Two Falls and a Nail — Isaiah 14 and 22

A king who wanted a throne above the stars and got no grave. A steward who carved himself a tomb on high and never lay in it. And a servant God fastened like a nail in a sure place.

A Funeral Song Sung for Joy

Chapters 13–23 are “burdens,” oracles against the nations, and Babylon comes first. Yet before a word is said against Babylon’s king, the Lord promises Israel rest “from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve” (Isaiah 14:1–3). The taunt is what a freed people sing when the one who held them is finally gone — not a war cry, but the song after the war.

Verse 4 calls it a “proverb” — mashal, a taunt — and it opens with a funeral word: “How hath the oppressor ceased!” The Cambridge Bible notes that it could be called a dirge (qinah), “commencing as it does with the characteristic word ’êkh” (Bible Hub). It is David’s “how are the mighty fallen!”

So Israel mourns the tyrant in the rhythm of a funeral, with the opening word of a funeral, before a watching world that knows exactly what a funeral sounds like — and every line is a laugh. Why? Because nobody weeps for him. The earth goes quiet and the cedars sing (7–8). Hell rises to greet him: “Art thou also become weak as we?” (9–11). The song reaches for heaven (12–15), then drops to a field where a corpse lies unburied and strangers stare (16–20). Earth, underworld, heaven, grave — and the man who filled them all ends as the one thing with no place.

The King of Double Reference

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” (Isaiah 14:12). Who is this? The poem names the king of Babylon, and many readers stop there. But Isaiah is the king of double reference, and double meaning, and here the text will not stay inside Babylon. The king of Babylon did not fall from heaven, and anyone who reads all of chapter 14, not just a verse of it, will see the poem plainly comparing the king to someone who was NOT the king.

“Lucifer” is Latin, from Jerome’s Vulgate: Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer. The Hebrew is helel ben shachar, “shining one, son of the dawn” — the morning star, brightest just before sunrise and gone the moment the sun comes up. Modern revelation settles the second reference. Joseph Smith saw “an angel of God who was in authority in the presence of God” thrust down: “he was Lucifer, a son of the morning” (D&C 76:25–27). The student manual holds both: the king is “probably Nebuchadnezzar,” and in the symbolic sense “Lucifer is Satan” (OT Student Manual, ch. 14).

Nephi copied the chapter onto the plates with small differences (2 Nephi 24:12–20). Where the King James has the “raiment of those that are slain” in verse 19, Nephi reads “the remnant of those that are slain.”

Five Steps Up, One Line Down

Isaiah 14:13–15 — the climb and the fall

1  I will ascend into heaven,

2  I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:

3  I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:

4  I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;

5  I will be like the most High.

↓  Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

Five steps up. One line down, back at the bottom.

What does he never do? Ask. Every step is his own will, said “in thine heart.” And the last step is the tell: he wants to be “like the most High” by taking where God sits. The Pearl of Great Price gives the same voice in the premortal council — “I will be thy son… surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor” — and the Beloved Son’s answer: “Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever” (Moses 4:1–2). What was that honor? He “sought to take the kingdom of our God and his Christ” (D&C 76:28) — Isaiah’s throne above the stars, in plain words.

The whole gospel runs the other way. The Son “humbled himself” and “God also hath highly exalted him” (Philippians 2:8–9). He went down, and God raised Him. Lucifer went up, and God brought him down.

“Cast Out of Thy Grave Like an Abominable Branch”

Here most readers pass by. “All the kings of the nations… lie in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch… Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial” (14:18–20). Every other king has a grave. This one does not. When was the king of Babylon cast out of his grave like an abominable branch? He wasn’t — Nebuchadnezzar “was certainly buried in great splendor,” the manual says. Yet the poem insists that this one gets no tomb at all, is thrown out like a cut branch, and is never joined with his brothers in burial. Who fits? Lucifer, who was never born, and so will never be buried and never rise.

The manual draws the line right there: “Think for a moment of Satan’s ‘grave.’ Never having received a body, he shall never have a tomb or monument of any kind” (14-17). Why does that matter? Because “spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33). The resurrection comes to all who took a body, “both the wicked and the righteous” (Alma 11:44). Every one of us, just or unjust, will die and rise. He will NOT.

And without Christ, we would share his fate: “if the flesh should rise no more our spirits must become subject to that angel who fell” (2 Nephi 9:8–9). Cast out of the grave, no rising — Isaiah 14:19 is what we escape. Because of the resurrection, death has no sting, and hell has an end.

What about verse 16, “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble”? In the poem “the man” is first the king, a mortal. The verse alone does not prove what Lucifer is; modern revelation does. He was a spirit son of God, and the spirit of man is “in the likeness of his person” (D&C 77:2). The risen Lord told Mary, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father” (John 20:17). So the double reference leaves a real picture: a son of God in the form of a man, who never became one, looked upon “narrowly” — all that noise, and the ONLY one in the room without a body.

Shebna’s Tomb on High

Isaiah 22 is the burden of “the valley of vision,” Jerusalem itself, feasting under siege: “let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die” (22:13). Then Isaiah is sent to one man. Shebna, the treasurer “over the house,” has “hewed thee out a sepulchre here, as he that heweth him out a sepulchre on high” (22:15–16). The city is in danger, the people are on the housetops, and the man who keeps the treasury is cutting his own monument into the cliff where everyone can see it, like the god-kings of old. Pride in a tomb!

The Lord will “toss thee like a ball into a large country: there shalt thou die” (22:18). He never lies in the grave he carved, because he dies in a strange land with his chariots of glory turned to shame. Set him beside chapter 14: the king wanted a throne on high and is denied a grave; Shebna built a grave on high and is denied it. Did it happen? Isaiah records it. When the Assyrians came, out went “Eliakim, Hilkiah’s son, which was over the house, and Shebna the scribe” (Isaiah 36:3). The office had changed hands.

The Key of David and a Nail in a Sure Place

Isaiah 22:22–23

“And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be for a glorious throne to his father’s house.”

Eliakim means “God raises.” The manual, quoting Adam Clarke, reads it “My God, he shall arise” — “thus, even the name typified Christ.” He is clothed with Shebna’s robe, given the government, made “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (22:20–21), and the key goes on his shoulder — where Isaiah had laid “the government” of the Child (9:6).

Isaiah 22:22 — the repeated words show it

A  so he shall open,

B  and none shall shut;

B′  and he shall shut,

A′  and none shall open.

The words cross. Nothing gets past the one holding the key, in either direction.

Who holds it? Christ, quoting this verse of Himself: “he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth” (Revelation 3:7). Every priesthood key His servants hold is borrowed from His shoulder.

The “nail” is a yathed, a peg driven into a wall so things can hang from it. And verse 24 hangs everything there: “all the glory of his father’s house, the offspring and the issue… from the vessels of cups, even to all the vessels of flagons.” Small cups and great flagons on ONE peg.

Christ is our nail in a sure place — it is through Him and Him ALONE we are saved! Upon Him hangs all of our hope for salvation. The manual calls the phrase messianic: “just as the nail of the cross that was driven in the sure place secured the body of the one being crucified, so the Savior Himself is, to all who will, a nail in a sure place.” The nails held Him; He holds us. President Jeffrey R. Holland: “Christ is the Nail in a Sure Place—never failing, never faltering, ever the most certain and reliable force in eternity” (Witness for His Names, 2019, 113, in Scripture Helps).

When the Peg Gives Way

Then verse 25: “shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall” (22:25). An honest reader has to face it. Albert Barnes applied it back to the old steward — “Not Eliakim, but Shebna.” Keil and Delitzsch read it as Eliakim’s own fall, “on account of the nepotism to which he has given way” (Bible Hub): too many relatives hung on the peg.

Either way, the type holds. Eliakim was a true type, but a type is not the thing it points to, and a man can sag under the weight of a family. So Isaiah shows us a nail that could fail, fastened by God and still only a man, and in doing so points past him to the one Nail who could not. Every human peg gives way sooner or later. Christ NEVER will.

Key References — Isaiah 14 and 22

• 2 Nephi 24 — Isaiah 14 as Nephi copied it onto the plates, with its variants in verses 2, 12, and 19.
• Moses 4:1–4 — why Satan was cast down.
• Revelation 3:7–8 — the key of David and an open door.

Whose “I Will”?

Go back to Isaiah 22:20–23 and listen to the voice. “I will call my servant Eliakim… I will clothe him… I will commit thy government… the key… will I lay upon his shoulder… I will fasten him.” Five times God says “I will” — the same count as Lucifer’s climb. Chance? Perhaps. But set the chapters side by side and they answer each other.

Pride builds itself a high place, and God will not let it keep one. Humility waits to be called, and God fastens it where nothing can pull it loose. Whose “I will” is running my life, then? Mine, climbing? Or His — calling, clothing, fastening? The Savior chose in the council and chose again in Gethsemane: “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Every covenant is that same choice. And the One who made it perfectly is the Nail. Hang everything on Him.

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