How to Read Isaiah — Hebrew Poetry and Nephi’s Keys

Nephi said Isaiah was hard for people who did not know “the manner of prophesying among the Jews.” That manner can be learned.

Why Isaiah Reads Hard to Western Eyes

Why does Isaiah seem to say everything twice? Because he is writing Hebrew poetry, and Hebrew poetry has no rhyme to speak of and no fixed meter. What it repeats is the idea. A line is stated, then echoed, reversed, or built upon, and the meaning lives in how the lines answer each other. Ideas survive translation, so the structure is all still there in the King James text, hidden only because it is printed as paragraphs.

Robert Lowth, Oxford’s professor of poetry, named the pattern in lectures published in 1753 as De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum. He called it parallelismus membrorum and sorted it into synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic kinds (Jewish Encyclopedia). Nephi knew it without the Latin: Isaiah was hard for his people “for they know not concerning the manner of prophesying among the Jews” (2 Nephi 25:1). The repetition Western readers find tiresome is the key, not the obstacle.

Nephi’s Keys and the Student’s Method

After thirteen chapters of Isaiah, Nephi stops and tells his readers what it takes to understand them. Know “the things of the Jews” and “the regions round about” — history, places, kings, and the poetic forms. Have the spirit of prophecy, for Isaiah is “plain unto all those that are filled with the spirit of prophecy” (25:4), and John defined it: “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10). Live in the last days, for “in that day shall they understand them.” You have this one covered already. And liken it: “I did liken all scriptures unto us” (1 Nephi 19:23).

Two more keys open almost every chapter. Know the theme in play: the Messiah — premortal, mortal, and millennial — or the covenant people, scattered and gathered. And watch for a physician’s order: diagnosis of the present state, prescription (“Wash you, make you clean”), and prognosis. Chapter 1 runs in exactly that order (Isaiah 1:5–20).

The method is simple and slow. Isolate the couplet by writing it out in poetic form, one line under the other. What is its theme? Why this image and not another? Where is the main point — the crescendo, the centre, the contrast? Then meditate on what it means for you, and apply it. Last, listen to the Holy Ghost and act on what He tells you. The first steps are study; the last two are why you study.

Couplets: Saying It Twice So It Cannot Be Missed

In synonymous parallelism the second line restates the first.

Isaiah 1:10 — synonymous parallelism

Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom;

give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.

Hear = give ear; word = law; rulers = people. Sodom and Gomorrah here are Jerusalem.

Miss the couplet and Isaiah seems to be preaching to cities destroyed a thousand years before. See it, and he has just given Judah’s leaders the worst name in their history. In antithetic parallelism the second line is set against the first:

Isaiah 1:19–20 — antithetic parallelism

If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land:

But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.

The Hebrew uses one verb (akal) for both: you eat the land, or the sword eats you.

The third kind builds, each line carrying the last a step further. Lowth called it synthetic; others say climactic or stair-like. Often one couplet is only half complete until the next ones finish it:

Isaiah 60:1–3 — building parallelism

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.

For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.

And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Risen upon thee → arise upon thee → thy rising.

Whose rising is it by the last line? Zion’s — but only because the LORD rose on her first. Read as prose, the paragraph hides that. Written as poetry, it cannot.

Chiasmus, Inclusio, and a Frame Around the Whole Book

Donald W. Parry of BYU defines chiasmus as “an inverted parallelism,” ideas presented and then presented again “in reverse order,” and notes that “the book of Isaiah alone has more than one hundred” (Parry, “Chiasmus,” Preserved in Translation). One of his examples is Isaiah’s commission:

Isaiah 6:10 — chiasmus (Parry)

A  Make the heart of this people fat,

B  and make their ears heavy,

C  and shut their eyes;

C′  lest they see with their eyes,

B′  and hear with their ears,

A′  and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.

Hardening begins in the heart and closes the senses; healing must come back the same road and end where it began.

Small chiasms can sit inside one line. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (5:20) holds three, by Parry’s count, and the form acts out the sin: the words are turned upside down because the values are. An inclusio opens and closes a passage on the same words. “How is the faithful city become an harlot!” is answered by “thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city,” with the purging in between (1:21–26). The repeated words show it.

Couplets can also answer other couplets — even across a whole book. Isaiah opens by calling witnesses: “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth” (1:2). He closes with the same pair made new: “I create new heavens and a new earth” (65:17). The witnesses to the indictment become the setting of the redemption, and that frame runs straight through chapters 40–66. On Alma 36, see Chiasmus and the Book of Mormon.

Is That Chiasm Really There?

Learn to see chiasms and you will start seeing ones that are not there. Pick the right words, skip the rest, and almost anything becomes a staircase. So how does an honest student test one?

John W. Welch, who first found chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, wrote the test himself: fifteen “Criteria for Identifying and Evaluating the Presence of Chiasmus” (Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4/2, 1995). He grants that analysts “may not know with certainty whether an author created inverted parallel structures intentionally or not.” His first question is objectivity: “To what degree is the proposed pattern clearly evident in the text?” And the centre: “Without a well-defined centerpiece or distinct crossing effect, there is little reason for seeing chiasmus.”

Protestant scholarship agrees. Brad McCoy defines chiasmus as inverted parallelism “which moves toward and away from a strategic central component” (CTS Journal 9, 2003). This guide therefore shows only structures a named scholar has published, or ones the King James words plainly show, and says which. Isaiah 6:10 passes every test in one verse. A twenty-verse chiasm built on common words would not.

Have Been and Shall Be

When the Savior told the Nephites to search Isaiah, He gave the reason: “all things that he spake have been and shall be” (3 Nephi 23:3). Have been AND shall be. That is dualism, one prophecy fulfilled in more than one event, stated by the Lord as the rule for this book.

The sign to Ahaz — “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son” — is tied two verses later to Ahaz’s own war: before the child can “choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings” (7:14–16). Matthew reads the same words as fulfilled at Bethlehem (Matthew 1:22–23). Which is right? Both. The near fulfillment proved the prophet to Ahaz; the far one is why the prophecy was given.

Isaiah also speaks of the future in the past tense. Grammarians call it the prophetic perfect: “The prophet so transports himself in imagination into the future that he describes the future event as if it had been already seen or heard by him” (Gesenius §106n). His first example is Isaiah’s “my people are gone into captivity” (5:13), written while Judah was still home. It is the prophetic absolute: not conditional, as good as done.

“For unto us a child is born” (9:6), seven centuries before Bethlehem. Most readers never notice that the Book of Mormon names this device. In the sermon built on Isaiah 53, Abinadi speaks of Christ’s coming in the past tense and stops to explain why: he is “speaking of things to come as though they had already come” (Mosiah 16:6). That is Gesenius’ definition, printed in 1830.

One Isaiah or Two?

Most academic scholars since the late 1700s hold that chapters 40–66 came from one or more later writers during or after the Babylonian exile. They point to the new setting in chapter 40, to shifts in style, and above all to Cyrus, the Persian king named in 45:1 some 160 years before he took Babylon.

But why must a prophecy of Cyrus be written after Cyrus? Only if prophets cannot foretell. That premise carries the late date, and Isaiah was a prophet — he saw the FUTURE, in vision and inspiration. The witnesses read one book. The Great Isaiah Scroll, from about 125 BC (Israel Museum), marks no break at chapter 40; asked about a division between 1–39 and 40–66, its co-editor Peter Flint answered, “No. There is no division at that point,” adding that the scroll does split in two, but after chapter 33 (Bible Study Magazine, 2008). John quotes Isaiah 53:1 and 6:10 back to back and says of both, “These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory” (John 12:38–41).

Then the Book of Mormon. Nephi quotes Isaiah 48–49 (1 Nephi 20–21) from brass plates carried out of Jerusalem about 600 BC, before the exile the theory requires. The risen Lord recites Isaiah 54 (3 Nephi 22) and calls it “the words of Isaiah.” Who wrote chapter 54? He answered that. The scroll alone does not settle authorship, and this guide does not claim it does; the full argument is at ldsdiscussions.info.

Key References

Great Are the Words of Isaiah

A few things not to do. Don’t give up and say it was written for another age — Nephi would disagree; he wrote it down for ours. Don’t rip a verse or two out of context and build on them alone. Don’t think you know everything about a couplet. It’s a poem, and like a song it will mean different things at different times in your life, the way the temple does. And don’t expect an expensive commentary to know it all. Its authors are doing what you are doing, and they miss things too.

What is left once the excuses are gone? A commandment: “a commandment I give unto you that ye search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah” (3 Nephi 23:1). He gave it to a congregation, not a faculty.

For who Isaiah was and when he lived, see Isaiah — He Saw Christ’s Mission 700 Years Early. Then open chapter 1, write its first couplet out in two lines, and ask why heaven and earth are being called as witnesses.

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