Panel essay · Isaiah 58–66 · October 12–18, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
No week of the Isaiah block puts the authorship question to a Latter-day Saint as sharply as this one. Since the late nineteenth century, critical scholarship has divided the book into three main blocks: chapters 1–39, largely tied to Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century BC; chapters 40–55, addressed to Judean exiles in Babylon around the rise of Cyrus; and chapters 56–66, which most scholars place in Judah after the return, in the early Persian period. Brevard Childs works with that three-part frame in his Old Testament Library commentary while reading the whole book as one canonical scroll. Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible volume on 56–66 reads these chapters as the record of a divided postexilic community arguing about fasting, Sabbath, sacrifice, and who counts as Israel. Not everyone accepts the third division. Shalom Paul's Eerdmans commentary argues that 40–66 is the work of a single later prophet, which removes "Third Isaiah" as a separate author. It does not bring the material back to the eighth century.
For Latter-day Saints the question has always run through the Book of Mormon, and here the facts are narrower than many members assume. The Book of Mormon quotes long stretches of Isaiah 2–14 and 48–54, and reworks chapter 29 at length. It does not quote any of 56–66 at length. Kent P. Jackson, who defends single authorship, states the consequence plainly: "because the Book of Mormon's Isaiah quotations do not include anything from 'Third' Isaiah (chapters 56–66), it cannot tell us anything about the history and authorship of those chapters." Joseph Spencer's work on Isaiah in Nephi's record makes the same observation from the other direction: Nephi's selections come from what scholars call First and Second Isaiah, never Third. Spencer has also urged Latter-day Saints to learn from critical Isaiah scholarship rather than simply fend it off, and Daniel Ellsworth's survey in Interpreter lays out the critical case for Latter-day Saint readers alongside alternative assumptions they might bring to it.
Silence is not the whole picture, though. Colby Townsend has shown that the Book of Mormon contains short phrasal echoes of these chapters even where it has no block quotations. "Robe of righteousness" appears in the King James Version only at Isaiah 61:10, and it shows up in 2 Nephi 4:33 and 2 Nephi 9:14. "Mighty to save" (63:1) appears in 2 Nephi 31:19, Alma 7:14, and Alma 34:18. Townsend reads these as evidence of a nineteenth-century English Bible shaping the text. A believing reader will explain them differently: as translation language, with Joseph Smith drawing on familiar King James phrasing. In either case the evidence does not fit a simple "the Book of Mormon never touches Third Isaiah" claim, and it does not show that Nephi had these chapters on the brass plates. Both camps should note where the real pressure lies. The critical problem for the Book of Mormon is its block quotation of chapters 48–54, which most critics date after Lehi's departure. This week's chapters, which it never quotes in blocks, add nothing to that problem.
The most useful evidence for dating is in the poems, not the theory. Isaiah 64:10–11 is a lament spoken over ruins: "Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire." Isaiah 63:18 complains that "our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary." In 60:10 foreigners will "build up thy walls," and 61:4 promises to "raise up the former desolations." These are the words of people standing among the rubble of 586 BC, not people dreading a future disaster. A Latter-day Saint who believes in predictive prophecy can say a prophet saw this in vision. The poems, however, are not written as predictions. They are prayers spoken from inside the loss.
Then there is the conflict within the community. "Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name's sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified" (66:5). The quarrel is between worshipers of the same God. Paul Hanson's The Dawn of Apocalyptic (1975) famously read 56–66 as the voice of "visionary" disciples of Second Isaiah pushed out by a priestly establishment, and he traced the birth of apocalyptic to that split. One need not accept Hanson's two-party model whole to see that 65:13–15 ("my servants shall eat, but ye shall be hungry") and 66:3–5 picture a community sorting itself into the faithful and the rest. The "holier than thou" of 65:5, now an English idiom, comes from this argument.
The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran Cave 1 (1QIsaᵃ), dated to about 125 BC, preserves all sixty-six chapters. It cannot settle the authorship debate; by its date the book had long since been assembled. One physical feature is still worth knowing. The scroll is divided into two halves of twenty-seven columns each, and the break falls between chapters 33 and 34, not at 39/40 or 55/56. Mladen Popović, Maruf Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker's 2021 handwriting analysis concluded that two scribes with very similar training probably copied the two halves. The ancient copyists marked no seam where modern critics place one.
At the level of individual words the scroll matters more. In 60:19 the Masoretic Text reads "neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee." The Qumran scroll, the Greek Septuagint, and the Aramaic Targum add "by night," which completes the parallel with "by day." The NRSVUE adopts it with a footnote. Donald Parry, a BYU professor and member of the international Dead Sea Scrolls translation team, has catalogued every such variant verse by verse in Exploring the Isaiah Scrolls and Their Textual Variants (Brill, 2019). It is the place to check before building doctrine on a single English phrase.
Chapter 58 opens with a complaint from people who are, by their own account, devout: "Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?" (58:3). God's answer does not abolish the fast. He redefines what it is for: "to loose the bands of wickedness… to let the oppressed go free… to deal thy bread to the hungry" (58:6–7). Jewish tradition chose this passage, 57:14–58:14, as the haftarah for Yom Kippur morning, so on the most important fast of the year the synagogue reads a prophet saying fasting alone is not enough. Verse 13's "call the sabbath a delight" uses ʻoneg, the word behind the Jewish practice of ʻoneg Shabbat.
The Latter-day Saint law of the fast takes the chapter in the same practical direction: it joins going without food to a monetary offering for the poor. President Henry B. Eyring's April 2015 talk "Is Not This the Fast That I Have Chosen?" takes its title from 58:6. In the same conference Russell M. Nelson, then of the Quorum of the Twelve, gave "The Sabbath Is a Delight," which built on 58:13–14 and proposed a single test: "What sign do I want to give to God?"
"The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me" (61:1). The Hebrew text does not identify the "me." Candidates include the prophet himself, the servant of 42 and 49, or a royal or priestly figure. The verb "anointed" (the root of mashiaḥ) explains why later readers heard a messiah.
Three later readings show how open the verse was. First, the Qumran Melchizedek text (11Q13), composed around 100 BC, combines Isaiah 61 with the jubilee laws of Leviticus 25 and gives a heavenly Melchizedek the role of proclaiming release. Second, Luke 4:18–19 does not reproduce the Hebrew. Luke's "recovering of sight to the blind" matches the Greek Septuagint of 61:1 (Brenton: "recovery of sight to the blind"). The Hebrew has a rare word, peqaḥ-qoaḥ, that literally means "opening" and is normally used of opening the eyes, which the King James translators rendered "opening of the prison." Luke's "to set at liberty them that are bruised" is not from chapter 61 at all. It is a line from 58:6 in Greek, spliced into the reading. Jesus then stops at "the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:19) and leaves out "the day of vengeance of our God" (61:2). The stop is in the text; its reason is a matter of interpretation.
Third, and distinctive to the Restoration: Doctrine and Covenants 138 takes the verse into the world of the dead. The Son of God appears "declaring liberty to the captives who had been faithful" (D&C 138:18). Messengers "proclaim liberty to the captives who were bound" (138:31). And verse 42 names Isaiah among the spirits present as the one "who declared by prophecy that the Redeemer was anointed to bind up the broken-hearted." The revelation thus credits 61:1 to Isaiah by name. A Latter-day Saint working with critical scholarship has to decide what that attribution means. One option, open to the faithful reader, is that "Isaiah" names the book and its tradition, just as the New Testament cites "Esaias" for chapter 40 (Matthew 3:3) and reads chapter 53 as "Esaias the prophet" (Acts 8:28–33). Another is to treat the attribution as historically exact. The text of D&C 138 does not settle the question.
"Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?" (63:1). The scene is built on wordplay. Edom sounds like ʼadom, "red," the same pun Genesis 25:30 makes over Esau's red pottage. The place is real. Bozrah is modern Busayra in southern Jordan, the Edomite capital, excavated by Crystal-M. Bennett between 1971 and 1980 and published under Piotr Bienkowski's editorship. It reached its height in the seventh century BC. Edom's part in Judah's fall left a lasting bitterness (Psalm 137:7; Obadiah 10–14), and that history is why a Judean poet would picture God coming back from Edom's capital covered in the vintage of judgment.
Doctrine and Covenants 133:46–53 reuses this passage almost line by line. It also changes the geography. The figure comes "down from God in heaven with dyed garments; yea, from the regions which are not known" (D&C 133:46). Edom and Bozrah are gone, and an Iron Age grudge has become a cosmic Second Coming. The Restoration had already made the move in its preface, where the Lord comes "down in judgment upon Idumea, or the world" (D&C 1:36). Section 133 carries the same reading into Isaiah's poem. It keeps the blood (133:51), which current readers should not soften. Isaiah's warrior is fearsome, and so is the Lord of D&C 133.
D&C 133:53 then quotes 63:9: "In all their afflictions he was afflicted. And the angel of his presence saved them." This is one of the hardest textual problems in the block. The written Hebrew (ketiv) has loʼ ṣar, "he was not afflicted." The marginal reading the Masoretes said to pronounce (qere) is lo ṣar, "to him there was affliction." The Septuagint reads the consonants differently again: "not an ambassador, nor a messenger, but himself saved them" (Brenton). The NRSVUE follows that line of reading: "It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them." So the King James reading, the one D&C 133 adopts, is a real ancient option, not an error, but it is not the only one. A Latter-day Saint should know that the verse best loved for its picture of a God who suffers with his people rests on a single disputed letter. It is also worth noting that the Jewish haftarah for Nitzavim, the last of the seven "haftarot of consolation," runs from 61:10 through exactly this verse.
"All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (64:6). The Hebrew beged ʻiddim means a cloth stained with menstrual blood. Such blood made a woman unclean in a ritual, not a sanitary, sense, and the UBS translators' handbook by Graham Ogden and Jan Sterk notes that the simile was meant to shock. The verse should be read carefully, because it is regularly made into a statement about human nature that the context does not support. It is the communal lament of a people whose temple is ashes (64:11), confessing that their cult and their good deeds did not prevent catastrophe. The thought continues two verses on: "But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter" (64:8). The lament is a plea for God to keep working the clay, not a claim that the clay is worthless. Paul loosely quotes 64:4 in 1 Corinthians 2:9, and D&C 133:45 quotes it again in the Restoration, with "how great things" in place of the King James "what."
"For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth" (65:17) supplies the language behind Revelation 21:1 and indirectly behind Article of Faith 10's renewed earth. The detail of the vision is surprisingly ordinary. People build houses and live in them; they plant vineyards and eat from them (65:21–22). And people still die: "the child shall die an hundred years old" (65:20). The new creation in Isaiah 65 is a repaired Judah, not a world without death. Doctrine and Covenants 101:30–31 picks up the same idea, "an infant shall not die until he is old; and his life shall be as the age of a tree," which echoes 65:22's "as the days of a tree," and then goes past Isaiah. In the Millennium the dying are "changed in the twinkling of an eye." The revelation keeps the Isaianic image and changes its terms, much as D&C 133 did with Edom.
"The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me?" (66:1). In a community arguing over a rebuilt temple, the line is pointed. Stephen quotes it against the temple establishment in Acts 7:49–50. Read with 66:2, though, it moves God's attention from buildings to the person "of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word" rather than condemning temples outright. Then the book ends on corpses: "their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (66:24). As Ogden and Sterk note, synagogue custom repeats verse 23 after verse 24 so the reading closes on all flesh coming to worship, and the New JPS Tanakh prints it that way. The Church's King James edition simply ends at verse 24. An honest reader holds both: a book that ends in judgment, and a tradition that would not let judgment have the last word.