As the prophet for Jesus Christ and the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Russell M. Nelson gives a special witness of our Savior, Jesus Christ. While standing on the Mount of Olives, adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City, he bears his testimony that “here at the base of the mount, Jesus came to the Garden of Gethsemane. He came to submit to the will of His Father and offer Himself as the sacrifice for the sins and weaknesses, the pains and burdens of all who had ever lived. In that garden, olives had been pressed under great weight to squeeze precious oil from the olives. In like manner, Jesus was literally pressed under the weight of the sins of the world.”
President Nelson expresses that “whenever I come to this great city of Jerusalem, I feel a renewed reverence for Him who made this land holy. Under the direction of the Father, Jesus the Christ was Creator of this and other worlds. He was Jehovah, God of the Old Testament. Jesus was the promised Immanuel, as prophesied by Isaiah.”
The prophecy spoken of by the prophet is in Isaiah 7:14-15: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.”
The prophet reflects that “more than 2,000 years ago, the Lord Jesus Christ was born in nearby Bethlehem. As the Only Begotten Son of our Almighty God, Jesus was the only perfect man to walk the earth. In New Testament days, Jesus established His Church, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets.
He healed the sick and caused the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the deaf to hear. He raised the dead. Yet He allowed His life to be taken to make resurrection a reality and eternal life a possibility for all humankind. It was here in Jerusalem that the Savior spent His final days in mortality.”
President Nelson testifies that the Lord will again return to the Holy Land of Jerusalem, where he is now standing. He quotes Isaiah 40:5 which reads “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”
If you read this verse in context with the other verses in chapter 40, you will see that Isaiah is prophesying of the greatness of the coming Messiah. Isaiah 40:1-11 declares: “comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people are grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. O Zion, that bringest goodtidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!
Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.”
President Nelson finishes his testimony by announcing that “he (Christ) will offer these words: “I was wounded in the house of my friends. I am he who was lifted up. I am Jesus that was crucified. I am the Son of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 45:52). And then every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ.
I testify that He is the living Christ, our Lord and Savior, Exemplar, Redeemer, and Judge in the sacred name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
John Bytheway and Darryl Alder from Discover with Darryl talk about the Servant Song in Isaiah 49.
1 Listen, O isles, unto me;
and hearken, ye people, from far;
The Lord hath called me from the womb;
from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name.
2 And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword;
in the shadow of his hand hath he hid me,
and made me a polished shaft;
in his quiver hath he hid me;
3 And said unto me, Thou art my servant,
O Israel, in whom I will be glorified.
4 Then I said, I have laboured in vain,
I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the Lord,
and my work with my God.
5 ¶ And now, saith the Lord
that formed me from the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob again to him,
Though Israel be not gathered,
yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord,
and my God shall be my strength.
6 And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob,
and to restore the preserved of Israel:
I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles,
that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.
7 Thus saith the Lord,
the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One,
to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth,
to a servant of rulers,
Kings shall see and arise,
princes also shall worship,
because of the Lord that is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose thee.
8 Thus saith the Lord,
In an acceptable time have I heard thee,
and in a day of salvation have I helped thee:
and I will preserve thee,
and give thee for a covenant of the people,
to establish the earth,
to cause to inherit the desolate heritages;
9 That thou mayest say to the prisoners,
Go forth; to them that are in darkness, Shew yourselves.
They shall feed in the ways,
and their pastures shall be in all high places.
10 They shall not hunger nor thirst;
neither shall the heat nor sun smite them:
for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them,
even by the springs of water shall he guide them.
11 And I will make all my mountains a way,
and my highways shall be exalted.
12 Behold, these shall come from far:
and, lo, these from the north and from the west;
and these from the land of Sinim.
13 ¶ Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth;
and break forth into singing, O mountains: for the Lord hath comforted his people,
and will have mercy upon his afflicted.
Darryl: John, when I was reading this chapter in ‘Isaiah for Airheads’; it was the first time I was ever exposed to the servant songs. That day, I read what you wrote, but I went out and discovered there were either four or five more songs. So, what’s that about?
John: I don’t know.
Darryl: It’s kind of a mysterious thing.
John: Yes, somebody identified that as a servant talking and then the identity of this servant is one of the things that there’s…
Darryl: There seems to be some controversy.
John: Some controversy, or just it’s multiple. It could be the house of Israel itself, it could be certain prophets or it could be Jesus. So, I think it’s all of that.
Darryl: So, you’re saying Isaiah could have meant more than one?
John: Like almost everything else he did, it seems like there can be multiple ways of looking at those things, which is kind of nice. It helps us to say…
Darryl: Layers and levels. So, because you chose to identify the first 13 verses as this servant song, which is the second servant song I found, I went with that in my study. But some others stop at verse 7, some at 6. What was it about the poetry in the first 13 verses that seemed like that made it the whole song.
John: Yes, and I could’ve moved that anyway. It sounded to me like almost a dialogue with the servant talking with God or saying prayers and having him answer as they’re going back and forth. And then finally the Lord taking over. I don’t know if you get answers just like that.
Darryl: But when you said that, I just have to tell you what I’ve tried today. I came to ask you this question. So, do you know the tune to the servant song and would you like to try to sing it with me?
John: That’s the thing, as a kid you see a song and you think, it’s going to rhyme and it’s going to have a melody; but this is something else. This is, I think like the Psalms in the Old Testament, where it has a poetic character to it.
Darryl: So, I’ve kind of gotten the impression Isaiah might have been more than the average kind of educated Jew and so he might’ve taken that extra class to learn how to do poetry right. So, can you give us any insights into the strangeness of poetry in his writing?
John: I know there are different sorts of parallelism, and so he’ll say something…
Darryl: Can you tell me what that means?
John: He’ll say it again. He’ll use a phrase and then he’ll use it again, but in different words. For example, in Isaiah 53, the Messianic chapter, it says “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.” He’s saying the same thing, but I’m going to say it again using different words, and there’s half a dozen of different kinds of parallelisms that off the top of my head.
I’m the airhead, I can’t remember, but clearly, he was a poet and a scholar and could do that, which is one of the reasons I think they say greater the words of Isaiah because he did it with such skill.
John Bytheway connects Isaiah 49 to 1 Nephi 21
Darryl: So, when I compare Nephi chapter 21 with Isaiah 49, there’s something interesting here because Nephi has inserted an entire sentence. Now, I finished college in the 70’s and in the 80’s there was sort of this storm about chiasm in the Book of Mormon. I’m surprised because I outlined this, and it looks chiastic. So how does that fit into poetry, these chiasms?
John: Yes, that’s got to be part of it. Right? And, like you said, that was something that kind of John Welch wrote his article for the new era in ’69, but the idea that chiasm is something that Isaiah employed.
Darryl: And probably others.
John: Sure, and is Nephi putting that in there, or is he reading right off the plates of brass?
Darryl: So, what do you think? Do you think Nephi was reading the plates of brass or do you think he was putting his own commentary in?
John: I do. But I think probably, he was reading the plates of brass. But who cares what I think. Nephi also is a prophet and it’s okay for a prophet to comment on the prophet. And so, what we have, particularly in this chapter as you mentioned, is a lot more than what’s in the King James.
Darryl: Right with that little section.
John: Even verse one.
Darryl: So after the first 13 verses, then what? It looks like the chapter’s got 2 parts.
John: Yeah, and then we’ve got the Lord kind of making his case that you have not been forgotten, and everything I’ve promised before is going to come to pass.
Darryl: But why does that matter? Oh, woe is me. Isn’t that the Jewish nature? Sorry, that’s probably not fair to say. I mean, Isaiah certainly plays it out like that over and over.
John: The way the Jews as a people have been treated over the centuries, I put in my book that some secular Jews would say God died during the Holocaust.
Darryl: That was a comment that made me really sit up and take notice.
John: Wow, that’s brutal. And the rest of these verses are reminding all of this, you’re not forgotten, you’re remembered. And all of these promises I made will come to pass and that’s the cool thing about calling them Covenant Israel where there are two parts to it. And the Lord’s going to remember his part of the Covenant.
John Bytheway on Remembrance
Darryl: So, the promise here, “I’ll not forget thee house O Israel.” You wrote some things about remembering that really impressed me.
John: President Kimball was giving a talk to CES educators years ago and he just said, when you look in the dictionary for the most important word, do you know what it is? He said, it could be ‘remember’. I used this in my classes because if you watch for ‘remember’ and ‘forget’, as you go through the scriptures, you will see it all over the place. It seems that the challenge that we all have is really just remembering, and that’s why I think we need so many reminders and that’s why there are weekly things that we do, there are monthly things that we do, like fasting. There are daily things that we should do, like prayer and pondering the scriptures. All of it, I think helping us to remember, keep it top of mind.
Darryl: They both have ‘remember’ and ‘remembrance’ in them.
John: Yes. Each one, twice.
Darryl: So, this is interesting that God’s saying he won’t forget us. It’s pretty easy to forget God, to not say prayers at night. Don’t you think that’s a pretty easy thing to do.
John: Yes, and I think when we’re reading the Book of Mormon about the Zoramites, that went up to the Holy stand, said this prayer and then, I guess whoever was writing it, Alma or [inaudible 00:06:59.08] it and then they would go home never speaking of God again, until they would come back to the holy stand. And we want to think those silly Zoramites, but we can…
Darryl: But we can be a little like them, can’t we? So, now I want you to think about this for a minute. Because if the nation of Israel’s crying, “O woe is me”, look at all the bad things: Assyria’s come, Babylon’s come, we’ve been scattered. Don’t you do that in your life, I do it in mine?
John: To be forgetful?
Darryl: No. Just to say, “O woe is me”, God’s forgotten me.
John: Sure.
Darryl: This really impressed me – he said, I will not forget thee. Doesn’t it feel like he forgets us as people, look around us, in this world.
John: Yeah, I guess it kind of depends on what we’re focusing on. I think president Eyring’s advice about keeping a journal is not just for your trips and your trophies, but it’s always, document the hand of the Lord in your life. And if you’re keeping that as King Benjamin might say, always before your eyes, then you see he hasn’t really forgotten me, has He? And he will turn bad things to good even, and that’s more of a where’s your focus type of thing that I guess is something we all need to do.
Darryl: So, how about these marks in the Savior’s hand? When he was resurrected, I’m assuming like all of us, he was resurrected whole, but for some reason…
John: They’re still there.
Darryl: What’s that about?
John: What I’ve read is that the prophecy in Zechariah, 13:6, “those are the wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.” An easy answer is they have to remain to fulfill that prophecy. And also, when he appeared to the righteous among the Nephites and Laminates in 3rd Nephi, 11 – he invited them to come up one by one and to feel those wounds, so they had to be there for that kind of as an evidence of what he had done on the cross. And so, they had to be there for that. I think it’s President Joseph Fielding Smith, who said that they would… I think his wording was ‘reappear as needed but ultimately be cleansed.’ So, that’s interesting. Is it kind of a partial resurrection of that part, but those wounds, what’s the song? ‘Poor wayfaring man of grief, the tokens in his hands I knew’, that they’ll remain as a testimony of who he is and what he’s done and that we’re not forgotten.
Darryl: So, sort of to close, this is the last thing I wanted to ask you about. When I was 17, Israel was attacked simultaneously by 3 countries. As a country, it was only 20 years old. It was known as the ‘six days war‘. And for most of us, at least in the church, we assumed Armageddon was about to be engaged and here we are now 50 years later, Israel still coexists. Talk to us a little bit about the re-establishment of Israel; about its size, its neighbors. You’re going there in a couple of weeks, right? So, give us some experiences about being in Israel because it’s tiny, but it could be a county.
John: Yes, it’s tiny, and what was it? 1949, the United Nations created it, and some have looked at this gathering of Kings and Queens as the United Nations doing that and could be. And the question that Laman and Lemuel asked right after 1Nephi 21 is, is this temporal or spiritual? Because when you read the Book of Mormon more often, it sounds like a gathering, is that they’re gathered here to Christ first, accepting them as their Redeemer, gathering in their testimony and then in their real estate.
Darryl: Well, that hasn’t happened in Israel.
John: Right, and so some of have said, well maybe it’s a preliminary gathering where they’re in the right place, but their testimony of Christ as the Redeemer, as the Messiah, that hasn’t happened yet.
Darryl: So, let me go back to that six-day war thing. So, when the United Nations established the State of Israel, I think as a church we all thought, okay, here it is, this is the ending, but I’ve been told by a friend that he’s never seen a more secular state. It couldn’t be the same thing that we’re hearing about here.
John: Yeah, interesting, because, yeah by the Book of Mormon definition, it sounds like they have to gather in their testimonies first before they gathered at stakes of Zion to real estate type of a thing. So, I can see that argument that no, that’s not the gathering we’re talking about, but it sure is something and it’s been massive. And as you said, Israel is this tiny sliver on the Eastern Mediterranean there and there’s a tension there.
Darryl: So, I have had some fun with Google maps the last couple of weeks. You can zoom right down and look at the orchards. Oh my gosh, there’s a difference between what they farm in Palestine and what they farm in Israel. This is a country that’s making the desert blossom. Millions of Jews live there now, but if the whole world is to gather there, talk to us about what kind of a straight place this might be because it’s pretty small.
John: Because it’s not very big and also when you leave Jerusalem and you get out on the highway near the old road to Jericho, just the green and the trees suddenly change to nothing and just…
Darryl: But why? Couldn’t they make all of the desert blossom, does that have to end at a border? What about the Jews in Israel today that are making that happen?
John: I don’t know.
Darryl: It’s just fascinating me that as a people, they’ve gathered, it looks like they formed a kind of agronomy that lets them be independent.
John: Yes, you go to certain places, like when you go further north to Megiddo and things like that, there’s fields and things and everything like that. But there are still some real desert places and going down to the Dead Sea and so forth. But I remember coming up one of those highways and just seeing miles of tomatoes, everywhere.
Darryl: Wow, what’s your favorite thing about going to Israel?
John: It’s not something that I expected, and it’s not something that gets talked about that much, but my favorite thing was sitting on the south steps of the temple and knowing that after the feast of Tabernacles, Jesus comes out, who did sin, this man or his parents that he was born blind? Neither, but that the works of God to be shown and he tells them to go wash in the pool of Silom, which is, the path that is right there. And a pretty good argument that it all happened right there, that the Savior had been on those steps and just, I don’t know, sitting there on those steps was, for me, that was wonderful.
Darryl: Great witness. Thank you very much for being with us today. Hope you have a good trip.
Ken Krogue continues his three-part interview with Joeseph Spencer, who explains his view on scholarly controversy surrounding the Book of Isaiah.
Joe: As a philosopher, what strikes me there in Isaiah is that there’s a kind of philosophical edge to him. A philosopher tries to find the general, the very universal, right? The conceptual or the patterns in things and then extract them and say, this has broad significance. Isaiah’s doing that. He’s tracking things happening in history, but then also extracting them from history in a way that you can see their universal applicability or something.
Ken: Our readers love to hear the exciting stuff, you know, and we were talking just before the show began, of the three main issues that seem to be hot is historical being fulfilled in end times right. Is it about Nephi’s day or our day?
That’s one, the scholars have been debating for years, and you’ve said recently they’ve even moved on, but the big question is, was there one Isaiah?
And if I can summarize, I understand that Isaiah prophesied, and he mentioned Cyrus by name 150 years into the future. And then it happened. So, there’s this big debate. Was there one Isaiah who saw that? Was there a series of Isaiah’s? They call it Deutro-trito Isaiah.
The second big issue, and then throughout Isaiah, there’s this discussion of the suffering servant that was prophesied. Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Joseph Smith talked about him also, and Orson Hyde talked about them. So, something’s going on there.
You’ve mentioned there are a few things, the scholars would you say to those three big mainstream issues that would really be interesting?
Joseph: Yes. Let me speak to each of them individually if that’s all right.
Controversy #1: Isaiah on End Times vs History of His Day
Joseph: So, for the first one, I think the question of the applicability of Isaiah today, maybe the way to phrase that one, is it something that we trap in the past through historical scholarship or does it have some kinds of ongoing relevance? And in some sense, that’s a question about all of scripture. To the extent that I can find the Book of Mormon and the ruins of Meso-America, that’s beautiful and maybe confirms my faith, but there’s a certain sense in which I’ve trapped it in the past and now I don’t know, why do I care about my ritual. There is a point at which I want to say no, I want to read the book about me, right?
Ken: And I have to wonder: would Nephi have gone to the trouble if it was only applicable about then?
Joseph: Exactly.
Ken: Would he write it to his descendants?
Joseph: Precisely. So, I think that’s a really important question about all of scripture. The more we study it historically, the better we will understand it. But we have to be careful to find a balance between historical understanding and losing the text in the past. I don’t think Isaiah was looking at the last days when he wrote his prophecies and so on.
Ken: How do you feel he was a John, the revelator kind of experience?
Joseph: It’s possible. I’m not going to say he didn’t, but the way that he reads to me is that he has looked laser-focused on his own time. What’s happening in the next century or two or something like that. The book of Isaiah clearly wants to generalize it and universalize it in certain ways. That’s unmistakable though. It took some talking to work through that, but I don’t think he’s trying to describe events in our days in a straightforward way, but Nephi teaches us to read Isaiah that way. So, I don’t want to say at the same time that we shouldn’t read it as about the last days.
Ken: So, Isaiah might not be in your opinion, but Nephi definitely is pointing us to look at it.
Joseph: What I want to say is you’d better read Isaiah as about the last days, even if that’s not what he’s talking about. I think this is how we read the Doctrine and Covenants, right? There’s a revelation given to David Whitmer under these circumstances and we all know that, but in Sunday school, no one says, okay, this is only for David. We go, how is this applicable to us? How do we think about ourselves in similar circumstances? And that’s what Nephi is trying to tell us to do with Isaiah. Even if Isaiah is not talking about the last days directly, Nephi says these patterns, these prophecies, they’re applicable.
Ken: That’s pretty tightly debated, isn’t that. I mean we’re talking to people who swear it is only last days. Others where it’s only historical, but you’re bringing in, well Isaiah historical, but Nephi applying to our day. That’s a different approach.
Joseph: And what I would say, I’m trying to figure out what the best way to say this is. I mean, the way that most biblical scholars would talk about this is that you have to draw a line between two ways of thinking about a text. You can think about the text as historical. Or you can think about the text as scriptural. And basically, what I want to say is we should think about Isaiah as both, right? So, a good historian is, frankly, I’m not aware of a single historian who works on the Old Testament things who would say that Isaiah was prophesying of last days. None of them.
Ken: So, there’s definitely historical.
Joseph: They would just say, we’re looking at this as a source in history. We’re trying to reconstruct ancient history. There are those who would read it, just as scripture, be in some sense, ignorant of all the history. And they’re going to say, well, of course, this is about the last days, this is what I see here. And I want to say, I think the most responsible approach is to say, there’s history here and the best reconstruction of the history is Isaiah is not thinking of last day stuff. Maybe he is, but he’s not making that obvious if he is, but because it’s also scripture, we claim it as ours. And as a book to be guided by, then we are not only free to but in some sense responsible to read it in light of our own times.
Ken: Well, that’s helpful. Thank you. Let’s move on to the other two.
Controversy #2: Authorship of the Book of Isaiah
Joseph: Authorship. The first thing I would say about authorship is that it’s a very old conversation; eighteenth century. Before the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, this question had already been raised. And the book that really sort of solidified it and got a lot of consensus building and so on was written in 1892 by a scholar named Duhm, (not doom, although some people might feel like that’s appropriate), Bernhard Duhm. But it was a very old hypothesis.
Ken: Did I summarize it correctly, that it was primarily that debate on Cyrus?
Joseph: It’s a little bit more complicated than that. I’ll see if I can spell that out a bit. So, this goes even further back. There are people in the medieval period who were pointing out that there are probably more than one book or more than one prophet involved in. The consensus that emerges at the end of the 19th century and then dominates the 20th century is that there are three distinct authors here behind the text, that often get called first Isaiah, second Isaiah, third Isaiah or just Isaiah-deurto and Isaiah-trito. Just fancy ways of saying first, second and third.
Ken: Would they be related?
Joseph: In terms of genealogy, no. In terms of intellectual inheritance, yes.
Ken: So, they would have studied the previous?
Joseph: Right, exactly. People often talk about a kind of Isaiah School of prophecy or something like that. First Isaiah would live in the eighth century, the way we think of the book of Isaiah traditionally. Second Isaiah would live in the sixth century. There’s a debate about whether he would be in Jerusalem or whether he would be in Babylon at the time. And then third Isaiah would actually be later, maybe even into the fifth century after Jews have returned to Jerusalem. That’s the traditional hypothesis.
It’s gotten much more complicated in the last 34 years. And so, when I hear Latter-Day Saint scholars saying something like, well, here’s what the consensus is on authorship, I want to say, you’re 50 years behind. It’s much more complex. I want to be really clear: that’s not to say that most biblical scholars now assume single authorship. Most don’t. The massive consensus is against unified authorship.
But what’s emerged is I would say two major developments. One is that most of the scholars working on trying to place Isaiah in an ancient context. They look at what they call redaction history. The idea is can we reconstruct the process over several centuries through which this book took its shape, and so they want to say, what can we attribute to an eighth-century figure and then can we figure out at what point people altered the text, edited the text, reorganized its materials, and so on. And that gets really complicated.
There are scholars who have literally deposited a seven or eight-century long process of that taking shape and hundreds of hands involved and so on. There’s a point at which where you have to raise your eyebrows a bit and kind of say from the text alone, you’re reconstructing. That seems a bit fishy, but that’s a major field in Isaiah scholarship. Redaction history has replaced the kind of, can we nail down what’s authentically Isaiah in the eighth century?
The other major development is that there’s been an emergence of interest in what we would probably just call literary readings of Isaiah. And the idea there is to say, can we find themes that run through the whole book that joined the book together, most scholars working on this don’t assume single authorship, but they nonetheless assume that the book as we have it, is a kind of unified whole. So rather than trying to say, oh, there’s first Isaiah and he’s got his project, and second Isaiah is a completely different thing they say, now these are related, and the book is trying to tell us something by the way it’s structured and organized. So yeah, it’s the primary conversation, and Isaiah scholarship has nothing to do with first, second and third Isaiah, or has nothing to do with this debate about whether there is a single author. Almost everyone assumes there are multiple authors.
Ken: So that debate in scholar’s eyes is already closed.
Joseph: Largely.
Ken: Is there anybody who’s not?
Joseph: Yeah, that’s certainly. Evangelical Christians who work in the biblical studies world, not by any means, all of them, but certainly some of them.
Ken: They’ve still got the door open?
Joseph: They do. And the reason is that they’re committed to biblical inerrancy. The idea that nothing in the Bible could be in any way wrong because this is God’s book, and so they say if it says the book of Isaiah at the beginning, then Isaiah is the author.
Ken: Where are the Latter-Day Saints on this, the scholars?
Joseph: There aren’t a lot of Isaiah scholars in the church. You can count them on one hand.
Ken: Who are they?
Joseph: So, Donald Perry is probably the most well-respected scholar, if you will. He’s a very recognizable name in the world of Biblical studies. He doesn’t write and publish from my knowledge of Isaiah.
Joseph: Exactly, he does Dead Sea Scrolls. He’s done a lot of work on 1st Samuel. So, he’s done a lot of text history stuff, but yeah, he hasn’t published a lot on Isaiah for a non-Mormon, but he writes a lot on Isaiah for Mormons. So David Barkervoy has written a bit about Isaiah though his specialization is primarily elsewhere in the Bible.
Ken: I’ve put you on the spot a little bit. Any others just come to mind? The first time we met you, you had a pretty big shelf of not only the LDS, but the whole shelf was full of Isaiah scholars.
Joseph: There’s no Mormon. I mean people have contributed to the scholarly conversation about Isaiah. Very, very few Latter-day Saints. Maybe one; just not a lot. And it would be worth, I mean, I really think it’d be an important thing for the latter-day saints to get involved in that conversation.
So in the actual field of Isaiah scholarship, the consensus is multiple authorship. Now can we reconstruct its history? The few who resist tend to be evangelical scholars. And it’s worth saying there are a lot of evangelical scholars who write about Isaiah who is not regarded as good scholars, but there are a couple who insist on single authorship, who is widely regarded as good scholars. John Oswald would be a very good example. So there are a couple of Isaiah scholars out there who are insisting on single authorship and make arguments for single authorship who are not the sort laughed out of the academy. It’s an option. I think it’s an important thing.
It’s regarded as a very conservative option, but it’s an option.
Controversy #3: Who is Isaiah’s Suffering Servant
Ken: Okay, well that’s helpful. So that’s the second big question. So how about the third one? The servant question.
Joseph: The servant question, yes. A lot of scholars have lost interest in that question too. It was also made really important by Bernhard Duhm, the same book in 1892 because in his commentary on Isaiah, he extracted what he called four servant songs from just Isaiah 40 through 55 and said these seem to have had been originally distinct. They seemed to have come from another context and then it had been forced into this text and that started a kind of long, ongoing conversation about the servant. There’s a great deal of scholarship over the course of the 20th century, but the last 20 to 30 years, that conversation has in a lot of ways died down in part because…
Ken: In the scholarly world.
Joseph: In the scholarly world, and partly because there was –
Ken: In our world of here, we’re getting it from all directions.
Joseph: Yes, it doesn’t surprise me.
Ken: It seems to be escalating.
Joseph: And that will be. What happened was there was a book, a very, very thin little book by David Klein’s, title was something like, I, He, We, something like something like that, but basically made the argument that trying to figure out who the servant is, misses the point of the book of Isaiah. If the book of Isaiah wanted you to know who the servant is, it would tell you, and that the way it’s written is trying to do something else. And that shifted attention away from trying to figure out who the servant is, to say, how is this organized literarily, and what is it doing with the servant. And I think the results have been far more fruitful than the debate over who the servant is. Obviously, Latter-day Saints have something invested because the New Testament’s insists that the servant is Christ and the book of Mormon makes that same move. Abinadi interprets it that way as well.
Joseph: Yes, exactly. So, the Latter-day Saints tend to have a stake…
Ken: Who are the candidates? So, Christ, in fact, that was written into the scripture headings. The Messiah. And then we’re hearing Joseph Smith, we’re hearing John the Revelator. We’ve heard John the Revelator. We’re hearing that it’s some descendant of David; Davidic bloodlines still to come that we don’t know. We’ve had the arguments made by LDS scholars that it’s a composite of the book of Mormon, that it’s not a person, it’s a book. Israel, literally the state of Israel says it means Israel. It’s a composite of a group of people. And we went back through some of the literature, some of the latter-day saint literature and when David O. McKay was the prophet, everyone’s swore up and said he was David. He was a prophet, you know, and so we were 8 different… and they’re still being debated, and it seems like they’re escalating. But you’re not seeing that in your world.
Joseph: Not in the scholarly world. I’m trying to decide how blunt I can be about Latter-day Saint’s interpretation. I’ll decide that in a moment.
Ken: We believe in radical candor here.
Joseph: I’ll be candid in a moment. I’ll speak first about the scholarly world though. In the scholarly world, there are sort of two major options that are discussed. So obviously there’s the traditional interpretation that it’s Christ. Most scholars today would say no, like the vast majority of scholars.
Ken: They would say text doesn’t support that.
Joseph: They would just say Isaiah is not looking that far down the road. Christians can read it that way, but that’s a Christian reading, that’s not Isaiah. Okay. So, the two…
Ken: This goes back to the sort of the Cyrus idea. He wasn’t meaning of the future.
Joseph: Right. Exactly. So, the two options that usually get discussed in the literature that is, one would be that it’s Israel as a composite. Not meaning the state of Israel started in 1947 but meaning Israel as the people. That is by far the most common Jewish interpretation today.
Ken: Yes, we see that.
Joseph: And in a lot of ways it makes the most sense of the text, so when it talks about the servants suffering and all these people looking on and say suffering for our sins, Israel says that’s the history of our people. We’ve suffered for the nations. The other major option, that’s often discussed, is that it’s actually a real literal person in Isaiah’s day, in second Isaiah’s day, right, so someone probably the prophet himself being persecuted for his prophecy. So, Isaiah is the servant. Probably second Isaiah initially discussed. So those are the two options that get discussed the most. Christians obviously traditionally regard it as Christ. The most traditional Jewish interpretation is that it’s the Messiah although of course, they don’t identify that with Jesus. So those are the options sort of traditionally. Latter-day Saints have done a lot of funky things with this. So here, I’ll get candid for a moment. I get so nervous about being so definitive, but, I think a lot of what gets said about the servant being some Davidic figure, etc., etc., is largely nonsense. Not just because I want to be like a good responsible historian and show my scholarly bonafide’s right, but just because it doesn’t make a lot of sense of the text.
Ken: Can you give an example? Just come up off the top of your head.
Joseph: There’s nothing within the context of say Isaiah 53 or Isaiah 52: 13 through Isaiah 50: 3,12, which is all one song or one poem. There’s nothing there that suggests that what we’re dealing with is a royal figure. There’s nothing there that decides that it should be of the lineage of David at all. You have to have some sort of systematic reading of the whole of the book of Isaiah and it forces things to mean certain things. And I’m just really highly skeptical of those kinds of readings. They seem to make a lot of leaps and not use a lot of evidence. And, I want solid evidence that this is the best way.
Ken: I was just at a conference three, four weeks ago where that was the main thesis of three of the seminars. It was Joseph Smith.
Joseph: And that’s a very traditional reading of 3 Nephi 20 and 21, right. So 3 Nephi, 20 and 21 there, Christ takes Isaiah 52 and the very last verses where It talks about the servant. And he talks about this being the figure who was going to be marred but then healed and he’s clearly talking about the context of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. And so, this sort of automatic or the easiest reading of that passage is that there Jesus is applying the certain passages to Joseph Smith. So that’s a very traditional interpretation. You go back over commentaries, I think Elder McConkie says that and so on. Right? So, that’s a very traditional latter-day saint interpretation of 3 Nephi, 20 and 21. Is that what Isaiah himself is talking about?
Again, I would say no. I think Isaiah is talking about his own time and Nephi, and Christ and the Book of Mormon and saying yes, but reapply this. And so, I don’t think Christ is there saying that’s what Isaiah was talking about. He’s saying you can use those there to think about the events of the restoration and so on. I think the better reading of 3 Nephi 20 and 21 is the one that was worked out by Gaye Strathearn and Jacob Moody in a paper that was published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. They argue that it’s not talking about Joseph Smith. It’s talking about the Book of Mormon itself. And you mentioned this is a possibility.
Ken: Yes, that one’s resurfaced quite a bit.
Joseph: I think that’s the best reading of the text. The word Christ is reapplying the servant to, the servant passages to…is not Joseph Smith, but the book of Mormon. It’s going to be marred and it’s going to be healed through the loss of lost manuscript. And then through the replacement with the small plates. So that’s another possibility, but other than the scholarly world, this is not…. I mean, these are not options they’re talking about at all for obvious reasons, right? They’re not going, could this be Joseph Smith, or could this be the book of Mormon?
From where I’m sitting, I would say Isaiah’s own discussion of the servant, I think the richest interpretation, the richest work going on, is this stuff going on in the scholarly world, saying stop trying to identify what’s Isaiah doing with the servant, how do we reconstruct the role he’s playing, first. And then second, we can say how does Christ reapply it in the Book of Mormon and there, I think the best reading is, he’s applying it to the Book of Mormon itself.
In this second article in the series on the Suffering Servant, we move to Isaiah 53, and focus on the vicarious nature of our Redeemer’s sacrifice. We also consider the Jewish perspective.
Cowles, regarding the vicarious nature of Christ’s sacrifice, writes: “We cannot be too grateful for these amplified, varied, and yet marvelously coincident and unanimous declarations to the effect of vicarious atonement—Christ suffering for his people … and here it cannot be said too emphatically that these numerous, various, yet equivalent forms of expression are all borrowed from the Hebrew sacrificial system, and therefore must be interpreted in the light of that system … that suffering must first be borne by some innocent being for the guilty before he can be forgiven … Hence in this great illustrative sacrificial system, the Lord selected those animals which best personify innocence, gentleness, meekness, e.g., lambs, goats, heifers, bullocks, doves; and made them symbols of the suffering, atoning ‘Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world.’”
Kay notes: “There are no fewer than eleven expressions in Isaiah 53 which clearly describe the vicarious character of the sufferings endured by the Lord’s Servant: (1) ‘He bore our griefs;’ (2) ‘He carried our sorrows;’ (3) ‘He was wounded for our transgressions;’ (4) ‘Bruised for our iniquities;’ (5) ‘The chastisement of our peace was upon Him;’ (6) ‘By His stripes we are healed;’ (7) ‘The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all;’ (8) ‘For the transgression of My people was He stricken;’ (9) ‘When Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin;’ (10) ‘He shall bear (or, carry) their iniquities;’ (11) ‘He bare the sins of many. In [the 9th item in this list] the sacrificial nature of these sufferings is directly stated … The terms ‘iniquities,’ ‘transgressions,’ and ‘sins,’ which all occur here, gather in like manner around the work of the high priest on the ‘Day of Atonement’ (Leviticus 16:16, 21, 22, 30, 34).
“The expressions in vv. 11–12, ‘carry their iniquities,’ and ‘bare the sin of many,’ are parallel to the one used in Leviticus 16:22; where it is prescribed that the scape-goat (over whose head Aaron had confessed ‘all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in all their sins,’ v. 21) should bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’”
Finally, McDonogh and Manton write that Isaiah 53: “is so full and clear, that it rather needs meditation than comment—faith more than learning to conceive it, to admire it, and to learn from it.”
We will also quote extensively from the Jewish writings of former ages to show the Jewish belief that Isaiah 53 points to the Messiah. Many of these come from Neubauer and Driver’s book, The Fifty-third Chapter of Isaiah according to Jewish Interpreters, Volume II, printed at Oxford in 1877.
The purpose of Neubauer and Driver’s book was to deny the Messianic significance of Isaiah 53, and certainly, there are plenty of quotes and allusions to shore up that perspective. But the reader who is filled with the Holy Spirit will be pricked in the heart to know that these scriptures testify of the Messiah.
The number of references to the Messiah quoted from the Talmud and other Jewish writings are extensive. One can clearly see, however, a transition between a belief in the Messiah, to a belief in two Messiahs—one who suffered and one who did not—to a number of other beliefs, including making Jeremiah, Hezekiah or Josiah or the nation of Israel the subject of these verses.
¶ “WHO hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” —Isaiah 53:1
“WHO hath believed our report?” Paul makes reference to these scriptures: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Esaias saith, Lord, who hath believed our report?” (Romans 10:13–16).
Elder McConkie taught: “Will you join with me in considering these questions: If you had lived in Jerusalem in the days of Jesus, would you have accepted him as the Son of God as did Peter and the Apostles? Or would you have said he had a devil and wrought miracles by the power of Beelzebub, as Annas and Caiaphas claimed? … If you believe the words of Joseph Smith, you would have believed what Jesus and the ancients said. If you reject Joseph Smith and his message, you would have rejected Peter and Paul and their message.”[1]
“And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” The LXX (????) reads, “And to whom hath the arm of the Lord been made manifest?” Jenour has: “The arm of Jehovah] i.e., the salvation of Jehovah, the power of Jehovah to save man exhibited in the gospel, which is called by the apostle, ‘the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth’ (Romans 1:16; 1 Corinthians 1:24).”
Wordsworth writes: “The Prophet asks, Who hath recognized God’s glorious working in Christ, delivering the World from a worse bondage and exile than that of Babylon? The Prophet takes up the word of Isaiah 51:9: ‘Awake, awake! put on strength, O arm of the Lord;’ and of Isaiah 52:10: ‘The Lord hath made bare His holy arm in the eyes of all Nations.’”
Govett says: “It is adduced, most justly, by St. John, among his closing observations on the public ministry of our blessed Lord, and its results, as regarded his nation. ‘But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him; that the saying of Esaias might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?’[2] This prophecy, therefore, was fulfilled by the general unbelief of the Jews, and the fewness of those who believed the Saviour’s miracles and doctrines.”
Jenour notes: “And so it is now; the doctrine of salvation through a crucified Saviour has no more attractions in the eyes of the self-righteous, nominal Christian than it had in the eyes of the Jews.” Keith explains that the time will come when many shall accept the Gospel: “… he shall make bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see his salvation” (Isaiah 52:10). Henderson notes that just as the hand, the arm “denotes power [to] act.”
“For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, [there is] no beauty that we should desire him.” —Isaiah 53:2
“For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground.” Instead of tender plant, the Peshitta (????) has infant. Cheyne suggests that this is in the perfect prophetic certitude (see Isaiah 30:7; 42:16; Mosiah 16:6, that is, when written as if it had already happened, so sure is the word of prophecy about a future event). Leeser translates as: “Yea, he[3] grew up [וַיַּעַל] like a small shoot before him, and as a root out of a dry land: he had no form nor comeliness, so that we should look at him; and no countenance, so that we should desire him.” Others who also use the prophetic perfect include AMP, ASV, BBE, Bishops, CEV, CJV, ERV, ESV, GW, HCSB, ISV, JPS, LBP, LBLA, LEB, LHI, NASB, NBLH, Rotherham, RV, TLV, WEB and WEBA.
Driver & Neubauer quote Yepheth Ben ‘Ali as saying that this verse is of the Messiah, as rather the whole of the chapter. Urwick writes: “… the figure [of a tender plant] is not intended to describe a feeling or estimate, but a fact—the lowly birth and youth of the Servant.” Christ Himself says: “I Jesus … I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star” (Revelation 22:16, also see Isaiah 11).
Wordsworth suggests: “Christ, Who has been described as the Arm of the Lord, revealed from heaven by reason of His Godhead, is now represented as a Shoot growing out of the earth by reason of His Manhood … Then He, Who is ‘the Branch,’ sprouted forth from it [i.e., from the trunk that had been cut down.”
Birks explains these expressions as: “The figures of the tender plant or sucker, and the root or shoot, are resumed from Isaiah 11:1, and express the low estate of the house of David when He appeared. The dry ground is expounded by the question of Nathanael, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’”
Govett suggests: “… also to the lowly and degraded state of the family of David, whence the Lord was to spring.” Jenour has: “The low condition of the parents of Christ, the obscurity of his birth, and the meanness[4] of his education, are principally intended. In propagating and establishing his doctrines he was wholly unsupported by human power; indeed both the Jewish and Gentile authorities were opposed to him; and thus with his little band of followers he might well be likened to a tender plant, exposed to the rude blasts of the north[5] wind.”
President Brigham Young observed: “Christendom now acknowledge that Jesus was the Son of God; they look upon him as God manifested in the flesh according to the New Testament; yet the generation in which He lived did not see these tokens of divinity which this generation recognize. To them he was ‘a root out of dry ground’— ‘a stumbling block,’ ‘a rock of offense.’”[6]
Elder Bruce D. Porter said: “In the premortal realm, he had been the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator of the earth, the great I AM. From these exalted heights, he descended, coming to earth in the most humble of circumstances … Instead of worldly station, he chose to be born in a lowly stable and live the simple life of a carpenter. He grew up in an obscure village in a despised precinct of Palestine. He made himself of no reputation, and was ‘a root out of a dry ground,’ having ‘no beauty that we should desire him.’”[7]
“He hath no form [לֹא־תֹאַר] nor comeliness.” Alexander writes: “Form is here put for beautiful or handsome form, as in 1 Samuel 16:18 [where] David is called a man of form [אִישׁ תֹּאַר], i.e. a comely person.” President Joseph Fielding Smith explained: “There was nothing about [Christ] to cause people to single him out. In appearance he was like men; and so it is expressed here by the prophet that he had no form or comeliness, that is, he was not so distinctive, so different from others that people would recognize him as the Son of God. He appeared as a mortal man.”[8] On this expression, please see my paper, “Witness the Condescension of the Son of Man,” as it relates to The Ascension of Isaiah and also 1 Nephi 11.
In the “Bread of Life Discourse” in John 6, we see multiple allusions to the condescension of Christ. The Savior proclaims: “For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6:38). Many of those who surrounded Him did not recognize Him for He had no external form or comeliness: “The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven. And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? (John 6:41–42).
“The Savior then teaches that He is the manna that came down from heaven: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:47–51). Even His own disciples were troubled by the Savior’s teachings about His condescension, to which He responded: “Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?” (John 6:60–62, emphasis added). Except the Holy Ghost bear witness, we could not see the Divinity and Sonship of the Holy One of Israel.
“And when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” Targum (????) has, “but a holy brightness shall be His brightness, that everyone who seeth Him shall contemplate Him (or, ‘consider’ or ‘meditate upon him’).” Instead of that we should desire him, the Peshitta (????) has we denied him (i.e., when man would see the Savior was as other men in appearance, they would deny Him).
Birks has: “Few will be found who have believed the prophet’s report; for, when the people look upon Messiah, He has no beauty in their eyes.” After I joined the Church I heard a lovely story about two men who had died and crossed the veil and were being interviewed. The first man shares his knowledge about the Savior and the restoration of the Gospel with the interviewer. When he is finished, he leaves the room and the second enters for his interview. As the second person enters the room and walks toward the interviewer “… he fell upon his knees and cried, ‘My Lord, my God.’”[9]
In the next article, we continue with Isaiah 53:3.
[3] The common י verb construction [וַיַּעַל] normally has us look at the person who is spoken off regarding the verb, but can also stand for the person. For instance, in Genesis 2:18 we have וַיֹּאמֶר יהוה אֱלֹהִים. And-(marker that indicates we should look for the person after the verb)-said-Lord Elohim, which means: “And the Lord Elohim said.”
[4]Meanness here signifies insignificant. Of course we know the Savior had no mean education, but rather, was taught from on high. So also the Prophet Joseph Smith, who was taught from on High by the Savior.
[5] In the Holy Land, better, east wind or sirocco (see Isaiah 27:8).
[6] Young, President, Brigham. “The True Church of Christ, Etc.” Journal of Discourses 12:206b.
[7] Porter, Elder Bruce D. “Redeemer of Israel.” October 1995 General Conference.
[8] Smith, President Joseph Fielding. Doctrines of Salvation 1:23. Compiled by McConkie, Bruce R.
[9] LDS Young Women Manual 3, (1994), 6–8. Lesson 2: “Coming to Know the Savior.”
Did you know it’s really possible to fast from all food for 40 days? An extended fast can be effective for your health and spirituality, but comes with dangers and risks.
Dangers of Extended Fasting
The video above tells of the dangers and risks involved with extended fasting. If you embark on an extended fast for your health or spirituality, we suggest you do your research, have body fat, and monitor your health along the way.
Do Your Research
“So the question is, are there any risks dangers for extended fasting? The main one is you’ve got to research and really know what you’re doing. Again The Complete Guide to Fasting is the book I recommend.”
“Make sure in extend fasting that you have enough fat stores. If you’re already pretty low body fat then your body moves from burning sugars to burning fats and the burning proteins, and that’s when your body starts eating itself. That’s when people move into bulimia and anorexia, having health problems, hair loss, all that kind of stuff. But if you got fat stores that’s not a problem. Think about a bear hibernating all winter living off their fat stores! The same architect who made a bear made man. It’s all about just monitoring closely.
Monitor Your Health
“Have some medical supervision. Check in with a doctor periodically to get your your vitals tested and blood work done. Then just get those checked and watch them close in the middle of the fast. Don’t don’t eat heavy things. I made the mistake of having a small handful of sunflower seeds and felt like I was going to die. If you re going to eat, eat little things like maybe some avocado, wheatgrass juice, Bragg’s apple cider, vinegar, lemon-lime juice, those kind of things are great. Do your homework make sure you’ve checked in with a doctor and if you don’t have enough body fat you’re not going to move from burning fat to burning proteins.
John: We approach 1st Nephi chapter 20, which is Isaiah 48. It’s really helpful to read the last few verses of 1st Nephi 19 where Nephi kind of sets up. In verse 22, he says, “that I might more fully persuade them to believe in the Lord their Redeemer. I did read into them that which was written by the Prophet Isaiah. For I did liken all scriptures unto us that it might be for our profit and learning.” In verse 24 of 1st Nephi 19 he then says, “hear ye the words of the Prophet who are remnant of the house of Israel, a branch who have been broken off, hear ye the words of the Prophet which were written unto all the house of Israel, and liken them unto yourselves. That ye may have hope as well as your brother and from whom he have been broken off, for after this manner, has the prophet written.”
Darryl: So, John, I found this very interesting that Royal Skousen and some other Book of Mormon scholars have pointed out that these three verses in chapter 19 are actually in a chapter the way Joseph Smith dictated it, that has all of 48 and 49 in it. So, it was great that you read that introduction. That helps us all realize we ought to capture those last three verses. Thanks.
John: Oh yes. And one of the great things about having a prophet comment on another prophet is Nephi is almost telling us this is what I want you to get from this. And then here come the actual words of Isaiah.
Darryl: You know, and what I find is the fact that Nephi offers so much commentary, he might be our best single source of commentary on the book of Isaiah.
John: And if we’re going to have a commentary on a prophet, it’s kind of nice that it would be another prophet.
Darryl: I agree.
John: Instead of an airhead.
Darryl: So, should we jump right in?
John: Sure. Let’s take a look.
Hearken and Hear This: Exploring Isaiah’s Commandment
John: In verse 1 of 1st Nephi chapter 20, it says “hearken and hear this.” Hearken means more than just hear. Hearken is hear and do, hear and obey. “Oh, house of Jacob who are called by the name of Israel that are come forth out of the waters of Judah or out of the waters of baptism.” Now, that’s not in the Old Testament, but it is here in the Book of Mormon, “depart out of the waters of baptism, who swear by the name of the Lord, make mention of the God of Israel, yet they swore not in truth nor in righteousness.”
Darryl: So, at the beginning of that verse, you notice that the word “hearken”, that wasn’t there in the King James version. So, what do you have to tell us about hearken?
John: Hearken means listen. If I say clean your room and you hearkened, that means you cleaned your room. Now I don’t normally order you to clean your room, but that means you did it. Whereas “hear” is I heard it, but I didn’t do it.
Darryl: So, there’s some obedience tied to hearken?
John: Yes, it’s a stronger word than “listen up”.
Darryl: Now we don’t really know if Nephi is the one who put the word “hearken” in, or if that’s something that got dropped from scribal error.
John: Maybe “Mr. Go and Do” put it in there because he not only heard but he did.
Darryl: Let’s keep going.
John: “They call themselves of the holy city, but they do not stay themselves upon the God of Israel.” I remember my sisters all used to sew, and they had these things called a fabric stay and I always think of that when I think of that idea of stay.
Darryl: I always put a little stay in my shirt…
John: Yes, to rely, “to stay upon the God of Israel, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of hosts is his name.” So, you know, it’s one thing to talk about and then say it belonged to him, but to really rely on him instead of on yourself, it’s just kind of the theme that’s coming up next.
Nephi’s Motive to Include Isaiah
Darryl: So, let me ask this question. When I got through these first two verses, it made me want to ask: is Nephi having to describe this in reformed Egyptian, in the gold plates. What would be his motive to include anything from Isaiah when he knows that we have the Bible because he gives evidence of that later in the Book of Mormon?
John: I myself wonder if it wasn’t for his people. If you go backward in 1 Nephi 19 to verse 3, it says, “the things which were written should be kept for the instruction of my people who should possess the land and also for other wise purposes which purposes are known unto the Lord.”
Darryl: That’s interesting. Terrell Davis did a thing on all the commentaries that the Book of Mormon did on Isaiah, so why Jesus used that, and why Alma used it with Abinadi, but Jacob kind of redoes this part and he kind of gives it as the codex for us saying, the Gentiles who come to America will be responsible for delivering the Gospel back to our people, the Lamanites, to all of the house of Israel and to all of the Jews. So that’s interesting that Nephi might be directing it just at his family.
John: I know, and we really think this is all written for us, for our day, but could it be that Nephi was talking to his own people as well.
Darryl: It could have just been a general conference to kind of scold them because Isaiah does a little bit of scolding, doesn’t he?
John: And it’s not that it doesn’t still apply to us and to everybody, but he’s talking, “I read to them,” it was to his people and I think we can benefit by looking at it that way as well as, okay, now what do I do with it today.
Isaiah and The Refiner’s Fire
Darryl: So, are there some other verses you want to highlight for us today?
John: In 1st Nephi, chapter 20? Absolutely. “I have refined thee, I have chosen thee in the furnace of a…”
Darryl: That doesn’t sound like you’ve been chosen.
John: No, do you know what it reminds me of, though? The hymn, ‘How Firm a Foundation.’ It’s one that we normally don’t sing because it’s underneath at the bottom.
Darryl: Oh, you mean where they have all the extra verses.
John: Yes, the extra credit verses. Let’s see, how does it go? “Though through fiery trials thy pathway may lie, my grace all sufficient shall be thy supply. The flame will not hurt thee. I only designed thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.”
Darryl: So, explain dross and gold, I don’t understand how things are refined. Do you?
John: Yes, “dross” is a metallurgy term and the impurities in the metal kind of float to the top. They’re the scum that you scrape off the top. And then what else you have is refined.
Darryl: So, what you’re saying is if we accept the furnace of affliction, God puts us in, He’ll scrape the scum off of us.
John: He burns the scum, some more than others, but he burns the scum out of us right. An interesting thing is that later on, the Book of Mormon uses the word dross in kind of an interesting way. The poor among the Zoramites come up to Alma and say, what about us? They won’t let us worship in the synagogues. And, they were considered dross, it says.
Darryl: Sort of the leftovers there weren’t’ they?
John: Because they felt poor and they felt they were dross, but by the end of it, when Alma talks to him he says, you’re not dross if you’re poor. If you remember to say the prayers the way I’ve taught you, if you remember God and all these things, but then you don’t hearken and go help the poor, then ye are as dross. And he says, no, you’re not dross because you’re poor, you’re dross because you’re not charitable. And that might be the only two times the word dross appears in the Book of Mormon, I have to check, but…
Darryl: So, what else is in this chapter that we ought to be paying attention to?
John: Just the fact that he’s scolding him, but he still loves him and he’s telling him, I haven’t forgotten you and you’re still my called and I’m going to send a servant to declare these words to you. You go to verse 18, “Oh, that thou hast hearken to my commandments, then had thy peace been as a river and thy righteousness is the waves of the sea.” Calling them on their past, but also kind of giving us a promise to the future.
Darryl: So, I hiked up to Bridal Veil falls the other day. The falls were falling on one side and I was looking at the Provo river rush by. The whole sound was so soothing.
John: Yes. And I don’t know if it’s an accident that we use white noise to help us fall asleep. It’s the sound of constancy and it drowns out other sounds. And then thy righteousness is as the ways of the sea. I have these relaxation CDs I bought 20 years ago at home, and one of them is waves, pounding surf and one of them is a river. And interesting that he would use that same idea.
Darryl: It is, and it speaks volumes to me. Verse 22 has an interesting set of words in, about a dozen. The Book of Mormon says, “and notwithstanding, he had done all this and greater also. And then there is no peace, saith the Lord unto the wicked.” What are your thoughts on that?
John: I equate it with the “wickedness never was happiness” idea. I’ve done all this, and I can do greater also. And I don’t know anything. But when I look at it, it sounds like you can’t feel good doing bad things. And the wicked, well the kind of peace I’m promising here will not come to the wicked unless you hearken.
Darryl: Well John, thanks a lot for joining us here today at SearchIsaiah.org.
Fasting is more than skipping meals (see Isaiah 58)
“Fasting combined with sincere prayer can help you prepare yourself and others to receive God’s blessings.”1 In Isaiah 58, the prophet lists at least eight reasons for fasting, some of which include calling on the Lord, “dealing thy bread to the hungry, and loosing the bands of wickedness in your own life.
The people fasted as God had commanded and asked Isaiah in perplexity why God had not heard them. In reply he told them, “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness . . . and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, . . . [to] bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him . . . ?” (Isaiah 58:6–7). This is a reminder that our own fasts require an offering for the poor.—“Great Are the Words of Isaiah”, Hugh Nibley 2
There are of course many reasons for fasting including caring for the poor, adding strength to prayers or priesthood blessings. But, the purpose of this post is more selfish and centered on what fasting can do for you specifically.
The definition above, comes from First Presidency in 2004, as they defined fasting for youth, young single adults, and new converts. But is also suggests that fasting is more than just going “without food and drink voluntarily for a certain period of time.”
In Isaiah 58, the prophet deepens our understanding of the principal of fasting in verses 6-12. There he lists the guiding principles of the fast and then motivates us by listing God’s promises for a “true fast.”
How Does One Fast for 40 days?
In this next video, Ken Krogue explains how he did a 40 day fast on his own!
Read more about the physical effects and logistics of extended fasting here.
Fasting As Isaiah Sees It
THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET ISAIAH CHAPTER 58The true law of the fast, with its purposes and attendant blessings, is set forth
6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the abands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go bfree, and that ye break every yoke? xx
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6 Is not this the fast that I choose: xxxto loose the bonds of xxxinjustice, xxxto undo the thongs of xxxthe yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, xxxand to break every xxxyoke?xxx
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Fasting can help lift the heavy burdens of sin that too many of us carry around for too long. It can help all of us with spiritual problems (for example, Alma fasted and prayed for his son;Mosiah 27:13-24—Ogden, D. Kelly, Verse by Verse, Old Testament: Volume Two, Deseret Book Company, Kindle Edition.
Verse 6 shows three purposes of a true fast: ➀“to loose the bands of wickedness,” or to help us overcome personal sins which have engulfed us; ➁ “to undo the heavy burdens,” or to help us gain strength for difficult assignments or problems; and ➂ “to let the oppressed go free,” or to petition the Lord to intervene in behalf of our loved ones, such as Alma did when fasting for the salvation of his son (see Mosiah 27:13-24).—Nyman, Monte S., Great are the Words of Isaiah, Cedar Fort, Inc., Kindle Edition. NOTE: inMosiah 27:13-24 “they had fasted and prayed for the space of atwo days and two nights;” not two meals as is the practice on LDS Fast Sunday.
7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the ahungry, and that thou bring the bpoor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from cthine own flesh?x
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7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, xxxand bring the homeless xxxpoor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them, xxxand not to hide yourself xxxfrom your own kin?x
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Let this be an ensample to all saints, and there will never be any lack for bread: When the poor are starving, let those who have, fast one day and give what they otherwise would have eaten to the bishops for the poor, and every one will abound for a long time; and this is one great and important principle of fasts approved of the Lord. And so long as the saints will all live to this principle with glad hearts and cheerful countenances they will always have an abundance.History of the Church, 7:413.
It would be a simple matter for people to comply with this requirement to abstain from food and drink one day each month, and to dedicate what would be consumed during that day to the poor, and as much more as they pleased. The Lord has instituted this law; it is simple and perfect, based on reason and intelligence, and would not only prove a solution to the question of providing for the poor, but it would result in good to those who observe the law. It would call attention to the sin of overeating, place the body in subjection to the spirit, and so promote communion with the Holy Ghost, and ensure a spiritual strength and power which the people of the nation so greatly need. As fasting should always be accompanied by prayer, this law would bring the people nearer to God, and divert their minds once a month at least, from the mad rush of worldly affairs and cause them to be brought into immediate contact with practical, pure and undefiled religion—to visit the fatherless and the widow, and keep themselves unspotted from the sins of the world—President Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine, pp. 237–38
8 ¶ Then shall thy alight➀ break forth as the morning, and thine bhealth shall spring forth speedily:➁ and thy righteousness shall go before thee;➂ the glory of the Lord shall be thy crearward.➃x
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8 Then your light➀ shall break forth like the dawn, xxxand your healing➁ shall xxxspring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,➂ xxxshall be your rear xxxguard.➃ x
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In verses 8–12, Isaiah lists eight promises those you fast true: ➀ Your mind will be illuminated; you will have an understanding
➁ Health come speedily to you
➂ God defends you, going before you as your ally
➃ The Lord has your back; He will protect you from behind
9 Then shalt thou acall, and the Lord shall answer;➄ thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.➅ If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the bputting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity; x
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9 Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;➄ xxxyou shall cry for help xxxand he will say, Here I xxxam.➅x
If you remove the yoke from among you, xxxthe pointing of the xxxfinger, the speaking of xxxevil,
➄ When you pray to Him, God will pay attention, hearing, and answering
➅ He hears and answers your cry for help as if face to face
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As explained in the days of the prophet Isaiah, the children of Israel were admonished, “Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,” meaning fasting and then paying fast offerings. If you would do that, he promised, “Then shalt thou call and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.” (Isa. 58:7,9.)
We are saying to the Saints, how important that you keep this fundamental law to fast and to deal out your bread to the hungry through contributions so that when you call, the Lord shall answer.—President Harold B. Lee England Area CR, 1971, p. 140.)
What a wonderful feeling of security can come in a crisis to one who has learned to pray and has cultivated listening ears so that he can “call, and the Lord shall answer;” when he can cry and the LORD shall say, “Here I am.”—President Harold B. Lee, A Time of Decision,April 1972
10 And if thou draw out thy soul to the ahungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light brise➆ in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday:➇ x
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10 if you offer your food to the hungry xxxand satisfy the needs of xxxthe afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness➆ xxxand your gloom be like xxxthe noonday.➇
➆ Your He lights the darkness of your life ➇ Gloom in your life will be brightened as the light at noon
11 And the Lord shall aguide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in bdrought, and cmake fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a dspring of water, whose waters fail not.
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11 The LORD will guide you continually, xxxand satisfy your needs xxxin parched places, xxxand make your bones xxxstrong;
and you shall be like a watered garden, xxxlike a spring of water, xxxwhose waters never xxxfail.
A Quenched thirst A’ Fed bones B Watered garden B’ Running spring (v. 11)(continued below)
12 And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.x
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12 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; xxxyou shall raise up the xxxfoundations of many xxxgenerations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach, xxxthe restorer of streets to xxxlive in.
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C. Rebuilt ruins C’. Raised buildings D. Repaired walls D’. Restored streets (12)In short, the Lord will bless the whole Israelite society by renewing their (A, A’) bodies (B, B’) fields , (C, C’) homes and (D, D’) cities Of course, although these are physical blessings, most of them can also represent spiritual blessings: water can represent the gospel, homes and foundations the family or Church organization, and streets the path returning to God’s presence.—Victor L. Ludlow,Isaiah: Prophet, Seer, and Poet, Deseret Book
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Fasting as Church Leaders See It
Verses about fasting have been quoted in general conferences by prophets, apostles and other general authorities more than 68 times,3 making the topic one of the most important. Here is a selection of those talks:
1 “Fasting and Fast Offerings,” True to the Faith (2004), 66–69 2 “Great Are the Words of Isaiah”, Hugh Nibley, in Sperry Symposium Classics: The Old Testament, (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, and Deseret Book 2005), 177–195. 3 Stephen W. Liddle and Richard C. Galbraith, Citation Index, Version 3.5.0
Learn the manner of prophesying among the Jews. Isaiah was “what LDS scholar Victor L. Ludlow called a ‘deliberately difficult’ prophet.… Conceal what you are going to say. Never use the same noun twice when referring to a person, group or place (Isaiah uses five different names to describe the same place in one instance). Speak of future events in past tense at times [because you saw the future yesterday in a vision]. In fact, have no time frame — move in and out of past, present and future without telling the reader what you’re doing. Use complex symbolism rather than simple parables. Never let anyone know whether you’re being literal or figurative. All of these come under the heading of the ‘manner of prophesying among the Jews.’” (John Bytheway, “Nephi’s Keys to Understanding the Isaiah Chapters” )
2
Have the spirit of prophecy.
…For because the words of Isaiah are not plain unto you, nevertheless they are plain unto all those that are filled with the spirit of prophecy. (2 Nephi 25:4)
John Bytheway says that this verse often solicits this response, “Well, that’s easy for you to say, Nephi, you were a prophet!” Nephi was, after all, a prophet and most of us do not feel we could be like him in this matter, selling ourselves short. Though most of us may not have his stature we are God’s children and if confirmed members of His Church we have the Gift of the Holy Ghost. He also reminded us that “John the Revelator taught that the testimony of Christ is the spirit of prophecy (Revelation 19:10).”
Ask yourself, if you have a testimony of Christ and if you do how did you get it? Probably some form of personal revelation, which means you have had the spirit of prophecy. Joseph Smith taught:
God hath not revealed anything to Joseph, but what He will make known unto the Twelve, and even the least Saint may know all things as fast as he is able to bear them (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 149).
If yours is a righteous desire to search the words of Isaiah, as we are commanded by the Lors, surely He will “prepare a way” for you to keep that commandment. Bytheway concludes “this way, you have the spirit of prophecy.”
3
Know the regions round about. Nephi had an advantage of growing up in Jerusalem, just 140 years after Isaiah made these prophecies. For the modern-day reader, we have to learn about Judah 2500+ years later. Isaiah uses 108 different place names with strange pronunciations that can lose the reader.
There are maps of the Holy Land in your scriptures that that may be helpful, but if you feel lost, Bytheway writes,”take heart. You’re in good company. One day, while the Prophet Joseph Smith was translating the Book of Mormon, he looked up and asked, ‘Emma, does Jerusalem have a wall around it?’ She said, ‘Yes, Joseph, Jerusalem has a wall around it. Everybody knows that.’ He said, ‘Thank goodness; I thought I was being deceived.’ And he went right on translating the record. (Events in Life of Prophet, “Elect Lady,” LDS Church News, 1994, 09/10/94).
If Joseph Smith didn’t know that much about Jerusalem while translating, then we don’t need to feel lost as we begin to learn our Holy Land geography.… I suggest if you can just remember four kingdoms, you’ll be in great shape:”
Assyria
Babylon
Israel
Syria
the military superpower to the northeast
the cultural, commercial center to the east
the apostate kingdom just north of Judah
the kingdom just north of Israel
(I might also have mentioned Egypt, but you’ve all heard about Egypt, and it would mess up my system of fours.) You might say I have a BIAS for the four above. BIAS = Babylon, Israel, Assyria, and Syria.” (John Bytheway, “Nephi’s Keys …”)
4
Live in the last days
I know that they shall be of great worth unto them in the last days; for in that day shall they understand them; wherefore, for their good have I written them. (2 Ne 25:8.)
Nephi makes an intriguing statement that begs the question: Why will Isaiah better understood in the last days? Perhaps it is because all around us we see things Isaiah prophesied happening around us. We are witnessing the growth of the Church, construction of temples, and the gathering of Israel by our missionary force. If we carefully study the scriptures the Lord’s Spirit may help us see these things fulfilled. Also as we review we can use these resources:
Restoration scriptures which help clarify Isaiah passages, like the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.
The synopsis at the beginning of each chapter Isaiah and the Book of Mormon. These helpful summaries offer guidance and doctrinal points.
Scripture footnotes add clarifying comments and offer other references.
The LDS Bible Dictionary contains short articles on Isaiah, the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.
Maps of the Holy Land in the back of the scriptures and Old Testament Institute manuals.
Modern prophets who have commented on Isaiah in their writings and General Conferences(See LDS Scripture Citation Index where Church leaders have quoted Isaiah more than 4000 times)
Books and articles from faithful LDS scholars on understanding Isaiah.” (John Bytheway, “Nephi’s Keys …”)
Video: Skyler Hunter | Mobaliz Video Content manager 2018.
This interview with Joseph Spencer, who wrote “The Vision of All,’ explains his unique path to understanding Isaiah through Nephi’s mind
Ken Krogue: Hi everybody, Ken Krogue here with Joseph Spencer and we’re talking today about Isaiah and some new elements that Joseph has added specifically to BYU scholarship. He is a philosophy professor in the middle of the religion department. That’s a bit unique, isn’t it?
Joe Spencer: Yes.
Ken: Has it been an interesting perspective? Tell us, has there ever been a philosophy professor in the religion department?
Joe: Yes at one point, philosophy and religion were actually one department, way before my time.
Ken: Philosophy of men, mingled with scripture.
Joe: Something like that, but from what I understand the point they separated ways, the only person left in the religion department, if I’m not mistaken, was Truman Madsen.
Ken: Well it doesn’t get much better than that.
Joe: Right.
Ken: That’s awesome.
Joe: So, I think I may be the first philosopher there since Truman.
Ken: Oh wow, that’s great. Well, I heard some of his talks on Joseph Smith and I loved that. And Ann Manson is still involved.
Joseph: She is.
Ken: She teaches Isaiah. We’ve interviewed her with podcasts and some of the fun stuff with Search Isaiah already. So is it okay if we just jump in and ask you some questions?
Joe: Sure.
Ken: Thanks for joining us today. But one of the things, what was the pathway that took you through graduate level scholarship to BYU?
Joe: It’s been a weird road. It’s been a very weird road for me. So, I don’t know how much detail you want. I originally planned on studying music before I realized I had no talent and then…
Ken: Note to self.
Joe: Then I thought I’d do business. I’d worked in the music business or something like that and then realized I didn’t like that at all, but in an economics class I took, we read some philosophers who had dealt with the political economy and that kind of thing and I fell in love, and I changed my major without having studied any philosophy, and then left on my mission.
Ken: Where’d you go by the way?
Joe: California. Yeah, Spanish speaking. So, when I came back I began taking philosophy courses. I was looking at the possibility of teaching in seminary or something like that, though that didn’t quite pan out and it didn’t draw my attention as I thought it might.
I studied philosophy when we, my wife and I finished at BYU, actually left the academy. I wasn’t planning on being a professor, we opened a small bookstore in eastern Washington, that survived for a little while. But then we closed up shop and I went and did a master’s in Library Science thinking I would stay in the book world.
In the meanwhile, began working in Mormon studies. At that time, I was doing primarily sort of philosophical reading of scripture, got involved in a few scholarly organizations and that kind of thing. As I was finishing my master’s in Library Science, I got a call from someone at Utah Valley University saying, we have a few philosophy courses that need to be taught, are you available? And I said, yeah, anything besides going on the job market, sounds great. So, I went and taught for a year and two weeks in the classroom which convinced me to go and get a Ph.D. in philosophy.
Ken: Where did you go for your Ph.D.?
Joe: I did my master’s and my Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico and Philosophy. And my plan was not to teach religion, my plan was to teach philosophy, but I kept doing work in Mormon studies and publishing, especially on the book of Mormon and doing theological work and it drew the attention of some folks in religious education and they reached out to me and said, would you be interested? And so, I added that to my list of possibilities and pursued that and landed there. So, it’s been a very strange road, very long.
Ken: How long have you been at BYU now?
Joe: So, complicated question. I started teaching there in 2015 just part time, after I was there a year, I was just doing that after I finished my Ph.D. while looking for jobs, after doing part-time for a year, then I came on full time, but in a temporary position. And then this fall, I’m starting in a tenure-track position. It’s permanent.
Ken: Great. Well, that’s wonderful. What are some of the projects you’re working on right now?
Joe: Too many. So, I’m working on a really big book on Isaiah, on Isaiah in the book of Mormon. It’s pitched at a non-Mormon audience. So not to Latter-day saints at all, though I’m sure that’s who primarily read it. I’m three-quarters of the way through a good solid first draft of that. So that occupies most of my time right now.
I’m working on a small book on gender in the Book of Mormon with another scholar Kim Berkey, who is at Loyola University. I’ve recently committed to doing a small book on Hugh Nibley’s thought; what was his contribution to Mormon thought.
Ken: Can you do a small book on Hugh Nibley’s thought?
Joe: It’s a good question. I’m supposed to do it under 45,000 words, so it better be short.
Ken: Well, that’s great. As you’re looking into the future and thinking about some things you really want to accomplish, where do you want to go with this focus?
Joe: Yeah, it’s a good question. I’ve got some long-term plans, that changes constantly, for my scholarship. I want to do a couple more major projects on Isaiah.
Ken: What’s pulled you to Isaiah.
Joe: That’s another story. Shall I answer the first question first?
Ken: You have to just bear with me. When an idea comes, I sort of run with it.
Joe: I want to do a few more projects on Isaiah, connected to Mormonism primarily, but then on the other side of that, I want to tackle the uses and connections to the book of Revelation in LDS scripture. This has been sort of on the horizon for me for a while, but I’ve committed to doing a paper this November on it, at a conference in Denver. So I’ve got to start getting earnest about that project, but I think that’s what I’ll turn to once I’ve finished most of what I want to do on Isaiah.
Ken: Okay. So, let’s go to Isaiah now. Why Isaiah? What intrigues you about that?
Joe: Yeah, it’s been a long, slow development, a long growth of interest in Isaiah. I mean, it began in some sense in the mission field or whatever, or just reading the book of Mormon carefully, and wanting to understand this because…
Ken: So, it came from the Book of Mormon.
Joe: Yeah. And I mean it’s there that we have Christ Himself, saying, hey, take this seriously. And so, I felt like I should. I had absolutely no idea what it was saying but I was working as hard as I could with what limited tools I had.
When I came back to BYU from my mission, I took courses in Hebrew and so on. And our first Christmas together, my wife gave me a Hebrew Bible as a gift.
I began, but I didn’t know much Hebrew yet. I was literally at the end of my first semester in Hebrew, so I sat down with dictionaries and what I did know and started working my way from Isaiah 1 onward. And that’s sort of where it began. And reading it with some tools in hand, they’ve made infinitely more sense than it ever had. So that sort of fired me up.
I didn’t plan on doing much more than just being a good latter-day saint then reading it carefully, until, my wife and I were doing some study together, pretty early in our marriage and stumbled on my reading of 1 Nephi 19 where I think Nephi lays out the structure of his whole project and that suggested really strongly, I argue about this in my book. It suggested to me really strongly that Nephi is telling us that the whole point of his record, is Isaiah; what he calls the more sacred part or the plain and precious part of his record.
Ken: I felt similarly.
Joe: Yeah, 2nd Nephi 6 through 30, which is Isaiah, Isaiah, Isaiah all through. And so, that got me fired up. I’m like, ok,
Ken: Something’s there. It’s really big.
Joe: Yeah, exactly, it’s not just that we have the Lord telling us, hey, you need to study this, we’ve also got Nephi saying, you haven’t understood me at all, if you haven’t sorted out what’s going on with Isaiah. So that got me interested more and committed more and that’s how my first book came about, was trying to work out Nephi’s project and what it suggested.
Ken: Yeah, we call that process, Nephi’s journey and then we’re trying to say, look, you know, his father sees a vision, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. They leave, they go back three times, they get the records, they get Ishmael and his family, and then they go out into the Wilderness for eight years. We’ve looked at that. That’s not an eight-year trip.
Joe: No, it shouldn’t be.
Ken: I mean, walking really slow, it’s a year. Right. And if you’re booking it, it’s a few months. You know, they were there for eight years, but during that time, tree of life, father, son, and then an angel explaining it and then he sees the same visions of John, the revelator and our day, he’s worried about his descendants and then the Lord said, you’re forbidden to say more. Right, and then he builds the ship, learns to smelt metal, and sails across to the new world. And the next thing he does is insert Isaiah. Something’s up. Is that what intrigued you?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, at first it was just, okay, so why is Isaiah so important? What’s he interested in here? Can I sort that out?
Ken: Do you feel like you know yet?
Joe: Oh yeah. I think I do. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant.
Ken: No, no, not at all. Keep going. Tell us moreJoseph: What eventually became clear to me. I mean, the first thing I think to say here is that Nephi is actually quite explicit about how he’s organizing his record. He takes…there are these moments where he steps back from the story he’s telling or from the prophecies he’s writing and says, okay, here’s what to expect, here’s where you can find what I’m doing. And he tells you a kind of organization of his project. And it would take us time if we wanted to go through the texts themselves, but basically…
Ken: Maybe we should do that at some point. Wouldn’t that be fun, because actually, we’re trying to help people get in and search Isaiah, maybe as a follow-up you could guide us?
Joseph: Yeah.
Ken: But keep going.
Joseph: Once you see the kind of map, if you will, that Nephi has got of his record, then you can begin to see what he’s doing. This is a lot of what I do in the vision as well.
He’s trying to say, okay, here are two sources of prophecy. There’s this brass plate record we brought from Jerusalem and there’s this dream my father had. And then he starts to unpack each of them. He has the dream himself and this massive, complicated version and then he starts reading from Isaiah itself and explaining it, this is all the second half of 1st Nephi. So, he’s giving you two prophetic sources, he’s beginning to unpack them and show that they’re related. And then when you get to 2nd Nephi, he weaves them together through Jacob’s prophecies and through his own.
And 2nd Nephi is really all about how these two sources are related. Eventually, I think it took me some time, but I came to see how it all seems to operate. He’s got a kind of project. It’s maybe we’re saying, Nephi doesn’t write the record we’re reading, the small plates, until 30 plus years after they’ve left Jerusalem. We sometimes read it like it’s a journal where it’s like he’s just, well, here’s what happened with Leman and Lemuel bothering me today. But, no, he sat on these experiences for 30 years and he’s read Isaiah and he’s got these visions and he sat with them for decades and now he’s taking the time to sketch a way of communicating what’s there. And I think once you see the structure, it becomes really clear what he’s trying to do. Here are these two prophetic sources; the written record, my own father’s dream, and now we can start to unpack how they help one to understand each other and then it becomes clear what he’s up to.
There’s this brass plate record we bought from Jerusalem and there’s this dream my father had. And then he starts to unpack each of them.
Ken: You used a fun word: unpack. You know, we’ve got our one-minute Isaiah challenge where we have like 1,500 people take the survey where they grade themselves on their level of scripture study and we were laughing earlier, you know, level one is “skip”. And even Elder Holland says, if you can’t get through it, we’ll skip the 2nd Nephi and keep going. Don’t stop. But skip, and then skim, then read, then study, then search, then search diligently. Then feast and you know, honestly and right in the middle, in fact, several times Nephi says, you’re not gonna understand this unless you understand sort of the way of the Jews and what they do. But I would say we Latter-Day Saints, we sort of stay at level three where we read it, like, I know, I put my chart up and mark three chapters a day and read it like a novel. But that’s not what you mean by unpacking the scripture. Tell us more. If we were going to start doing some things on our own to move to study or to even search, what does that mean to unpack? Maybe give us a few examples.
Joseph: Yeah. There’s a lot of prep work, I think, is part of what’s difficult. Right.
Ken: So, what do you mean by prep work?
Joseph: I mean, the first thing is, just the task of reading Isaiah is hard because the language is archaic.
Ken: Okay. So, you’ve got to figure out language and idioms and…
Joseph: Yeah, the part of its idioms, but part of its just words. So, for example, we’re reading, even in the Book of Mormon, when we get Isaiah, we’re getting it in King James English. It’s 400 years old and a lot of the words have stayed the same over 400 years, but the kinds of words that have changed are actually the most concrete, down to earth words. They’re the words we use the most, and so they’re the ones that actually seem to change… I’m not a linguist, but that’s the general sense I’ve got. And as you read Isaiah, you see that, you’ll get words in there and you’re like, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. And then if you look at a historical dictionary, you go, oh, or if you look at a Hebrew.
Ken: So, you have to do your homework on some of the meanings of the word, some of the historical context. So, you can know what’s going on.
Joseph: Right? So yeah, first would be just the language barrier, two is going to be historical context. When Isaiah is talking about Assyria if you don’t know anything about Assyria…
Ken: So, get the maps out, probably the maps back then. Some of the countries aren’t the same.
Joseph: Yeah, exactly. And some of it is just going to have to be understanding history. You’ve got about a 250-year history that’s very important for understanding Isaiah, from the middle of the 8th century BC down to the middle of the sixth century BC, at least, because it’s going to cover things going on with Assyria, it’s going to cover things going on with Babylon, a bit with Persia, and if these names mean nothing, then it’s really hard to know what Isaiah is talking about at all.
Ken: You’ve done some fun themes with unpacking it. You tried to take it from Nephi’s perspective.
Joseph: Yes.
Ken: That’s pretty cool. Well, what led you to that perspective?
Joseph: Well, I mean I got interested in Isaiah because of Nephi, so in some sense, I’ve actually in some ways spent more time trying to figure out what Nephi is doing with Isaiah than I’ve ever tried to figure out what Isaiah is doing with Isaiah. Nephi’s Isaiah is my Isaiah, so to speak.
Ken: Well, to Nephi, I think you’ve said this. I mean, the prophet of his day was Isaiah, a lot like Joseph Smith was the prophet of our day, so that’s pretty powerful. That’s referring to the prophet and most of the time it’s Isaiah.
Joseph: That’s right. Yeah. So, it’s something like that, right? He’s invested in Isaiah for some obvious reasons. He’s still the influential, towering prophetic figure. He’s got this prominent place in the brass plates that are very clear. Part of it is the themes, though. If there’s anything that draws Nephi to Isaiah, it’s the specific themes that Isaiah talks about.
Ken: What do you mean?
Joseph: The remnant. So, you read the title page of the Book of Mormon and it talks about a remnant, this has got to be brought to the knowledge of the remnant. That’s not any old language, that’s Isaiah’s language. And Nephi has had visions where he’s seen what’s going to happen to his people. Some destroyed, some kept as a remnant. He reads Isaiah and goes, hey, that looks familiar. I’ve seen this. The theme of a certain Messianic theme, a coming King. That’s not surprising to any Christian reader right, but also the idea of a sealed book. It’s buried up for a later time. People not listening at a certain time. Nephi says that’s exactly what I’ve seen in the vision. I’m going to write this stuff. My descendants are going to write these things. They’re not going to listen, and my people will be completely destroyed, but then the book can be buried and sealed up for a later generation.
That’s right out of Isaiah, so I think he reads Isaiah and says, oh, this is almost point-by-point, what I’ve seen in my vision. The really big picture thing that he sees, that I think often gets missed, is the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles. That’s the heart of Isaiah, especially of the latter half of Isaiah and Nephi sees there the various story about his brother’s descendants.
Ken: Wow. Well, and quite often we as Latter-Day Saints think we’re Israel, but we’re not. We’re the Gentiles.
Joseph: Not in the book of Mormon. The Book Mormon would call us gentiles. Would call, I should say, Latter-Day Saints of European descent, right? There’s plenty of people in the church who are…
Ken: In fact, the title page, it’s written to the Jews, the remnant and the lost tribes, right? And the Gentiles get to come along for the ride if they’re willing, it sounds like.
Joseph: Well, I think that’s the picture. So that picture that Isaiah gives you of a relationship between Israel and the gentiles is crucial to Nephi. And it’s not a simple story. It’s not just to kind of like, oh, Gentiles are kind of involved if they want to be, right. It’s a story about Israel getting off the track and God going, how do I get these people to fulfill their responsibility?
Because their responsibility is to bring all the nations to an understanding of the truth and to introduce peace to the world that’s filled with war and hatred and so on. And Israel is not doing its job, so to speak.
And so, what Isaiah essentially says is, well, you’re going to be sent off into exile, you’re going to find yourself in a circumstance where you’re surrounded with Gentiles to whom you ought to be taking this message. And then I’ll bring you out of there in a miraculous way. I’ll deliver you and bring you home, in a way that will wake the Gentiles up and then they’ll see that this is the true God. So this happens already anciently. Isaiah is clearly talking about Babylon and Persia and so on, this happening there when Jews come out of exile and return to Jerusalem, Persia will be involved, and kings will help, and so on. Nephi says that’s what Isaiah was talking about. I’ve seen something almost identical happening in the future again, and now it’s going to be the remnant of Israel, Laminates, living among Gentiles who have come from Europe and colonized and devastated native populations and all this kind of thing. But then this book, coming forth to this remnant in such a spectacular and miraculous way that’ll wake Gentiles up and help them to recognize who the true God.
Ken: This is pretty remarkable. So although the prophecies of Isaiah were fulfilled in his day, historical, Nephi saw our day and realized those same prophecies have a full end time scenario. It seems like there’s a dual, and it’s applicable to both places.
Joseph: Nephi’s word for this is likening, so we often take likening and we’re like, oh, I have to apply it to my everyday life. We can do that, but I don’t think it’s what Nephi’s got in mind at all when he says likening, he says, here’s what Isaiah was talking about, he’s talking about Jews at a very specific time, under very specific circumstances, but because God is dealing there with Israel and we’re Israel, he’s going to do the same thing. We’re getting the same pattern again and again and again.
Ken: What was will be again.
Joseph: Exactly. So, he sees it happening multiple times. And Jacob puts this very simply, and this is in 2nd Nephi, 6 when he starts talking about Isaiah, he says, before I talked to you about things in the past, now I want to talk to you about things that are now, and things that are coming. So, I’m going to read to you from Isaiah. What’s going on right in Jacob’s time is the fulfillment of Isaiah and it’s literal historical sense. But then Jacob’s going to liken it to what Nephi and he have seen in vision, latter-day, laminate redemption with gentiles.
Ken: The layers and the depth of Isaiah to be able to be applicable in all three areas is just mind-blowing.
Fasting is an age old alm to God. Extended fasting, for 40 days for instance, is something many prophets did when they needed direction. Isaiah tells of the wonders of fasting in chapter 58. He says “Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours” (Isaiah 58). This article tells of the physical effects of extended fasting, using video interviews of Ken Krogue, who recently fasted for 40 days!
How I Overcame Insulin Resistance, High blood Pressure and Pre-Diabetes by Fasting
In the video above, Ken Krogue tells us how fasting for 40 days improved his health in many vital ways.
“I overcame insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, high blood sugar problems, and high blood pressure. Here’s how I did it a 40 day water fast, and it worked! Everybody said, ‘Ken you’re crazy’ and I said ‘look guys, read this book I just read called The Complete Guide to Fasting. It has over 1,000 reviews on Amazon in fact I’m putting a review out here I’d recommend you guys do too. Read it, get the Kindle audible version, whatever. Read this thing!
The Longest Fast in the World
“I asked people ‘ what do you think the longest fast is?’ Everyone says 40 days, some say 40 days 40 nights. One said Noah fasted the longest during the flood, also for 40 days. It’s true Christ fasted 40 days and I’m not trying to compare myself to Christ but I found that if you got enough fat storage you can go a long time. And I was pretty well set for that.”
“However the longest fast on record was 382 days. This guy from Sweden. drank only water with a multivitamin for 382 days. With doctor supervision he went down from 456 pounds to 180 pounds.”
“Frankly, it’s just a math problem. If you burn 2,200 calories a day, which is about what I do, and a pound of fat is 3600 calories, you can lose a lot of weight really fast. You feel great! It’s like ketosis on steroids.”
“First the fast got me off my insulin resistance, which finally allows you to lose weight. That happened about day 5. Then my blood sugar went back to normal, my blood pressure went to normal, and all pre-diabetic signs were gone. I’m feeling wonderful. I got off my CPAP that standard breathing apparatus for old fat guys. So address the problem and your health can come back. I’m so excited I’m gonna keep going down to the weight I was in high school. Try it out!”
Fasting Away the CPAP
Krogue’s fast was so beneficial to his health that it fixed the sleep apnea he developed at a young age, and he was able to get off his CPAP machine.
“I have a pretty bad sleep apnea problem, so I want to share with you how I got off my CPAP using a 40 day fast. Now, again, everyone says ‘Ken you’re crazy how can you go 40 days?’ Well it was very easy—in fact I loved it. It’s one of the best and most healthy things I’ve ever done in my life. I started at about 258 pounds, and as soon as I got below 217
pounds I didn’t need a CPAP.”
“I was adopted and I understand I was never breastfed. I was fed on a bottle was a little baby and then I had bad orthodontic work that makes my breathing really bad, so when I went into the sleep apnea clinic they said, ‘Ken you got one of the most worst cases
of sleep apnea we’ve ever seen.’ They said basically you stop breathing several times, like 50 times an hour, and I couldn’t stay awake.”
“Welcome to the problem of old fat guys have! All of those guys with CPAP should stop worrying about ways to get around their sleep apnea and just address the problem! It’s been great for me. The fast also helped my insulin problems, blood sugar, and my blood pressure was back to normal by about day five.”
