Panel essay · Isaiah 58–66 · October 12–18, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
Most of my congregants have never read Isaiah 58–66 straight through, as you are doing this week. Yet they know these chapters better than almost any other part of the Prophets, because Jews meet them in the calendar, not as a book. Chapter 58 on the hungriest morning of the year; chapter 59 every weekday morning; chapter 60 every Friday night; chapters 60 through 63 before Rosh Hashanah; chapter 66 whenever the new moon falls on a Sabbath. Let me read them as a Jew hears them, and point out where Christian readers, Latter-day Saints included, tend to hear something different.
The Talmud fixes the haftarah, the reading from the Prophets, for Yom Kippur morning: "For thus says the High and Lofty One," that is, Isaiah 57:14–58:14 (Megillah 31a). Think about what that means. The congregation has gone without food and water since sundown, doing exactly what the law commands. Then the reader chants, in our name, our own complaint: "Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?" (58:3). And God answers that the fast he wants is "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free" (58:6), "to deal thy bread to the hungry" (58:7).
Jewish tradition did not read this as an argument against fasting. We still fast. We read it as a warning that the fast is worth nothing by itself. At the public fasts held in a drought, the Mishnah says, the eldest of the community stood up and reminded the people that Scripture does not say God saw the sackcloth and fasting of Nineveh. It says "God saw their deeds" (Jonah 3:10; Mishnah Taʻanit 2:1). In the Talmud, Mar Zutra puts it more bluntly: the real reward of a fast day is the charity given on it (Berakhot 6b).
The haftarah does not stop with fasting. It goes on to the Sabbath (58:13–14). The Torah calls Yom Kippur shabbat shabbaton, a Sabbath of complete rest (Leviticus 16:31). So on the strictest day of the year, the last thing the congregation hears from the Prophets is a verse about delight. My own reading is that the order matters: first you open your hand to your neighbor, then you can enjoy God's day.
"Call the sabbath a delight" (58:13). In Hebrew, "delight" is ʻoneg. On this one word the rabbis built a whole category of Sabbath law.
The Talmud reads verse 13 phrase by phrase (Shabbat 113a–b). From "and shalt honour him" it learns that your Sabbath clothes should not be your weekday clothes. From "not doing thine own ways" it learns that your walking on Shabbat should not be like your weekday walking: no rushing, no long strides. From "nor speaking thine own words" it learns that your Sabbath speech should not be weekday speech, so no business talk. Only speaking about business is forbidden; thinking about it is allowed, a merciful concession to human nature.
How does one delight in it? The Talmud answers: with a dish of beets, large fish, and heads of garlic (Shabbat 118b). The same page promises that whoever delights in the Sabbath receives "a boundless portion," because verse 14 promises "the heritage of Jacob thy father." Jacob, unlike Abraham and Isaac, was promised that he would spread out in every direction (Genesis 28:14), so his heritage has no borders (Shabbat 118a–b). Maimonides counts "honor" and "delight" as two of the Sabbath's four dimensions, citing this verse (Mishneh Torah, Shabbat 30:1).
Christian discussions of the Sabbath often get stuck on the question "what am I not allowed to do?" Isaiah's verse, as the rabbis read it, asks something else: what is so good about this day that you would not want to spoil it with errands? Abraham Joshua Heschel's small book The Sabbath (1951) made this the center of modern Jewish thinking about the day, which he called "a palace in time" (Hebrew College on Heschel's The Sabbath). In Isaiah the prohibitions are there to protect the pleasure.
Every weekday, near the end of the morning service, observant Jews recite a prayer that opens with two verses from this block: "And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob… My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed" (59:20–21). The prayer takes its name from those opening words, Uva le-Tsiyyon, and it contains the angels' "Holy, holy, holy" with an Aramaic translation (Siddur Ashkenaz, Uva Letzion).
Look at the grammar of 59:20 in Hebrew. The redeemer comes le-Tsiyyon, to Zion, and le-shavei feshaʻ be-Yaʻakov, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression. The people turn and the redeemer comes. Repentance is how you get to the redemption, not something that happens after it. Paul quotes this verse in Romans 11:26, but he follows the Greek translation: "There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob." In Paul's version the redeemer starts in Zion and goes out, and he is the one who does the turning. In the Hebrew the people do the turning.
Verse 21 explains why a Jew says this every day: the covenant is words that stay in the mouths of your children's children. Rashi's comment on verse 20 is short and blunt: "As long as Zion is in ruins, the redeemer has not yet come" (Rashi on Isaiah 59:20). That sentence sums up why Jews did not accept the announcement that the redeemer had come.
After the fast of the Ninth of Av, which mourns the destroyed Temples, the synagogue reads seven haftarot of consolation, all from the second half of Isaiah, on the Sabbaths leading up to Rosh Hashanah. The sixth reading, for the Torah portion Ki Tavo, is all of Isaiah 60, "Arise, shine." The seventh and last, for the portion Nitzavim, is Isaiah 61:10–63:9, beginning "I will greatly rejoice in the LORD" (Rav Yehuda Shaviv, "The Seven Haftarot of Consolation"; OU Haftarah Helper, Nitzavim). So these chapters are, quite literally, the last thing Jews hear from the Prophets before the new year.
They also come back every Friday night. Lekha Dodi, the sixteenth-century Sabbath hymn by Solomon Alkabetz, sings Isaiah 60:1, kumi ori, "arise, shine," to Jerusalem. It uses 62:5 for the Sabbath bride: "as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee" (Lekha Dodi). And 60:21, "Thy people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the land for ever," is the verse the Mishnah uses to teach that "all Israel has a share in the World to Come," sinners included (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1). That line is recited before each chapter of Pirkei Avot (OU, "Pirkei Avot in the Summer"). A promise about land became a promise about every Jew's soul.
"The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me" (61:1). The lesson manual treats it as Jesus' plain declaration that he is the Anointed One. Ibn Ezra says flatly that "the first person refers to the prophet," and he points out that prophets are called "anointed" in Psalm 105:15 (Ibn Ezra on Isaiah 61:1). Radak says these are "the words of the prophet about himself," and that "anointed" here means appointed or commissioned, since kings were installed by anointing (Radak on Isaiah 61:1). Rashi says the anointing "is nothing but an expression of nobility and greatness" (Rashi on Isaiah 61:1). The Hebrew mashaḥ here does not make the speaker "the Messiah" in the later technical sense.
The midrash makes the point with real tenderness (Vayikra Rabbah 10:2; Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 16:4). God asks, "Whom shall I send?" (Isaiah 6:8), and warns Isaiah that his children are troublesome and stubborn and that a prophet sent to them will be struck and insulted. Isaiah accepts, quoting "I gave my back to the smiters" (50:6). Then God tells him that because he loves to vindicate Israel and hates to condemn them, he is anointed above his fellows. Other prophets received the spirit secondhand, as Elisha did from Elijah; Isaiah received it directly: "The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me." In this midrash, the anointing of 61:1 is the reward for a prophet who would not speak badly of his people.
Luke 4 is a very Jewish scene: a young man stands in a Galilean synagogue on the Sabbath and reads from the Prophets. Your tradition hears a claim about his identity. Ours hears a description of what a prophet is called to do, and, in the midrash, the reward for refusing to condemn. Both sides could take that seriously.
The warrior from Edom in 63:1–6, with garments stained like those of a man treading grapes, is the most uncomfortable passage in the block. It is also part of that last haftarah of consolation, read the Sabbath before Rosh Hashanah. Rashi does not avoid it. He explains that the prophet speaks of God "in the expression of the wars of human beings," because Scripture describes the Divine Presence in human terms "to convey to the ear what it can hear" (Rashi on Isaiah 63:1).
Then there is the question of who "Edom" is. In the Talmud, Reish Lakish says that "the angel of Rome" will make three mistakes when he flees to Bozrah: he will take it for Bezer, a city of refuge; he will forget that refuge shelters only accidental killers; and he will forget that it shelters humans, not angels (Makkot 12a). For the rabbis, Edom was Rome: the empire that burned the Second Temple. In the Middle Ages, as the historian Gerson D. Cohen showed, Esau and Edom became standard Hebrew code names for Christian Rome and for Christendom as a whole ("Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought," 1967). This is what Christian readers almost never know. The Latter-day Saint reading, with Christ in red garments (D&C 133:46–53), is beautiful on its own terms. But for centuries Jews under Christian rule read these verses as God's promise of justice against Christendom, a hope of rescue from the very people who read it as a portrait of their savior. I offer that as history, not accusation.
The haftarah does not end with the blood. It ends at 63:9: "In all their affliction he was afflicted." Here the Hebrew has a famous spelling problem: the written lo has an aleph ("not"), but the word read aloud has a vav ("to him"). So the verse can mean "he was not afflicted" or "he was afflicted." The Talmud raises exactly this question and decides from the rest of the verse that God shared their suffering (Sotah 31a). And Reish Lakish explains the ashes put on the ark during a public fast by this verse, as if God himself were sitting in the ashes with us (Taʻanit 16a). Rashi follows the written form, "He did not trouble them," meaning God did not punish them as harshly as they deserved (Rashi on Isaiah 63:9). Both readings belong to the tradition. I preach the one where God suffers with us.
"All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (64:6, which is 64:5 in Hebrew Bibles, because the chapter break falls in a different place). The Hebrew is beged ʻiddim. The Aramaic Targum, followed by Rashi, renders it "a discarded garment," something everyone says to take away (Rashi on Isaiah 64:5). The bigger point is the genre. This verse belongs to a communal lament, spoken by a people whose "holy and beautiful house… is burned up with fire" (64:11). Rashi explains "we are all as an unclean thing" as "since the righteous have departed from us." It is grief over a community emptied of righteous people, not a theory that human goodness is worthless.
"I create new heavens and a new earth" (65:17). Christians connect this with Revelation 21, Latter-day Saints with the earth's paradisiacal glory (Articles of Faith 1:10). Maimonides reads it differently. In the Guide of the Perplexed he argues that Isaiah describes a kingdom's restoration as a new creation, and explains the phrase himself in the next verse: "I create Jerusalem a rejoicing." The new heavens are "perpetual gladness and joy in place of the previous grief" (Guide II:29). In his law code he states it as a rule: in the messianic age "the world will continue according to its pattern," and the wolf and the lamb are "a metaphor and a parable" for Israel living securely among nations that once preyed on it (Mishneh Torah, Kings 12:1). His view matches the Talmudic opinion of Shmuel, who said the only difference between this world and the days of the Messiah is freedom from foreign rule (Berakhot 34b).
Verse 20 supports him. Even in Isaiah's renewed Jerusalem, a person who dies at a hundred "shall die," and there are still sinners. The vision is of full lifetimes, houses lived in by those who built them (65:21–22), not escape from history. For a Jew, "new heavens" means this earth repaired, not this earth replaced.
When Rosh Hodesh, the new month, falls on a Sabbath, the Talmud assigns Isaiah 66 as the haftarah, because 66:23 mentions both "new moon" and "sabbath" (Megillah 31a). The book ends with carcasses, an undying worm, and unquenched fire (66:24). The synagogue does not let the reading end there. After verse 24 the reader repeats verse 23, "from one new moon to another… shall all flesh come to worship before me," so that the haftarah ends, as the OU's guide puts it, "on an uplifting note" (OU Haftarah Helper, Shabbat Rosh Chodesh).
The rabbis also did something with verse 24 that Christian readers should know about. In Mark 9:48 the undying worm describes Gehenna, and Christian tradition has often read it as endless. The Mishnah, by contrast, uses the very verse before it, "from one new moon to another," to teach that "the judgment of the wicked in Gehinnom" lasts twelve months (Mishnah ʻEduyot 2:10). In the rabbis' reading the calendar puts a limit on the fire. Rashi reports that the Targum reads the last word of Isaiah, deraʼon, "abhorring," as two words meaning "enough seeing": the righteous will say, we have seen enough (Rashi on Isaiah 66:24).
That is how we finish Isaiah. We do not cut verse 24 out of the Bible. We read it, we say "enough," and we turn back to the new moon and the Sabbath. The last word the congregation hears is worship.