poetry of last-resort justice for victims: the same God "wondered that there was none to uphold" (63:5; cf. 59:16) and is afflicted "in all their affliction" (63:9), just three verses later. Eric Seibert's Disturbing Divine Behavior argues that readers must distinguish "the textual God" from "the actual God" and judge violent portraits by the character of God revealed in Jesus. Ken Esau's critique in Direction replies that the distinction comes at the cost of traditional views of inspiration and biblical authority. A believer who is troubled by Isaiah 63 has company on both sides of that argument.
"All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (64:6). The Hebrew beged ʻiddim means a garment of menstruation, a cloth that made its wearer ritually unclean. The NET Bible translates it frankly as "a menstrual rag." Two controversies cluster here. One concerns gender: a holy book uses the female body as its figure for defilement. The other concerns doctrine. In Protestant–Latter-day Saint arguments online, this verse is often quoted to show that human works contribute nothing to salvation, which is a direct challenge to a covenant theology of effort.
Context complicates both uses. Isaiah 63:7–64:12 is a communal lament, spoken by people whose temple is burned, and its subject is uncleanness, not a lack of merit. The next verse moves straight to "thou art our father; we are the clay" (64:8). Whatever else 64:6 is, it is a cry from inside a ruin and not a systematic theology of grace. Readers in both traditions can learn from that, and readers who wince at the image are not wrong to wince.
"I create new heavens and a new earth" (65:17) sounds absolute. Three verses later death is still there: "the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed" (65:20). This new creation still has long lives, curses, and sinners. Critical readers take that as evidence that the vision is a this-worldly restoration of Jerusalem and not a cosmic end state. Revelation 21:4 ("there shall be no more death") has to go further than Isaiah to reach its picture. Latter-day Saint scripture handles the problem in its own way. D&C 101:29–31 says "there is no death," then explains that "an infant shall not die until he is old," and that at death a person is "changed in the twinkling of an eye." That is a revelation reinterpreting Isaiah 65:20 to fit the Millennium. Whether you see it as a fulfillment or a harmonization is, again, a choice made by the reader.
Two smaller puzzles come first. The ritual in 66:17 is obscure: purification "in the gardens behind one in the midst" (the KJV supplies "tree"), with eating "swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse." No one knows what this rite was. And 66:1–3, "where is the house that ye build unto me?", with its equation of sacrificing an ox to killing a man, reads to some as hostile to the temple itself. Stephen quotes 66:1–2 against the temple in Acts 7:49–50, which is an uncomfortable fact for a temple-building church.
The largest problem is the book's final sentence. The worshipers "shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (66:24). In Isaiah these are corpses, not souls in torment. But Mark 9:48 places the line in Jesus' mouth as a description of Gehenna, and from there it shaped centuries of teaching about eternal hell. Jewish practice answers it with a liturgical refusal. When Isaiah 66 is read as the haftarah for a Sabbath that falls on the new moon, verse 23 is repeated after verse 24, in the Orthodox Union's description "in order to end the Haftarah… on an uplifting note." Latter-day Saint scripture answers it twice, in tension with itself. D&C 76:44 applies "their worm dieth not" to the sons of perdition. D&C 19:6–12 says that "endless torment" names God's punishment ("Endless is my name"), not a punishment without end.
Neither the synagogue nor the Doctrine and Covenants deletes the verse. They put something next to it. That may be the most honest posture for this whole block: keep the hard line in the text, read it aloud, and decline to let it be the last word without also refusing to pretend it isn't there.