≈30 min · introductory episode · October 12–18, 2026
A conversation introducing the week. All voices — hosts and guest — are AI-written study personas, not real people.
Weekly introductory episode — Come Follow Me, October 12–18, 2026: Isaiah 58–66
ELI: Nathan, I have a confession, and it happened in a minivan.
NATHAN: Most good confessions do.
ELI: Fast Sunday. Kids in the back, everybody hungry, we're running late for sacrament meeting. And I snapped at my son over a seatbelt. Really snapped. And in the quiet afterward, I thought, well, at least I'm fasting.
NATHAN: (dry) Isaiah 58, verse 3.
ELI: That's exactly where I ended up. "Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?" And God's answer, verse 4: "Behold, ye fast for strife and debate." The ritual was intact. The car ride was not.
NATHAN: Welcome in. This is the introduction to the week of October 12th through 18th: Isaiah 58 through 66, the last nine chapters of the book. The lesson is called "The Redeemer Shall Come to Zion." And to be clear up front, this episode is not one of the five study sessions. It's the front door. Context first, then a walk through the content, then real time on the controversies. And this week has a lot of them.
ELI: Which is why we have a guest. This week's guest is the panel's honest questioner, the panelist who wrote this week's essay, "Blood on the Robe, Worms at the Gate." Welcome.
THE QUESTIONER: Thanks for having me. And I want to say at the start, I love these chapters. "Arise, shine." "Beauty for ashes." "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together." But the same nine chapters have a God whose clothes are soaked in blood, foreign nations plowing your fields, human goodness compared to a menstrual cloth, and a last verse so grim the synagogue won't end on it. A lot of people meet those verses for the first time online, framed as reasons to walk away. I'd rather people meet them here first, with the strongest version of the problem and the honest range of answers.
NATHAN: That's the deal, then. Everything on the table, and nothing more settled than it is.
ELI: Nathan, put us on the map.
NATHAN: There are two maps, and they matter more this week than any week of Isaiah. The critical map goes back to Bernhard Duhm's commentary in 1892. Chapters 1 through 39 are tied mostly to Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century BC. Chapters 40 through 55, "Second Isaiah," speak to exiles in Babylon around the time of Cyrus. And chapters 56 through 66, "Third Isaiah," are set back in Judah after the return, in the Persian period.
ELI: And why do scholars put these chapters there?
THE QUESTIONER: This is the part people get wrong. The case isn't just "scholars don't believe in prophecy." It rests on what the chapters assume. Listen to 64, verses 10 and 11: "Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire." That's not dread of a future disaster. It's a prayer said standing in the rubble.
NATHAN: And the community is fighting with itself. 66, verse 5: "Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name's sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified." Same God, two sides. The panel's academic scholar walks through the theories. Paul Hanson read these chapters as protest literature from a visionary group shut out by the priests running the rebuilt temple. Brooks Schramm pushed back and argued the targets were syncretistic cults. The conflict was real; the neat sociology probably outruns the evidence.
ELI: Fun detail I didn't know: "holier than thou" comes from this argument. 65, verse 5.
NATHAN: It does. "Stand by thyself, come not near to me; for I am holier than thou." God calls those people "a smoke in my nose." And even the three-part split isn't unanimous. Shalom Paul treats all of 40 through 66 as one later prophet.
ELI: Okay, and the second map. The one in our scriptures.
NATHAN: For Latter-day Saints, the authorship question usually runs through the Book of Mormon, because the brass plates carry Isaiah out of Jerusalem around 600 BC. But here's the fact that the panel's LDS scholar stresses, and it surprises people. The Book of Mormon quotes long stretches of Isaiah 2 through 14 and 48 through 54. It does not quote any of 56 through 66 at length.
ELI: Not at all?
NATHAN: Not in blocks. Kent Jackson, who defends a single Isaiah, says it plainly: because the Book of Mormon's Isaiah quotations don't include anything from Third Isaiah, "it cannot tell us anything about the history and authorship of those chapters."
THE QUESTIONER: Which means this week isn't really the Book of Mormon anachronism question. The pressure point for that is chapters 48 through 54, which the Book of Mormon does quote, and which most critics date after Lehi left. These nine chapters add nothing to that problem.
NATHAN: With one wrinkle. Colby Townsend noticed short phrases. "Robe of righteousness," which the King James Bible has only at 61:10, shows up twice in 2 Nephi. "Mighty to save," from 63:1, shows up in 2 Nephi and Alma. Townsend reads that as the English Bible shaping the text. A believing reader says Joseph Smith was translating in familiar King James language.
ELI: So for a believer this week, the live question isn't "could Nephi have read this."
THE QUESTIONER: It's what kind of prophecy this is. One view: a single eighth-century prophet saw the burned temple in vision. Another: later inspired voices carried Isaiah's tradition into a new crisis, with no less authority. Faithful members hold each view, and the text gives evidence both ways. 65:25 condenses chapter 11's peaceable kingdom and ends on the same line, "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain." One author's signature, or a disciple quoting his master. You can hear it either way.
NATHAN: One more piece of shape before we dive in. Scholars have noticed that 56 through 66 is built like a ring. Outsiders welcomed at both ends. Harsh polemic just inside that. Then lament. Then two nearly identical scenes of God as a warrior: 59:16, "he wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation," and 63:5, "I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation." And dead center, chapters 60 through 62, the glorified Zion.
ELI: So the brightest chapters of the week are sitting inside a frame of conflict.
NATHAN: That's the shape. Keep it in your head while you read.
ELI: Back to my minivan. Chapter 58.
THE QUESTIONER: What strikes me is who God is scolding. These aren't lazy people. Verse 2: they "seek me daily," they "take delight in approaching to God." They're observant. And verse 3: "in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours." They're still driving their workers on the fast day.
ELI: And then the redefinition. Verse 6: "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free." Verse 7: "to deal thy bread to the hungry." And the rabbi has the detail that stopped me cold. The Talmud fixes this passage, 57:14 through 58:14, as the prophetic reading for Yom Kippur morning.
NATHAN: The holiest fast of the year.
ELI: So a congregation that hasn't eaten or had water since sundown, doing exactly what the law commands, hears the reader chant their own complaint back at them. "Wherefore have we fasted?" And the rabbi's point is that Jews never read this as an argument against fasting. They still fast. They read it as a warning that the fast is worth nothing by itself. The Mishnah says scripture doesn't report that God saw Nineveh's sackcloth. It says "God saw their deeds."
THE QUESTIONER: And there's a Talmudic line, from Mar Zutra, that the real reward of a fast day is the charity given on it. Which is basically the Latter-day Saint solution too.
ELI: The fast offering. The panel's doctrinal connector makes a point I'd never thought about. Nothing in Isaiah's complaint suggests their skipped meals fed anybody. The fast offering is built so the skipped meals literally become bread dealt to the hungry. It answers verse 7 literally.
NATHAN: President Eyring's April 2015 talk takes its title from verse 6, "Is Not This the Fast That I Have Chosen?" His line is that a fast offering "will do more than help feed and clothe bodies. It will heal and change hearts."
ELI: And the practical disciple pushes on the number. President Kimball, at a welfare session in 1974, suggested giving "perhaps much, much more, ten times more where we are in a position to do it." And keep that qualifier. It's a question for the comfortable household, not a guilt instrument for the family already counting coins.
THE QUESTIONER: I'd add one honest note. Some readers take chapter 58 as prophetic contempt for ritual itself. I don't think the chapter resolves that tension for you, and maybe it shouldn't. The charge in verse 3 is aimed at observant people, not lax ones. That's uncomfortable for any church that loves its practices.
NATHAN: One more phrase people skip. Verse 9, "the putting forth of the finger."
ELI: Which sounds so odd.
NATHAN: In the ancient Near East, pointing the finger was the gesture of formal accusation. The laws of Hammurabi, section 127, punish someone who points the finger at a priestess or another man's wife and can't prove it. So Isaiah puts slander in the same verse as the yoke. A reputation destroyed by talk is the same kind of burden as a debt you can't pay.
ELI: And the practical disciple says the modern finger is usually typed. The ward group chat. The family thread. "I'm just concerned about her." And then the reward, verse 12: "thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach." Not the person who was right. The person who repairs.
THE QUESTIONER: And then the chapter pivots to the Sabbath. Verse 13: "call the sabbath a delight."
NATHAN: The Hebrew word is ʻoneg, and the whole Jewish idea of ʻoneg Shabbat, Sabbath delight, grows out of this verse. The Talmud reads verse 13 phrase by phrase. "Honour him" means your Sabbath clothes shouldn't be your weekday clothes. "Nor speaking thine own words" means no business talk.
THE QUESTIONER: But only speaking about business is forbidden. Thinking about it is allowed.
ELI: (laughing) A merciful concession to human nature.
NATHAN: And how do you delight in it? The Talmud's answer: a dish of beets, large fish, and heads of garlic.
ELI: I love that. The rabbi's point is that Christians get stuck on "what am I not allowed to do," and Isaiah asks: what's so good about this day that you wouldn't spoil it with errands? The prohibitions protect the pleasure.
NATHAN: Which is close to what then-Elder Nelson said in April 2015, in "The Sabbath Is a Delight." He described moving away from lists of dos and don'ts to a single question: "What sign do I want to give to God?"
ELI: And the doctrinal connector ties both halves of 58 together through Doctrine and Covenants 59. "This is fasting and prayer, or in other words, rejoicing and prayer." Isaiah put fasting, an affliction of the soul, next to the Sabbath, a delight. Section 59 erases the line. Rightly done, fasting is rejoicing.
THE QUESTIONER: And the Yom Kippur reading ends on these Sabbath verses. On the strictest day of the year, the last word from the Prophets is delight.
ELI: Chapter 59 is darker.
NATHAN: It opens with "the LORD's hand is not shortened," but "your iniquities have separated between you and your God." And then a portrait of a whole culture. Verse 14: "truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter." And verse 15, the honest part: "he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey."
ELI: The practical disciple reads that as the workplace. Not dramatic fraud, just the small accommodations. The timesheet that rounds up. The meeting where you nod at a claim you know is false because correcting it would make you the difficult one. And Isaiah doesn't promise honesty pays. He says it might cost you.
NATHAN: Then verse 16: God "saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor." So he arms himself. "He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation."
ELI: And verse 20, which gives the lesson its title. "And the Redeemer shall come to Zion."
NATHAN: The rabbi tells us every weekday morning, near the end of the service, observant Jews recite a prayer that opens with 59:20 and 21. It's named for its opening words, Uva le-Tsiyyon. And the rabbi points out the grammar. The redeemer comes to Zion, and "unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob." The people turn, and the redeemer comes.
THE QUESTIONER: Paul quotes it in Romans 11 from the Greek, where the redeemer does the turning instead. And Rashi's comment on verse 20 is short and blunt: as long as Zion is in ruins, the redeemer has not yet come. That sentence explains a lot about why Jews didn't accept the announcement that he had.
ELI: And then the center of the ring. Chapter 60. "Arise, shine; for thy light is come."
NATHAN: Jewish congregations sing that verse every Friday night. Lekha Dodi, the sixteenth-century Sabbath hymn, sings 60:1 to Jerusalem, and borrows 62:5 for the Sabbath bride. And chapter 60 is the sixth of the seven haftarot of consolation, the readings after the fast that mourns the destroyed temples. The seventh runs from 61:10 through 63:9. So these chapters are literally the last prophetic words Jews hear before the new year.
ELI: The lesson reads 60 and 62 as light and dark, the gospel gathering people out of darkness. And then 62 gives the city new names. Hephzibah and Beulah. "The LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married."
THE QUESTIONER: Can I bring in the first hard one? Because it's right here in the bright part.
ELI: Please.
THE QUESTIONER: 60:10, "the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls." 60:12, "the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish." 61:5, "Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen." Read in a world shaped by colonialism, and by modern arguments about Zionism on every side, those lines can sound like a charter for domination.
NATHAN: And the strongest answer?
THE QUESTIONER: It comes from inside the book. These lines were most likely written by a small, poor people under Persian rule. A fantasy of reversal is what the powerless write, not the powerful. And the same collection opens the door shockingly wide. 66:21: "I will also take of them for priests and for Levites." If "them" means the nations, and commentators do divide on that, then foreigners serve at the altar, which the Torah never allowed. So both readings are in the text: nationalist triumph and radical inclusion. Picking one and ignoring the other is the reader's decision, not the text's.
ELI: And Latter-day Saints already have the motif in the Book of Mormon. Kings as "nursing fathers," in 1 Nephi 21.
THE QUESTIONER: Right. It's in our own Isaiah too. Which means we can't treat it as someone else's problem.
ELI: Chapter 61. This is the one the lesson builds around. "The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek."
NATHAN: First question: who is "me"? The Hebrew never says. The medieval Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra says flatly that the first person refers to the prophet, and that prophets can be called anointed, citing Psalm 105. Others hear the servant of the earlier chapters. And the verb, "anointed," is the root of mashiaḥ, messiah. Which is why later readers heard a messiah.
ELI: The rabbi has a midrash on this I found genuinely tender.
NATHAN: Go ahead.
ELI: God warns Isaiah his people are stubborn and a prophet sent to them will get beaten and insulted. Isaiah accepts anyway. And because he loves to vindicate Israel and hates to condemn them, he's anointed above his fellows. In that reading, the anointing of 61:1 is the reward for a prophet who refused to speak badly of his own people.
NATHAN: And then the passage starts traveling. The Qumran text called 11Q13, the Melchizedek scroll, from around 100 BC, reads Isaiah 61 together with the jubilee law of Leviticus 25. The key word, "liberty," is deror, the technical jubilee term. "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land." So before Jesus, Jews were already reading this as an end-time jubilee, with a heavenly Melchizedek proclaiming release.
ELI: And then Luke 4. Jesus stands up in the synagogue in Nazareth, reads, closes the book, sits down, and says, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." The lesson calls it "one of the Savior's most straightforward declarations that He was the Anointed One."
NATHAN: Two details, and both are in the essays. First, Luke isn't quoting the Hebrew. "Recovering of sight to the blind" follows the Greek Septuagint. And "to set at liberty them that are bruised" isn't from chapter 61 at all. It's a line from 58:6, in Greek, spliced in.
ELI: Wait. From the fast chapter?
NATHAN: From the fast chapter. Whether that's Jesus or Luke, the effect is to bind the jubilee of 61 to the true fast of 58.
ELI: That's beautiful. The anointed one reads the fast into his mission statement.
NATHAN: Second detail. He stops mid-sentence. He reads "the acceptable year of the Lord," and he closes the book before "and the day of vengeance of our God."
THE QUESTIONER: And that's a controversy in its own right. Christians have often read the stop as a theological statement: vengeance is deferred to a second coming. The doctrinal connector gives the Restoration version of that, and it's elegant. Liberty to the captives goes to the spirit world, in Doctrine and Covenants 138, which even names Isaiah as the one who prophesied that the Redeemer was anointed to open the prison. And the day of vengeance goes to the Second Coming, in section 133, where the Lord finally says, "this was the day of vengeance which was in my heart." The words Jesus left unread are finally spoken by him.
ELI: And the six-outlooks panelist, working from Donald Parry's six ways to read Isaiah, adds something about proportions. Isaiah 61 says a "year" of favor and a "day" of vengeance. And 63:4 does it again, "the day of vengeance… the year of my redeemed." Isaiah doesn't deny judgment. But mercy gets the longer measure. And at Nazareth, Jesus read only the year.
THE QUESTIONER: I love that reading. Now the other side, at full strength. For Jewish readers, 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 gets taken from it and handed back as evidence against it. Christians can confess Jesus as the Anointed One. The honest move is not to pretend 61:1 meant only that in its own setting.
NATHAN: And the rabbi frames it generously. Luke 4 is a very Jewish scene, a young man reading the Prophets in a Galilean synagogue on the Sabbath. Your tradition hears a claim about his identity. Ours hears a description of what a prophet is called to do. Both sides could take that seriously.
ELI: Before we leave 61, the heart of it. Verse 3: "to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."
NATHAN: And it's wordplay. "Beauty" is peʼer, a headdress, a turban. "Ashes" is ʼefer. Nearly the same letters. The ashes a mourner puts on their head get replaced by a festive headdress that sounds almost the same.
ELI: And the six-outlooks essay notices the oil. The speaker was anointed in verse 1. By verse 3 the oil is poured on the mourners. The anointed one passes his anointing on.
THE QUESTIONER: (softly) That's the most hopeful thing in the block for me.
ELI: Me too. And the practical disciple makes it concrete. Every exchange in the verse is physical. A head covering. Oil. A garment. Isaiah's comfort comes with objects, not explanations. Bring the meal. Do the laundry. And remember the ashes are still on the head long after the casseroles stop. The third month, the first anniversary, those are lonelier than the first week.
NATHAN: Which brings us to the hardest passage of the week. 63, verse 1. "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?"
THE QUESTIONER: Let me read the problem straight. Verse 3: "I have trodden the winepress alone… for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment." The speaker is God. And verse 4: "the day of vengeance is in mine heart."
NATHAN: The poem runs on puns. Edom sounds like ʼadom, "red," the same pun Genesis makes over Esau's red stew. Bozrah sounds like the word for a grape-gatherer. Edom had a hand in Judah's fall, so a Judean poet pictures God coming back from Edom's capital covered in the vintage of judgment.
ELI: Now, a lot of us grew up hearing this as Gethsemane.
THE QUESTIONER: We did, and Christian art has done that for centuries. But the text doesn't support it as a reading of the original. The blood belongs to the trampled peoples. "I will tread them." And here's the thing for Latter-day Saints specifically: we can't use the Passion reading to soften the scene, because modern revelation repeats the violence. Doctrine and Covenants 133, verse 51: "I have trampled them in my fury… their blood have I sprinkled upon my garments."
NATHAN: The doctrinal connector lays out what 133 changes. Edom and Bozrah disappear. The figure comes "down from God in heaven… from the regions which are not known." And section 1 had already decoded the name: "Idumea, or the world." Edom becomes everyone.
ELI: But section 133 also runs straight on into 63, verses 7 through 9, without a break. "In all their afflictions he was afflicted." So the bloodied warrior and the God who suffers with his people are one figure in one speech. That doesn't erase the violence. But it doesn't let the winepress stand alone either.
NATHAN: And Elder Holland's 2009 talk, "None Were with Him," reads 63:3 and 63:5 as Gethsemane and Calvary. The connector is careful to call that an application, not Isaiah's original setting. Holland's line: "because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so."
ELI: So what do you do with a God splattered in blood?
THE QUESTIONER: Responses fall along a spectrum. At one end, you read it as poetry of last-resort justice for victims. Notice God "wondered that there was none to uphold." He acts because nobody else would. At the other end, Eric Seibert argues readers have to distinguish "the textual God" from "the actual God," and judge violent portraits by the God revealed in Jesus. Ken Esau answers that the distinction costs you traditional views of inspiration. And Gili Kugler suggests vengeance here works as "a rhetorical substitute for actual redemption," for a community that can't yet see its restoration. A believer troubled by Isaiah 63 has company on both sides.
NATHAN: And the rabbi adds a layer almost no Christian reader knows. For the rabbis, Edom came to mean Rome, the empire that burned the Second Temple. And in the Middle Ages, as the historian Gerson Cohen showed, Esau and Edom became standard Hebrew code names for Christendom.
ELI: Oh.
NATHAN: So for centuries, Jews living under Christian rule read this chapter 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. The rabbi offers that as history, not accusation.
ELI: (quietly) That rearranges the furniture.
NATHAN: One more textual knot, in the verse we love most. 63:9, "In all their affliction he was afflicted." As written, one Hebrew word is spelled with an aleph, which makes it "not": he was not afflicted. The word read aloud has a vav: "to him it was affliction." One letter. The King James follows the read-aloud version, and so does section 133.
THE QUESTIONER: And the Talmud raises exactly that question and decides, from the rest of the verse, that God shared their suffering. The rabbi says both readings belong to the tradition, and preaches the one where God suffers with us.
ELI: Then the lament. 63:15 through 64. And it is not a polite prayer.
NATHAN: "Where is thy zeal and thy strength?" "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down." And 63:16, which I find startling: "Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us." Calling God "father" this directly is rare in the Hebrew Bible. And here it's the plea of people whose own ancestors no longer seem to know them.
THE QUESTIONER: And then 64:6. "All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags."
NATHAN: The Hebrew is beged ʻiddim. A garment of menstruation. A cloth that made the wearer ritually unclean. The NET Bible translates it frankly: "a menstrual rag." It was meant to shock.
THE QUESTIONER: Two controversies cluster here. One is about gender: a holy book uses the female body as its figure for defilement. Readers who wince at that are not wrong to wince. The other is doctrinal. In Protestant and Latter-day Saint arguments online, this verse gets quoted to prove that human works contribute nothing to salvation. Which is a direct challenge to a covenant theology of effort.
ELI: And context?
THE QUESTIONER: Context complicates both uses. This is a communal lament, said by people whose temple is ashes. Its subject is uncleanness, not a lack of merit. It's a cry from inside a ruin, not a systematic theology of grace.
NATHAN: The rabbi notes Rashi reads "we are all as an unclean thing" as: since the righteous have departed from us. Grief over a community emptied of good people.
ELI: And the six-outlooks essay has a pairing I'll be thinking about all week. Back in 61:3 the mourners become "trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD." That righteousness is planted by God. Here in 64:6 is what a people's own righteousness amounts to on its own. The garment of praise and the filthy rags are both cloth. What differs is who does the clothing. And 61:10 says it outright: "he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation."
NATHAN: And the very next breath of the lament, 64:8: "But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter."
ELI: The practical disciple says that verse isn't spoken from serenity. It's the turn a tired person makes while still asking where God is. And it pairs it with 62:6: "I have set watchmen upon thy walls… ye that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence, and give him no rest." That's permission for persistent, repetitive, honest prayer. Complaint included.
NATHAN: Chapter 65. "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth." The verb is baraʼ, the creation verb of Genesis 1. And then the details are startlingly ordinary. People build houses and live in them, plant vineyards and eat the fruit. It reverses the curse of Deuteronomy 28, almost phrase for phrase.
THE QUESTIONER: And verse 20: "the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed." So the new creation still has death, sinners, and curses. Critical readers take that as evidence that this is a this-worldly restoration of Jerusalem, not a cosmic end state. Revelation 21, "there shall be no more death," has to go further than Isaiah to get its picture.
NATHAN: The rabbi says Maimonides reads it exactly that way. The "new heavens" are perpetual gladness in place of grief, and the world continues according to its pattern. For a Jew, the rabbi writes, "new heavens" means this earth repaired, not this earth replaced.
ELI: And our tradition?
NATHAN: Doctrine and Covenants 101 picks up Isaiah's image. "An infant shall not die until he is old; and his life shall be as the age of a tree." That's 65:22. Then it goes past Isaiah: when he dies, he shall be "changed in the twinkling of an eye." Death still happens. There's no burial.
THE QUESTIONER: Which is a revelation reinterpreting Isaiah 65:20 to fit the Millennium. Whether you call that fulfillment or harmonization is, again, the reader's call.
ELI: The practical disciple reads those houses and vineyards for anyone whose work feels futile right now. Isaiah doesn't say the futility is imaginary. He says it's not the last word. And it turns the question back: whose labor in my own house do I enjoy without acknowledging it?
NATHAN: Chapter 66 opens with a line that should make a temple-building church sit up. "The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me?"
THE QUESTIONER: And Stephen quotes it against the temple in Acts 7. That's an uncomfortable fact for us.
ELI: But verse 2 keeps going: "to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word." And the connector points to Doctrine and Covenants 97. The house is commanded, but "if it be defiled I will not come into it." What God looks at is the contrite person inside it.
NATHAN: And then 66:13.
ELI: (laughing) The verse I'd tattoo on somebody if I were a tattoo person. "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."
NATHAN: And then the book's last verse.
THE QUESTIONER: 66:24. 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." In Isaiah these are corpses outside the city, not souls in torment. But Mark 9:48 puts the line in Jesus' mouth about Gehenna, and from there it shaped centuries of teaching about eternal hell.
ELI: And the synagogue's answer.
NATHAN: When the new moon falls on a Sabbath, the Talmud assigns Isaiah 66 as the reading, because verse 23 mentions both "new moon" and "sabbath." And after verse 24, the reader repeats verse 23. "From one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me." So the reading ends, in the Orthodox Union's description, "on an uplifting note."
ELI: They don't cut the verse.
NATHAN: They don't cut it. And the rabbi adds two more pieces. The Mishnah uses verse 23, "from one new moon to another," to teach that the judgment of the wicked in Gehinnom lasts twelve months. The calendar puts a limit on the fire. And Rashi reports that the Targum splits the last word of the book into two words meaning "enough seeing." The righteous say, we have seen enough.
THE QUESTIONER: And Latter-day Saint scripture answers it twice, a little in tension with itself. Doctrine and Covenants 76 applies "their worm dieth not" to the sons of perdition, a small group, and declines to describe their end. And section 19 says "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.
ELI: That might be the posture for the whole week.
THE QUESTIONER: I think it is. Keep the hard line in the text. Read it aloud. And refuse to let it be the last word, without pretending it isn't there.
ELI: So, let's orient people. The guide page has five study sessions. This episode was the front door. Session one is waiting.
NATHAN: And all seven panel essays are linked there, including our guest's, which takes every hard question we touched today one at a time.
ELI: One thing each to carry in. Questioner, you first.
THE QUESTIONER: Read 63:1 through 9 in one sitting. Don't stop after the blood, and don't skip to the comfort. Read the warrior and "in all their affliction he was afflicted" as one speech, the way section 133 does, and notice what that does to you.
NATHAN: Mine: read Isaiah 61:1 and 2, then read Luke 4:18 and 19 right beside it. Find the line from chapter 58 that got spliced in, and find the half-verse that got left out. Then ask why.
ELI: And mine. Before your next fast, name a person. The practical disciple's point is that a fast with a named purpose holds up better than a fast with only a duration. And maybe, in the car on the way to church, remember that the fast God chose begins with how you treat whoever's sitting in the back seat.
NATHAN: Five sessions. Start with session one.
ELI: And when the hard verses stop you this week, remember the synagogue on the new moon.
THE QUESTIONER: Read the last verse. Then read verse 23 again.