Awake, Awake — Isaiah 50–52
Israel cries for the arm of the LORD to wake up, and the LORD answers with the same words turned around. Jacob read them aloud to the Nephites; Moroni reached for them in his farewell.
“Where Is the Bill of Your Mother’s Divorcement?”
Jacob read these chapters to the Nephites because “they may be likened unto you, for ye are of the house of Israel” (2 Nephi 6:5). The first thing that covenant people heard was a question about divorce.
Under the law of Moses a husband who sent his wife away had to “write her a bill of divorcement” (Deuteronomy 24:1). No paper, no divorce. So the LORD asks for the paper, and for the name of any creditor He sold them to (50:1), and nobody can produce either, because Israel was sent out for her own sins while He never signed a decree or owed a debt: “for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves.”
Jacob’s copy asks it more sharply: “Have I put thee away, or have I cast thee off forever? … Yea, to whom have I sold you?” (2 Nephi 7:1).
Compare it with the Bible; they are clearly not the same, and Jacob’s opens with the question the whole chapter answers. Then comes a second — “Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem?” (50:2). The problem was never His reach. When He called there was “none to answer,” and the rest of these chapters is about who does.
“He Wakeneth Mine Ear” — the Servant Who Listens First
“The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.”
Someone answers: the third Servant Song. The tongue is named first, but it is “the tongue of the learned,” and the Hebrew is limmudim — the taught ones, disciples, as in “all thy children shall be taught of the LORD” (54:13). The Servant gets the right word for a weary man by being woken every morning to hear it. The ear comes before the tongue.
Then the price: “I gave my back to the smiters … I hid not my face from shame and spitting” (50:6; Matthew 26:67). And the face was already set “like a flint” (50:7). Luke has the same picture, “he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem,” and then a detail most readers pass: a Samaritan village “did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51–53). Strangers could read the flint in His face.
The song ends in a courtroom: “He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? let us stand together” (50:8). Paul lifted it into Romans — “It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died” (Romans 8:33–34) — and handed the Servant’s confidence to everyone in Christ.
Walking by the Light of Your Own Sparks
Isaiah 50:10–11 — two walkers
Who is among you that feareth the LORD … that walketh in darkness, and hath no light?
let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.
all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks:
walk in the light of your fire … ye shall lie down in sorrow.
Our arrangement. The one without light leans on God; the one with his own is left to walk by it.
Who is in the dark here? The faithful one, and Isaiah does not scold him for it. Darkness is not the danger. Homemade light is — sparks flare and die, and a man who walks by them has to keep striking new ones until he lies down in sorrow.
The Rock Whence Ye Are Hewn
“Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn … Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone” (51:1–2). Why look backward to find the way forward? Because a stone that forgets its quarry forgets what it is made of, and the quarry was one old man and a barren wife. If God built a nation from two people past the age of children, a scattered remnant is not too small for Him. Nor is the rock only a bloodline: “as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed” (Abraham 2:10). Then the promise that He “will make her wilderness like Eden” (51:3), and its guarantee: the earth “shall wax old like a garment,” “but my salvation shall be for ever” (51:6). Then a question for the fearful: “who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die” (51:12)?
Three Cries of “Awake, Awake”
Three times in twenty verses the same doubled command rings out, and doubling is how Hebrew raises its voice. But who is being woken? The repeated words show it:
Isaiah 50–52 — who wakes whom
50:4 “he wakeneth morning by morning” — the Servant, already awake
51:9 “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD” — Israel to God
51:17 “Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem” — God to Jerusalem
52:1 “Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion” — God to Zion
One Hebrew verb, ‘ur, in all four. Israel asks the arm to “put on strength”; the LORD tells Zion to “put on thy strength.”
The first cry is a good prayer that reminds God of the Red Sea, and the answer is a promise nearly word for word from chapter 35: “the redeemed of the LORD shall return, and come with singing unto Zion” (51:9–11; see The Desert Shall Blossom).
Then the LORD turns the prayer around. His arm was never asleep; the one asleep is Jerusalem, “drunken, but not with wine,” from “the cup of his fury” (51:17–22). The second cry is reflexive, hit’oreri, rouse yourself. The third cry tells Zion to put on the very thing she asked God to put on.
We ask God to wake up. He hands the same two words back to us.
Jacob stopped reading right there. His Isaiah ends on the third cry (2 Nephi 8:24–25), and then he preached.
“Put On Thy Strength” — the Question Elias Higbee Asked
D&C 113:7–8 — Elias Higbee asks, 1838
“He had reference to those whom God should call in the last days, who should hold the power of priesthood to bring again Zion, and the redemption of Israel; and to put on her strength is to put on the authority of the priesthood, which she, Zion, has a right to by lineage; also to return to that power which she had lost.”
Zion’s strength is priesthood authority, hers “by lineage” — the rock of Abraham again. And the last clause: “that power which she had lost.” Lost, not never had. Zion is told to pick up what she dropped.
And the bands on her neck? “The scattered remnants are exhorted to return to the Lord … which if they do, the promise of the Lord is that he will speak to them, or give them revelation” (113:9–10). Joseph points to the promise that follows, “I am he that doth speak” (52:6): the first sign of a woken Zion is that God speaks to her again.
What about “henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean”? Critics list it as a failed prophecy, since Jerusalem has been taken many times. But it is spoken to a Zion that has woken and dressed, and the Savior dated it Himself, quoting it at Bountiful as still ahead: “And then shall be brought to pass that which is written: Awake, awake again, and put on thy strength, O Zion” (3 Nephi 20:36). Awake AGAIN. The promise waits on the waking.
The debt of chapter 50 is settled too: “Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without money” (52:3; see Enlarge Thy Tent).
Most readers never notice that the Book of Mormon’s first great farewell and its last both reach for these verses. Lehi, dying: “Awake, my sons; put on the armor of righteousness. Shake off the chains with which ye are bound … and arise from the dust” (2 Nephi 1:23), the words of Isaiah’s cry from a man who had Isaiah on the brass plates. Moroni, three verses before his last Amen: “And awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem; yea, and put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion” (Moroni 10:31).
Elder David A. Bednar ended a talk on the wedding garment with “Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion.” The king, he said, “likely gave guests the garments from his own wardrobe”; still, “you and I ultimately can choose to be chosen” (October 2022). The garments are provided. Putting them on is ours.
No Haste This Time
Then come the beautiful feet (52:7; Abinadi’s reading is in The Suffering Servant). The watchmen “shall see eye to eye, when the LORD shall bring again Zion” (52:8) — the phrase Joseph used in his answer about Zion’s strength. Then “The LORD hath made bare his holy arm” (52:10). Israel begged the arm to wake; now it is bared for work, and the next song asks, “to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?” (53:1). The arm turns out to be a Man. Then the last two verses rewrite the Exodus:
Egypt “ye shall eat it in haste” (Exodus 12:11)
Zion “ye shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight”
Egypt the angel “went before the camp … removed and went behind them” (Exodus 14:19)
Zion “the LORD will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rearward”
Our arrangement. The first Exodus was a flight, the guard moving from front to back. The second is a procession, with God at both ends.
With nothing to run from, what is asked instead? “Be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the LORD.” Those who carried the temple vessels were priests, so the verse asks for priesthood holiness — the same strength Joseph said Zion must put on (D&C 133:5; see Babylon Is Fallen).
Key References
- 2 Nephi 7–8 — Jacob’s copy of these chapters; read it beside the Bible.
Who Needs to Wake Up?
Israel’s prayer is one we all pray — awake, O arm of the LORD, for a child who has wandered, a diagnosis, a marriage, a nation — and these chapters answer by handing the prayer back to the one praying.
That is not a rebuke; it comes with a pattern. The Servant shows how a person wakes: every morning, the ear first, then the tongue, then a face that does not turn away. The strength is authority Zion already has a right to. The garments are laid out by the King, and the debt was paid without money.
What is left is to get up out of the dust.
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