The Bible lost plain and precious things. Isaiah came through. There is a reason.
The short answer: a shepherd’s rock in 1947 uncovered a complete Isaiah scroll copied about a century before Christ. It’s a thousand years older than any Hebrew manuscript we had, and it is the same book. 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?
A goat, a stone, and the sound of breaking pottery
I have the December 1958 National Geographic on my desk, the issue that told America the story. Here’s how it happened.
In 1947 a Bedouin boy named Muhammad adh-Dhib was searching the wilderness of Judaea for a goat that had strayed. Climbing the cliffs above the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, he tossed a stone into a small opening in the rock and heard pottery shatter. He ran. He came back with a friend. Inside were tall clay jars, and in them, scrolls wrapped in rotting linen. (SOURCED: Tushingham, National Geographic, December 1958, p. 785)
One of them was Isaiah: all sixty-six chapters, on leather, about twenty-four feet long, copied about a century before Christ was born. (SOURCED: p. 805)
Experts in Jerusalem looked at the first scrolls and pronounced them worthless. Then photographs of the Isaiah reached Dr. William F. Albright at Johns Hopkins, the leading authority on ancient Hebrew handwriting. He dated it to about 100 B.C. and called the find “an absolutely incredible find.” (SOURCED: pp. 785, 788)
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. We’re going to help you do exactly that.
A thousand years older, and the same book
Scholars unrolled the scroll and set it beside the Isaiah in our Bibles.
The 1958 magazine put it plainly: apart from a few earlier fragments, the biblical scrolls from those caves were older than the oldest known Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament by a thousand years. (SOURCED: p. 788)
A thousand years older than any Hebrew manuscript we had, and it is the same book.
The differences are spelling and scribal, the kind any hand-copied book collects. The magazine even notes that a second hand, an editor, went back over the Isaiah scroll inserting corrections. (SOURCED: p. 805) 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.
Three things the 1958 magazine didn’t know it was telling us
1 · They went into the desert because of Isaiah. The community that hid the scrolls had its own rule book, and the magazine reports what it said: their move into that wilderness fulfilled Isaiah 40:3, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (SOURCED: p. 797) They practiced a washing in water that the magazine itself calls “a form of baptism.” (SOURCED: p. 797)
That’s the very verse Lehi quoted in the first Isaiah of the Book of Mormon (“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight,” 1 Nephi 10:8). And it’s the verse John the Baptist applied to himself, baptizing at the Jordan, in that same wilderness: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness… as said the prophet Esaias” (John 1:23). (TEXT) One verse, three witnesses, one desert. (OURS)
2 · Sealed and open, in an earthen jar. The magazine notes that storing documents in jars was an ancient practice, and points to Jeremiah. Read the verse: “Take these evidences… both which is sealed, and this evidence which is open; and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days” (Jeremiah 32:14). (TEXT)
A sealed record and an open one, put in the ground to last. Isaiah saw a sealed book too: “thou shalt… speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust” (Isaiah 29:4). Nephi read that chapter as a record that would come out of the earth in the last days (2 Nephi 26:16; 27). (TEXT) In 1947, Isaiah came out of the ground beside the Dead Sea. In 1827, another record came out of a hill in New York. Two records, from two holy lands. And the Lord said they’d be brought together: “the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews” (2 Nephi 29:13). (TEXT; OURS)
3 · A New Jerusalem, in a cave. Among the newest finds from Cave 11, the magazine lists a fragmentary text called a Description of the New Jerusalem. (SOURCED: p. 807) Two thousand years ago, men by the Dead Sea were writing about a New Jerusalem. The Book of Mormon tells you where it will stand: “a New Jerusalem should be built up upon this land… like unto the Jerusalem of old” (Ether 13:6, 8). (TEXT) And later in that same December 1958 issue, another writer laid Utah’s map beside the Holy Land’s (In 1958, National Geographic Found Two Holy Lands).
Written for a latter day
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 (Avraham Gileadi)
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.” 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’m 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 two different things? And if they are two different things, which one was this book written for?
I have an opinion. I’ll earn it before I say it, and I’ll bring receipts when I do.
For now, hold the fact: a book written down deliberately, encoded deliberately, and preserved deliberately, for a latter day. And in 1947, it came out of the ground.
This is part of a weekly series walking through Isaiah ahead of Come Follow Me.
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