A Shepherd Threw a Rock Into a Cave. What He Found Should Bother You

The Bible lost plain and precious things. Isaiah came through untouched. There is a reason.

The short answer: a shepherd’s rock in 1947 uncovered a complete Isaiah scroll copied a century before Christ, and it matches the Isaiah in your scriptures. Everything around it was edited. Isaiah was not. I think the reason is that you cannot censor what you do not understand — and Isaiah said in his own book that this was the plan.

Here is the long answer.

Nephi saw it happen. He watched a great and abominable church take away “many parts which are plain and most precious” from the record that went out to the Gentiles — and he watched what it cost. 1 Nephi 13:26–29. Anyone who has compared a Joseph Smith Translation footnote against the verse above it has seen the fingerprints.

So here is a question worth sitting with: Why did nobody cut Isaiah?

In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea and heard pottery break. Inside those jars, among other things, was a scroll about twenty-four feet long containing the entire book of Isaiah — all sixty-six chapters — copied roughly a hundred and twenty-five years before Christ was born.

It had been sitting in the dark for two thousand years. Before Herod. Before the manger. Before anyone had a reason to protect it or a reason to change it.

And there was an older one. Lehi’s family left Jerusalem around 600 BC, and Nephi went back for a record engraved on brass — a record that cost a man his head. Whatever Isaiah was on those plates, it was written down at least four hundred and seventy-five years before the scroll in that jar.

We do not have the brass plates. But we have what Nephi copied out of them, and anyone can set it beside the King James page and read the differences for himself — and we are going to help you do exactly that.

Scholars unrolled it and set it beside the Isaiah in our Bibles.

It matched.

The book we read is the book that sat in that jar. Across two millennia, through the hands of every scribe and council and censor who touched the rest of the record, Isaiah came through.

I think I know why, and it is not comfortable.

You cannot censor what you do not understand.

Open Isaiah with scissors and an agenda and what do you find? Cedars and briars. A vineyard. An ensign on a hill. Seven women taking hold of one man. Kingdoms that stopped existing twenty-five centuries ago.

To a man looking for something dangerous to remove, it reads like old poetry about somebody else’s politics.

The code protected the book.

And now ask what else came through. Daniel. Beasts, horns, a statue of gold and iron and clay. John’s Revelation. Seals, trumpets, a woman clothed with the sun, a number.

The two other books nobody can read are the two other books nobody cut.

And Isaiah told us that was the plan. He wrote it down in the middle of the book, in a verse almost nobody reads:

“Go now, write on tablets concerning them; record it in a book for the end-time, as a testimony forever.”

— Isaiah 30:8, Isaiah Institute Translation

Written down on purpose. Sealed in language on purpose. Preserved on purpose.

The King James has it as “for the time to come.” The Hebrew underneath is le-yom acharon, and acharon means latter or last. Avraham Gileadi renders it “for the end-time” in the Isaiah Institute Translation. Read it literally and it comes out: for a latter day.

Now say that word out loud the way we say it every Sunday: Latter-day.

Which raises a question I am not going to answer today, but I want to leave it with you. The latter days are the time we are living in now — and they started nearly two hundred years ago. A boy walked into a grove of trees in 1820, and we have been in them ever since.

But the prophets keep talking about an end time as something still ahead of us. Are those the same thing, or are they two different things? And if they are two different things — which one was this book written for?

I have an opinion. I will earn it before I say it — and I will bring receipts when I do.

For now, hold the fact: a book written down deliberately, encoded deliberately, and preserved deliberately — for a latter day.

This is part of a weekly series walking through Isaiah one week ahead of Come Follow Me.

[ Subscribe in the sidebar. ]