Scripture Difficulties
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Isaiah in the Book of Mormon

Why is so much of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, and does that prove Joseph Smith copied the King James Bible?

Bible

The Bible answers

Bible · Isaiah 29:4

KJV + NRSVUE

Thy speech shall be low out of the dust.

King James Version

And thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.

NRSVUE

Then deep from the earth you shall speak; from low in the dust your words shall come; your voice shall come from the ground like the voice of a ghost, and your speech shall whisper out of the dust.

Bible · Isaiah 29:11–14

KJV + NRSVUE

The sealed book. A marvelous work and a wonder.

King James Version

And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed. … Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder.

NRSVUE

The vision of all this has become for you like the words of a sealed document. If it is given to those who can read, with the command, “Read this,” they say, “We cannot, for it is sealed.” … so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing.

Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon answers

3 Nephi 23:1–3

Jesus commands them to search Isaiah.

And now, behold, I say unto you, that ye ought to search these things. Yea, a commandment I give unto you that ye search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah. For surely he spake as touching all things concerning my people which are of the house of Israel; therefore it must needs be that he must speak also to the Gentiles. And all things that he spake have been and shall be, even according to the words which he spake.

2 Nephi 27:6–11

The book shall be hid, then delivered to one who is not learned.

And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall bring forth unto you the words of a book, and they shall be the words of them which have slumbered. And behold the book shall be sealed. … The book shall be delivered unto a man, and he shall deliver the words of the book, which are the words of those who have slumbered in the dust.

Ancient witnesses

Dead Sea Scrolls and related extra-biblical texts that illuminate the same pattern the Restoration restores.

Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Copied about a century before Christ, 1QIsaa is essentially the Isaiah Nephi knew: a long, unified prophetic book, not a Victorian collage. Variants exist, as they do in every ancient text. The scroll’s existence ends the lazy claim that ‘Isaiah was too late or too fluid to be on the brass plates.’ It also shows why a godly people would copy Isaiah at length—because they believed he was the word of the Lord.

Faithful answers

Scripture Central

Isaiah in the Book of Mormon

Scripture Central

The brass plates contained Isaiah. Nephi says he quotes to more fully persuade his people to believe in the Redeemer. The risen Christ commands Isaiah to be searched. Where the English text follows the King James, that is how the Lord chose to clothe already-scriptural language for a King James people; where it diverges, the divergences are often meaningful. Deutero-Isaiah theories are modern academic constructs. They are not a photograph of 600 BC. The Great Isaiah Scroll should make everyone slower to declare whole chapters unavailable to Nephi.

Jesus Christ, not Nephi only, is the one who said ‘great are the words of Isaiah’ and commanded that they be searched.

  • Isaiah on the brass plates is a source claim, not a nineteenth-century whim.
  • KJV diction in a translation is not plagiarism; it is a register.
  • 1QIsaa is a physical answer to ‘Isaiah wasn’t a book yet.’
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The Interpreter Foundation

Isaiah variants and translation

The Interpreter Foundation

If Joseph were merely copying, the Book of Mormon would not alter, abridge, and interleave Isaiah with commentary the way Nephi and Jacob do. It would not produce a sealed-book midrash of Isaiah 29 that matches Restoration history. Translation is not stenography. Critics who demand a non-KJV Isaiah of 1829 are demanding that God ignore the Bible the Saints already held.

A translator may render a known prophecy in the words a people already call scripture. That is not theft. That is mercy.

  • Many ‘anachronistic’ Isaiah chapters are precisely the ones about scattering, gathering, and the Messiah—the brass plates’ purpose.
  • Academic partitions of Isaiah are hypotheses, not carbon dates on Nephi’s copy.
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Further reading

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