Avraham Gileadi’s answer to my question, the Hebrew the King James translators turned into “diligently,” and the Latin word for love, all pointing the same way
Road to Esaias · Float · Pays the promise made in “What Country Is Isaiah Actually Talking About?” and “Two Years Before Isaiah Opens”
I owe you this
In September I told you that years ago I asked a Hebrew scholar what one word meant, and his answer took the roof off. I said I’d tell you next week. That was six weeks ago. Here it is.
The word is in the Savior’s command to the Nephites:
“Yea, a commandment I give unto you that ye search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah.” — 3 Nephi 23:1
Of every prophet who ever wrote, Isaiah is the only one the Lord ever commanded us to search by name. He did it twice in person (3 Nephi 20:11; 23:1), and Moroni sent us back a third time: “Search the prophecies of Isaiah” (Mormon 8:23). Four verses later the Lord widened it to all the prophets (3 Nephi 23:5). But He started with Isaiah, and He used one word to say how: diligently.
What I thought it meant
I thought diligently meant consistently. Show up every day. Don’t skip. Try hard.
So I asked Avraham Gileadi, who has spent his life in the Hebrew of Isaiah, what he thought the word meant.
What Avraham told me
As I remember our conversation, his answer was simple: diligently means to keep searching until you get to the end. To finish.
That took the roof off, because it changes what kind of word it is. Diligently isn’t just an effort level, how hard or how often. It’s a finish line. It means you don’t stop short.
The King James translators said the same thing
I didn’t want to hang this on one phone call, so I went looking for a receipt in the text, and the Old Testament has one.
In Leviticus 10, Moses goes looking for what became of an offering. The Hebrew doubles the verb for search, darash: literally, searching he searched. Hebrew doubles a verb to mean all the way. When the King James translators reached that doubled verb, they wrote:
“And Moses diligently sought the goat of the sin offering, and, behold, it was burnt.” — Leviticus 10:16
Moses didn’t search hard and then quit. He searched until he found out what had happened.
That same verb, darash, is the one Isaiah uses when he tells his own readers to search: “Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read” (Isaiah 34:16). The Book of Mormon comes to us in English, so there’s no Hebrew behind 3 Nephi 23:1 for us to check. But the word the Savior chose to describe the search lines up exactly with the word Isaiah used for it.
What I realized after
Avraham gave me the finish line. Later I realized something he hadn’t said, and it’s the part I can’t let go of: the End isn’t a place. It’s a Person.
You don’t search Isaiah to reach the last chapter. You search it until it brings you to Him.
The word itself means love
Then I looked at the English word. Diligent comes from the Latin diligere, which means to choose out, to value, to love. It’s the word for love in the Latin Bible’s first great commandment: Diliges Dominum Deum tuum, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
A machine can be persistent. Only a lover is diligent.
And it meets the finish line. A lover doesn’t stop looking until he finds the one he’s looking for. Until the end and because you love are the same diligence, seen from two sides.
Herod searched diligently too
Scripture shows us the counterfeit, and it uses the same words:
“Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.” — Matthew 2:8
Herod. Same words, same Person. He had all the effort and none of the love, so his search was a hunt. The wise men searched for the same Child, and when they found Him, “fell down, and worshipped him” (Matthew 2:11).
That’s the difference. Diligence isn’t how hard you look. It’s who you’re looking for, and whether you keep going until you reach Him.
Why it matters
It turns a reading assignment into a road. You can finish a book. You can’t finish a Person. So search these things diligently isn’t “get through Isaiah.” It’s “don’t stop until Isaiah has brought you to Him.”
It’s the same command as enduring to the end. Nephi says to “press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end” (2 Nephi 31:20). Same End. Searching diligently and enduring to the end are one command, applied to a book and to a life. And Nephi finishes the verse with the Father’s own voice: “thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.” The road runs through Christ to the Father.
And it comes with a promise. “For he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost” (1 Nephi 10:19).
One step this week
Don’t add more reading. Pick one verse of Isaiah that you don’t understand, and stay with it until you do. Read what’s around it. Look up the cross-references. Ask the Lord about it. Come back tomorrow.
That’s what diligently means. Not more. Until.
Ken Krogue is a co-founder of The Covenant Project and has been deeply searching Isaiah for more than ten years. He writes with two AI research partners, Orson (Claude) and Nathan (ChatGPT), and approves every word.
