{"id":8504,"date":"2026-06-13T12:27:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T19:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8504"},"modified":"2026-06-13T12:43:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T19:43:23","slug":"the-seal-that-never-was-why-isaiah-29-does-not-foretell-the-book-of-mormon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/06\/13\/the-seal-that-never-was-why-isaiah-29-does-not-foretell-the-book-of-mormon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seal That Never Was: Why Isaiah 29 Does Not Foretell the Book of Mormon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph Smith’s Golden Plates, and the Anatomy of a Repackaged Prophecy<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

A Critical Theological Examination<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

INTRODUCTION: A PROPHECY IN SEARCH OF A FULFILLMENT<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

In the centuries since the Latter-day Saint movement first appropriated the twenty-ninth chapter of Isaiah as a foretelling of the Book of Mormon, no LDS apologist has felt obligated to defend the appropriation by establishing what Isaiah himself meant. That work \u2014 the discipline of moving from text to context to meaning \u2014 has been quietly skipped. The chapter is read, instead, through the inverted lens of 2 Nephi 27, where Nephi paraphrases Isaiah and supplies dramatic content the prophet never wrote. The result, repeated for nearly two centuries in pulpits, manuals, and seminary classrooms, is the conviction that Isaiah, 701 years before Christ, saw in vision a young farm boy in upstate New York receiving golden plates from a resurrected angel. Ben Gregersen’s recent Medium essay, \u201cMy commentary of Isaiah 29, which is a Biblical prophesy about the Book of Mormon<\/a>,\u201d<\/strong><\/em> is the latest iteration of this tradition. It is also, as we shall demonstrate, indistinguishable in argument, evidence, and method from dozens of LDS treatments preceding it.<\/p>\n

This study takes Gregersen’s central thesis seriously enough to test it against the criteria scholars of every tradition apply to claims of fulfilled prophecy: What did the prophet say? To whom did he say it? What historical situation did he address? What did his original audience understand him to mean? And, when later interpreters claim a hidden second meaning, what textual or historical warrant do they offer for that claim? The aim is not polemical. The aim is exegetical. When the dust settles, three findings emerge with unusual clarity. First,<\/strong><\/span> Isaiah 29 in its original Hebrew context is a unified oracle concerning the city of Jerusalem in the late eighth century B.C., culminating in the deliverance of the city from the Assyrian armies of Sennacherib. Second,<\/strong> <\/span>the LDS reading of Isaiah 29 is not derived from Isaiah at all but from 2 Nephi 27, a passage written nineteen centuries later that reshapes Isaiah’s text and grafts onto it a wholly new prophetic content. Third,<\/strong> <\/span>even seasoned LDS scholars have begun to acknowledge \u2014 quietly, but increasingly \u2014 that the traditional reading cannot survive engagement with the actual text. Gregersen’s commentary, far from advancing the discussion, restates the tradition without addressing any of these difficulties.<\/p>\n

A second strand of this essay concerns the parallel claim made by Islamic apologists about the very same passage.<\/strong><\/span> Verses 11 and 12, with their references to a sealed book delivered to one who cannot read, have been pressed into service as a foretelling of Muhammad’s experience in the Cave of Hira, where the angel Gabriel commanded him to recite and he responded that he could not. The Islamic argument runs along the same rails as the Mormon argument \u2014 different vehicle, identical track \u2014 and fails for the same reasons. Examining the two together throws each into sharper relief and demonstrates that the LDS hermeneutical move is neither original nor unique. It is a recurring pattern that emerges whenever a religious movement seeks to anchor a later revelation in earlier scripture by isolating a fragment from its setting.<\/p>\n

What follows is an attempt to restore the chapter to its setting and to demonstrate, in the process, that the sealed book of Isaiah 29 was never a book at all.<\/p>\n

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I. JERUSALEM, 701 B.C.: THE WORLD INTO WHICH ISAIAH SPOKE<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The first interpretive principle that the LDS reading violates is the most elementary one in all of biblical studies: a prophetic oracle must be read in the historical situation that prompted it. Isaiah 29 was not written in a vacuum, nor was it written to be deciphered in some distant century after centuries of suspended meaning. It was written to a specific city, in a specific year, under a specific military threat, by a prophet who had been delivering oracles to that city for roughly four decades.<\/p>\n

The setting is the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, who ascended the throne in approximately 715 B.C. and who was forced almost immediately to navigate the catastrophic geopolitical realignment caused by the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-Pileser III, Shalmaneser V, Sargon II, and finally Sennacherib. The Northern Kingdom of Israel, with its capital at Samaria, had already been destroyed by Sargon II in 722 B.C., its ten tribes deported to the upper Tigris and Habur basins. Judah was now a small, vulnerable rump state, surrounded on three sides by Assyrian provinces or vassal kingdoms, and its leaders were already debating, by the time Isaiah delivered the oracle of chapter 29, whether deliverance lay in submission to Assyria, in alliance with Egypt, or in the prophetic counsel of trust in YHWH alone.<\/p>\n

In 701 B.C., Sennacherib invaded Judah in retaliation for Hezekiah’s withholding of tribute. His own annals, preserved on the Taylor Prism and the Sennacherib Prism in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, record that he captured forty-six fortified Judean cities and shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem \u201clike a bird in a cage.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The siege was real, the threat catastrophic, and the city’s deliverance \u2014 when it came \u2014 was sudden and miraculous. According to 2 Kings 19:35 and Isaiah 37:36, the angel of the Lord struck down 185,000 Assyrian troops in a single night, and Sennacherib withdrew. Herodotus, writing centuries later, preserves a garbled version of the same event involving a plague of mice that gnawed the Assyrian bowstrings, which most historians have understood as a folk memory of a bubonic outbreak in the Assyrian camp. Whatever the precise mechanism, the historical fact of Jerusalem’s improbable survival in 701 B.C. is well attested in three independent textual traditions and is the indispensable framework for reading Isaiah 28\u201335.<\/p>\n

Isaiah 29, in its original setting, addresses this crisis with prophetic precision. The chapter opens with a woe oracle directed at Ariel, an enigmatic poetic name for Jerusalem that appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible as a place name. Most modern lexicographers, including Brown-Driver-Briggs and Koehler-Baumgartner, derive Ariel from the Hebrew roots for either \u201clion of God\u201d<\/strong><\/span> (ari-el) or \u201caltar hearth\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>(ar’el), and the play on both meanings is almost certainly intentional. Jerusalem, the lion city where David encamped, will be made a hearth of burning; the place of priestly sacrifice will itself become the offering. Isaiah then announces the siege \u2014 \u201cI will encamp against thee round about, and will lay siege against thee with a mount\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(Isa. 29:3, KJV) \u2014 and the humiliation that follows (\u201cthou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/strong>). And then, in a single dramatic reversal, he announces the deliverance: \u201cthe multitude of thy strangers shall be like small dust … yea, it shall be at an instant suddenly\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (29:5). The Lord of hosts visits the city \u201cwith thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (29:6), and the besieging armies dissolve \u201cas a dream of a night vision\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (29:7).<\/p>\n

This is not a subtle allegory. This is a description, in real time, of the events of 701 B.C. as Isaiah saw them unfolding.<\/strong><\/span> The Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown commentary, one of the standard Protestant references of the nineteenth century, observes that the chapter opens the series of prophecies concerning the invasion of Judea under Sennacherib and its deliverance. Dr. Thomas Constable’s modern expository notes concur:<\/p>\n

The historical setting of this chapter seems to be Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah in 701 B.C. Jerusalem is spared (Isaiah’s theology), but Judah is devastated.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Dr. Thomas Constable, Expository Notes on Isaiah 29 (StudyLight.org)<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The BibleRef.com chapter summary, written for general readers, is equally direct: the chapter \u201cseems to predict the impending invasion by Assyria … This corresponds to a miraculous intervention around 701 BC which annihilated the Assyrian army.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Within this setting, the spiritual indictment that follows in verses 9\u201312 takes on its proper meaning. Isaiah is not foreshadowing some far-distant event; he is rebuking the very citizens of Jerusalem who, in his own day, sit under his preaching and remain unmoved by it. They are blind, drunk, and deaf \u2014 figuratively \u2014 because they refuse to hear the prophetic word that would deliver them. Their prophets are covered. Their seers are unable to discern. And the vision Isaiah has labored to deliver to them is, to them, no more intelligible than a scroll whose wax seals have not been broken.<\/p>\n

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II. THE FIVE MOVEMENTS OF ISAIAH 29<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

To grasp the unity of the chapter and to see how the sealed-book passage functions within it, it helps to map the chapter’s structure. Isaiah 29 unfolds in five clearly delineated movements.<\/p>\n

The first movement (vv. 1\u20134)<\/strong> <\/span>announces the impending siege. Jerusalem, called Ariel, will be brought low. Her speech will whisper from the dust \u2014 an image of the abject humiliation of a besieged people.<\/p>\n

The second movement (vv. 5\u20138)<\/strong> <\/span>announces the sudden deliverance. The very enemies who appear to triumph will dissolve like dust and chaff; their conquest will prove as substantial as a dream of a meal that leaves the dreamer still hungry. This corresponds to the destruction of Sennacherib’s army in 701 B.C.<\/p>\n

The third movement (vv. 9\u201312)<\/strong> <\/span>shifts from external events to internal conditions. The people of Jerusalem are spiritually drunk, blind, and asleep. Their prophets and seers are themselves covered, and the vision Isaiah delivers to them has the same effect upon them that a sealed scroll has upon both the educated and uneducated who attempt to read it. Neither can comprehend it.<\/p>\n

The fourth movement (vv. 13\u201316)<\/strong><\/span> intensifies the indictment. The people honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from Him; their religion is taught by the precept of men. They imagine themselves so clever that they can hide their political schemes \u2014 chiefly the Egyptian alliance \u2014 from God Himself. They are clay, imagining themselves to be the potter.<\/p>\n

The fifth movement (vv. 17\u201324)<\/strong> <\/span>ends on a note of hope. In a very little while, the Lord will reverse the apostasy. The deaf will hear, the blind will see, the meek will rejoice, the scoffer will be silenced, and the house of Jacob will turn to genuine worship.<\/p>\n

This is a unified literary composition with a clear historical referent and a coherent theological argument. It contains no embedded prophecy of a nineteenth-century event. It contains no embedded prophecy of a seventh-century Arabian event. It contains a sermon Isaiah preached to Jerusalem in his own day, against the immediate background of Assyrian invasion and impending divine deliverance.<\/p>\n

The LDS interpretation, by contrast, must shatter this unity to extract from it a few isolated phrases. It must lift verses 4, 11\u201312, 14, and 18 out of their setting; supply them with meanings nowhere demanded by the surrounding text; and ignore the historical situation that gives the chapter its coherence. As we shall see, the only way to do this credibly is to read Isaiah 29 not from Isaiah at all, but from 2 Nephi 27 \u2014 a separate document that imports the chapter’s vocabulary into an entirely new narrative.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

III. THE SEALED BOOK THAT WAS NEVER A BOOK<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The centerpiece of the LDS appropriation is the brief image in verses 11 and 12:<\/p>\n

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: And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Isaiah 29:11\u201312 (KJV)<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

LDS expositors have built their reading of the entire chapter around these two verses. The \u201csealed book\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is identified with the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. The \u201clearned one\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is identified with Charles Anthon, the Columbia College professor of classical languages to whom Martin Harris reportedly carried a transcript of the characters. The \u201cone who is not learned\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is identified with Joseph Smith himself. The sequence \u2014 book given to the learned, who cannot read it because it is sealed; book given to the unlearned, who declares his lack of education \u2014 is then claimed to map onto the events of the early 1820s with prophetic precision.<\/p>\n

The problem with this reading is grammatical, syntactical, and exegetical.<\/strong> <\/span>Notice that Isaiah introduces the image with the word as. The vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed.<\/em> This is a simile, not a prediction. Isaiah is not announcing that there will, in the latter days, be a literal book that is literally sealed. He is saying that the vision he has already delivered to Jerusalem has become to its hearers like a sealed scroll. The figure operates on the same plane as Isaiah’s preceding similes in the chapter: the city will become as a hearth (v. 2), the enemies will be as a dream (v. 7), the dreamer like a hungry man (v. 8). No one reads verse 8 and concludes that Isaiah is predicting a literal hungry dreamer in nineteenth-century New York. The simile is the entire mechanism by which the verse functions.<\/p>\n

Luke Wayne, writing for the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM), makes the point with admirable economy:<\/p>\n

Even if we just take the verses by themselves, Isaiah says that the vision he is speaking of will be ‘like’ a sealed book that people take to both a literate and illiterate man. That means that it will not actually be a sealed book brought to such men. It is a comparison. Isaiah is making an analogy.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Luke Wayne, CARM<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The image is also drawn from a known cultural reality. Sealed documents \u2014 papyrus or parchment scrolls bound by string and stamped with a clay or wax bulla \u2014 were common in the ancient Near East. Excavated examples are displayed in museums from Israel to Turkey to the United Kingdom. Ferrell Jenkins, a Bible-lands archaeologist, has photographed sealed scrolls in the museum at Gaziantep, Turkey, that illustrate exactly the sort of document Isaiah’s hearers would have visualized. Such scrolls were sometimes legal contracts, sometimes royal correspondence, sometimes priestly records. Their seals were not broken casually; they were broken only on the authority of the originating party. To attempt to read a sealed document was to attempt the impossible.<\/p>\n

But Isaiah’s simile turns on a second axis. The book is given first to a literate man, who declines because it is sealed; then to an illiterate man, who declines because he cannot read. The point is that neither category of person can apprehend the vision. The educated cannot, because the document is closed; the uneducated cannot, because they lack the skill. The hopelessness is total. As Matthew Henry, the eighteenth-century English Nonconformist commentator, observed in his classic exposition:<\/p>\n

Every vision particularly that this prophet had seen for them, and published to them, had become unintelligible; they had it among them, but were never the wiser for it, any more than a man (though a good scholar) is for a book delivered to him sealed up.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Isaiah 29)<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bereansearching commentary updates the point for modern readers: the sealed book referred to in Isaiah, chapter 29, is the Word of God, the Bible itself;<\/strong> <\/span>and the entire image describes the spiritual blindness that prevents both the religious establishment and the common laity from grasping what God has revealed.<\/p>\n

Notice what the LDS reading must do to overturn this. It must transform the simile into a literal prediction; it must transform a metaphor of universal spiritual blindness into a narrative of two specific nineteenth-century actors; it must transform an oracle to ancient Jerusalem into a coded message for upstate New York. None of this is exegesis. It is allegorical superimposition, and the test of any such superimposition is whether the text itself, in its original language and setting, anywhere demands such a reading. It does not. The text only demands such a reading once one has first decided \u2014 on grounds entirely outside Isaiah \u2014 that Joseph Smith and Charles Anthon must be in it.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting here that several thoughtful Latter-day Saint scholars have, in recent decades, begun to concede this point.<\/strong><\/span> Robert A. Cloward, in his 1998 chapter for the FARMS volume Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, observed:<\/p>\n

Isaiah lamented in Isaiah 29:11 that the vision of Jerusalem’s people had become as the words of a sealed book. No specific book is mentioned. Isaiah’s concern was the lost vision of his people, not books. His expression is symbolic \u2014 a simile, one of many similes and metaphors in Isaiah 29. Isaiah’s symbolic sealed book is still sealed today.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Robert A. Cloward, \u201cIsaiah 29 and the Book of Mormon,\u201d in Isaiah in the Book of Mormon (FARMS, 1998)<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cloward goes further, distinguishing between Isaiah 29 and 2 Nephi 27 and noting that Nephi is not actually quoting Isaiah 29 verbatim in 2 Nephi 27 but is rather using Isaiah’s verbiage \u2014 and expanding on it \u2014 to express his own prophecy. This is a striking concession. The LDS apologist who wishes to demonstrate that the Book of Mormon was foretold in the Bible must now reckon with the fact that one of his own most respected scholars holds that no specific book is mentioned by Isaiah at all.<\/p>\n

A still more candid acknowledgment comes from Brigham Young University professor Charles R. Harrell, who writes in his 2011 monograph This Is My Doctrine:<\/p>\n

Isaiah isn’t talking about a literal book, much less one that would come forth in the future … Latter-day Saints go beyond the traditionally accepted allegorical meaning of this passage and its fulfillment in ancient Israel to see a literal book that came to light in the latter days through the ‘unlearned’ prophet Joseph Smith … When read at face value, Isaiah seems to be merely comparing Israel’s inability to discern the word of God to an unlearned person’s inability to read a book.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Charles R. Harrell, This Is My Doctrine (2011)<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harrell traces the traditional LDS misreading directly to Joseph Smith himself, who, in Harrell’s careful phrasing, saw the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon as a direct fulfillment of Isaiah 29. When the Book of Mormon’s most thoughtful internal interpreters concede that Isaiah’s sealed book is not the gold plates, the apologetic case becomes considerably more difficult to maintain.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

IV. THE SUBSTITUTION: HOW 2 NEPHI 27 REWRITES ISAIAH 29<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The reason LDS expositors can claim a Book of Mormon prophecy in Isaiah 29 is not, finally, because Isaiah 29 contains one. It is because 2 Nephi 27 contains one. The two passages are routinely conflated, but they are in fact substantially different, and the differences are precisely what supply the Book of Mormon prophecy that Isaiah does not.<\/p>\n

A careful comparison of the sort made convenient in tables published by Search Isaiah (the largest LDS Isaiah scholarship aggregator) and by the Joseph Smith Translation reveals the magnitude of the alteration. Isaiah 29 has 24 verses. 2 Nephi 27 has 35. The added eleven verses in 2 Nephi do not appear in the King James Version of Isaiah, in the Septuagint, in the Vulgate, in the Masoretic Text, in the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaa), or in any other extant manuscript witness to the Book of Isaiah. They are unique to 2 Nephi 27.<\/p>\n

What do these eleven extra verses contain? Precisely the material that turns Isaiah’s metaphor into a prediction of Joseph Smith. They describe a book that will be \u201csealed by the power of God\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(2 Nephi 27:10); a book that will be \u201cdelivered unto a man\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>who will deliver words to \u201canother\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (27:9); a learned man who will say, \u201cBring hither the book, and I will read them,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>but who, upon being told the book is sealed, \u201cshall say: I cannot read it\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (27:15\u201318); a man \u201cthat is not learned\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span> to whom the Lord will say, \u201cThe learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them, and I am able to do mine own work\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (27:20); three witnesses who will \u201cbehold\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>the book (27:12); and the explicit declaration that the words \u201cshall be read upon the house tops\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (27:11). None of this is in Isaiah. All of it is in 2 Nephi.<\/p>\n

Faced with this divergence, LDS scholarship has had to take one of two positions. The first<\/strong> <\/span>is to claim that Nephi had access to a more accurate version of Isaiah than the one preserved in the Hebrew Masoretic Text; that this fuller version included the eleven extra verses; and that the post-exilic Jewish redactors removed them, possibly because of their reflection of doctrines uncomfortable to second-temple Judaism. This view, while occasionally voiced, is impossible to sustain against the manuscript evidence. The Great Isaiah Scroll, dated to c. 125 B.C. \u2014 five centuries before the textus receptus and three centuries before the destruction of the Second Temple \u2014 contains essentially the same text as the medieval Masoretic Hebrew. It does not contain the additional eleven verses. There is no manuscript trace, anywhere in the textual history of the Book of Isaiah, of the verses that distinguish 2 Nephi 27 from its source.<\/p>\n

The second position<\/strong><\/span> is to acknowledge that Nephi was not quoting Isaiah verbatim but was, in the LDS technical term, \u201clikening\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Isaiah to his own people. This is the position taken by Cloward and by recent contributors to Book of Mormon Central. It is also, however candid the admission, a fatal one for the prophecy claim. If Nephi was likening Isaiah’s words to a new situation rather than quoting an actual additional Isaianic text, then the new material in 2 Nephi 27 is Nephi’s commentary, not Isaiah’s prophecy. And if it is Nephi’s commentary, then it cannot be cited as a Biblical prophecy of the Book of Mormon. The Bible \u2014 which is to say, the writings of Isaiah \u2014 never mentions the events of the 1820s upstate New York. Only the Book of Mormon does. And the Book of Mormon attributes its mention to a prophet (Nephi) writing six centuries after Isaiah, in a redaction whose composition the LDS faithful believe was inspired and the non-LDS world believes was nineteenth-century. Either way, it is not Isaiah.<\/p>\n

The structural problem is plain. The Mormon argument from Isaiah 29 runs as follows: Isaiah foretold the Book of Mormon (Premise 1); the Book of Mormon is true (Premise 2); therefore, the Book of Mormon is confirmed by Isaiah (Conclusion). But Premise 1 is true only if 2 Nephi 27 \u2014 a chapter from the Book of Mormon \u2014 is presupposed as an accurate expansion of Isaiah 29. The argument is, in short, circular: it uses the Book of Mormon to interpret Isaiah, in order to prove that Isaiah prophesies the Book of Mormon.<\/strong><\/span> To anyone not already committed to the Book of Mormon’s authority, the apologetic carries no weight whatsoever. Isaiah, taken on his own terms, says nothing about a book delivered to an unlearned man in 1827.<\/p>\n

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V. \u201cA MARVELOUS WORK AND A WONDER\u201d: THE PHRASE THAT BUILT A CHURCH<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

If the sealed book serves as the keystone of the LDS reading, the phrase \u201ca marvelous work and a wonder\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>in Isaiah 29:14 serves as its rhetorical signature. The phrase has been adopted by the LDS movement as a near-trademark designation for the Restoration. It is paraphrased no fewer than six times in the Doctrine and Covenants (4:1, 6:1, 11:1, 12:1, 14:1, 18:44). It is invoked in dozens of General Conference addresses; it titles books, lessons, missionary discourses, and documentary films. Apostle LeGrand Richards’s mid-twentieth-century missionary classic A Marvelous Work and a Wonder (Deseret Book, 1950) bears the phrase as its title and uses it as the organizing motif of an entire LDS apologetic program. Neal A. Maxwell’s 1990 BYU devotional address borrowed the same vocabulary. The phrase has become so identified with Mormonism that for many Latter-day Saints, it is simply a synonym for the Restoration itself.<\/p>\n

What did Isaiah mean by it?<\/p>\n

The Hebrew verb behind \u201cmarvelous work\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is pala’ \u2014 to do extraordinarily, to act wondrously, to perform marvels. Isaiah uses the cognate noun in 28:29 immediately before our passage to describe the LORD’s wisdom in giving the farmer his agricultural skill: \u201cthis also cometh forth from the LORD of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Throughout the Hebrew Bible the term most commonly designates God’s mighty acts of deliverance, supremely the Exodus from Egypt (Exod. 3:20, 15:11; Pss. 77:11, 78:12). The phrase in Isaiah 29:14 stands as a sober warning, not a triumphant announcement: God will do a marvelous work because the people honor Him with their lips while their hearts are far from Him; therefore the wisdom of their wise men shall perish and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.<\/p>\n

This is not a promise; this is a judgment.<\/strong> <\/span>The marvelous work in view is the inversion that befalls the political establishment of Jerusalem when their schemes \u2014 particularly the Egyptian alliance Isaiah condemned throughout his ministry \u2014 collapse, and when their conventional wisdom about how to survive the Assyrian threat proves disastrously wrong. The \u201cwisdom of the wise\u201d<\/strong><\/span> that shall perish is the wisdom of Hezekiah’s pro-Egypt advisers. The \u201cmarvelous work\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is the visible vindication of Isaiah’s contrary counsel that trust in YHWH, not in Egyptian chariots, is the only path to survival. The historical fulfillment came in 701 B.C., when Egypt’s army under Tirhakah failed to deliver Jerusalem, the Assyrians encircled the city, and the deliverance came not from human alliance but from divine intervention.<\/p>\n

Paul, writing to the Corinthian church, picks up this very text in 1 Corinthians 1:19 \u2014 \u201cFor it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>\u2014 and applies it to the gospel of the crucified Christ. Paul’s hermeneutic is instructive. He does not claim that Isaiah secretly foresaw a nineteenth-century event in upstate New York. He does claim, on the apostolic authority granted him by the risen Christ, that the same divine pattern at work in Isaiah’s day continued in his own day: God overturns the calculations of the wise by the foolishness of the cross. This is a typological application, openly identified as such, not a claim that Isaiah’s verse was sealed up until Paul interpreted it.<\/p>\n

The LDS reading does not engage in typological application of this kind. It does not say, \u201cIsaiah’s principle of divine reversal applies again to the Restoration.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> It says, instead, that Isaiah specifically foresaw the events of Joseph Smith’s life, in detail, including the appearance of Charles Anthon and the testimony of Martin Harris. This is a much stronger claim, and a claim that bears no relation to the historical situation of Isaiah, no relation to the literary structure of his oracle, and no relation to the way the apostles themselves used the verse.<\/p>\n

Even the most cherished LDS application of the phrase \u2014 its appearance in the Doctrine and Covenants \u2014 operates as a literary borrowing, not as an exegetical demonstration. When D&C 6:1 (given by Joseph Smith in April 1829 to Oliver Cowdery) declares, \u201cA great and marvelous work is about to come forth among the children of men,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>the language is borrowed from Isaiah. It is not claiming that Isaiah predicted this very utterance; it is appropriating Isaiah’s vocabulary to describe a contemporary mission. That kind of literary borrowing is one of the standard moves of religious rhetoric. It is not, however, the same as showing that Isaiah prophesied a specific nineteenth-century book.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

VI. CHARLES ANTHON AND THE PROBLEM OF FULFILLMENT<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The most concrete element in the LDS reading is the identification of the \u201clearned man\u201d<\/strong><\/span> of Isaiah 29:11 with Professor Charles Anthon. The episode is told by Martin Harris in Joseph Smith\u2014History 1:63\u201365. Harris carried characters reportedly copied from the gold plates to Anthon, who at first authenticated them and produced a written certificate to that effect; upon learning the source of the document, Anthon allegedly tore up his certificate, asked to see the plates themselves, and, when told that part of them were sealed, responded: \u201cI cannot read a sealed book.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Harris then visited Dr. Samuel Mitchill (sometimes called \u201cMitchell\u201d<\/strong><\/span>), who reportedly corroborated Anthon’s initial judgment. The visit, and the reported \u201cI cannot read a sealed book\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> remark, are then treated by the LDS tradition as the fulfillment of Isaiah 29:11.<\/p>\n

There are several historical difficulties with this reconstruction. Anthon himself, contacted by E. D. Howe in 1834 and by John Andrew Clark in 1841, repudiated the LDS version in unambiguous terms. In a letter to Clark dated August 17, 1841, Anthon wrote:<\/p>\n

The whole story about my pronouncing the Mormon inscription to be ‘reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics’ is perfectly false. Some years ago, a plain looking countryman called upon me with a letter from Dr. Mitchill requesting me to decypher, if possible, a paper which the farmer would hand me … This paper, in question, was, in fact, a singular scroll. It consisted of all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns … a mere hoax, and a very clumsy one, too.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Charles Anthon, Letter to John A. Clark, August 17, 1841<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anthon flatly denies giving Harris any certificate; denies authenticating the characters; and denies the \u201cI cannot read a sealed book\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>remark. He further describes the document as a mere imitation of various alphabets \u2014 Greek, Hebrew, English letters inverted, Arabic-style flourishes \u2014 arranged decoratively. His description, if accepted, makes the entire prophecy-fulfillment narrative depend on the unverifiable account of a single witness, Harris, against the explicit denial of the other party.<\/p>\n

Even if one prefers Harris’s version to Anthon’s, a second difficulty remains. Isaiah does not say that the unlearned man will eventually read the book successfully. The two figures in Isaiah’s simile are parallel: neither the learned nor the unlearned can read the document. To map Joseph Smith onto the unlearned man, one must also claim that he succeeded where the learned man failed \u2014 that he did, in fact, read the book. But Isaiah’s simile depicts the unlearned man as equally helpless: \u201che saith, I am not learned.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The figure does not break the pattern. He repeats it. The unlearned man is not a successful reader; he is one more example of the universal incomprehension. Isaiah’s whole point is undone if the unlearned figure ends up reading the book. The LDS reading, to function, must invert Isaiah’s own conclusion.<\/p>\n

A third difficulty is chronological. Isaiah is addressing the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the late eighth century B.C. He uses the present tense and the imperative. \u201cStay yourselves, and wonder … they are drunken, but not with wine … the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(29:9\u201310). The \u201cyou\u201d<\/strong><\/span> of verse 11 is the same \u201cyou\u201d<\/strong><\/span> as that of verses 9\u201310: the very citizens listening to Isaiah preach. To address this, \u201cyou\u201d<\/strong><\/span> Isaiah uses the prophetic past, the prophetic perfect \u2014 a Hebrew tense that depicts the spiritual condition as already established. The reference is not future; it is present, and the verses describe the moral state in which Isaiah’s hearers already find themselves. To press the passage into service as a prophecy of a future encounter between Charles Anthon and Martin Harris in 1828 is to ignore the most basic conventions of Hebrew prophetic speech.<\/p>\n

The deeper question, of course, is methodological. If Isaiah 29:11 is taken as a prophecy of the Anthon-Harris meeting, then by the same hermeneutical principle, Isaiah 29:8 must be a prophecy of a literal hungry dreamer somewhere; Isaiah 29:4 must be a prophecy of a literal speaking-from-the-dust event; and Isaiah 29:6 must predict a literal thunder-and-earthquake event matched to a specific moment in church history. The LDS interpretive tradition does, in fact, adopt this approach selectively. Verse 4’s \u201cspeak out of the ground\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is invoked as a prophecy of the gold plates emerging from the Hill Cumorah. Verse 6’s thunder and earthquake are sometimes invoked, in apocalyptic LDS literature, as references to the events preceding the Second Coming. But the selectivity is striking: the verses that can be made to fit the Restoration narrative are taken literally and predictively, while the verses that cannot be made to fit (verses 1\u20133, the Assyrian siege; verse 8, the dreamer; verses 5\u20137, the besieged enemies) are left in their original historical context. There is no principled criterion for the division. Whatever verse can be drafted into Restoration service is drafted; whatever verse cannot be, is left aside.<\/p>\n

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VII. HAS GREGERSEN MERELY REPACKAGED?<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

This brings us to a question that hovers over Ben Gregersen’s Medium essay and indeed over the broader genre to which it belongs. Has any LDS treatment of Isaiah 29 advanced beyond the framework laid down by Joseph Smith himself, by Orson Pratt in the Journal of Discourses, by LeGrand Richards in A Marvelous Work and a Wonder<\/em>, and by the official Church Educational System manuals?<\/p>\n

The answer, on careful examination, appears to be no.<\/strong> <\/span>The LDS interpretive tradition on Isaiah 29 is remarkably static. The same five elements recur in essentially every LDS exposition: Ariel as Jerusalem and as a type of Nephite destruction (Isa. 29:1\u20134); the marvelous work and a wonder as the Restoration (29:14); the sealed book as the gold plates (29:11\u201312); Charles Anthon as the learned man (29:11); and the deaf and blind hearing the words of the book as Book of Mormon readers (29:18). The same proof-texts are cited, the same prophets quoted, the same correlations alleged. From the 1840s through the 2020s, the substance of the LDS reading has not materially changed.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What Gregersen contributes, then, is essentially a personal restatement. He arranges the familiar materials in a Medium-friendly format, offers his own pious application of the established framework, and reaches the conclusion that the tradition reaches. But his essay engages none of the substantive challenges that have been raised against the framework. He does not address the manuscript evidence<\/strong><\/span> from the Great Isaiah Scroll. He does not address the divergence<\/strong><\/span> between Isaiah 29 and 2 Nephi 27. He does not address the simile-versus-prediction question.<\/strong> <\/span>He does not address the Anthon denial<\/strong> <\/span>or the chronological difficulties of fitting Isaiah’s present-tense address to nineteenth-century events. He does not engage Cloward’s admission<\/strong><\/span> that no specific book is mentioned. He does not interact with Harrell’s concession<\/strong><\/span> that Isaiah is not talking about a literal book at all.<\/p>\n

This is not a personal failing of Gregersen; it is, rather, the characteristic posture of the entire LDS apologetic literature on this passage. The tradition is content to repeat. It does not feel compelled to defend itself against external criticism. It operates as a closed system, drawing its premises from 2 Nephi 27 and the Joseph Smith Translation, and treating those premises as the authoritative interpretation of Isaiah. To read outside the system is, in this hermeneutical world, to read Isaiah incorrectly. To read inside the system is to find Joseph Smith on every other page.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Latter-day Saint scholar Darryl Alder, whose extensive table comparing Isaiah 29 with 2 Nephi 25, 26, and 27 is a standard reference at the Search Isaiah portal, betrays the methodology in his own subtitle. The heading on his chart reads: \u201cA people (the Nephites) will speak as a voice from the dust \u2014 Darkness and apostasy will cover the earth in the last days \u2014 A restoration of the gospel and coming forth of a sealed book (the Book of Mormon) are foretold \u2014 Three witnesses will testify of the book \u2014 The learned man will say he cannot read the sealed book \u2014 The Lord will do a marvelous work and a wonder.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>This is the LDS reading of Isaiah 29 in compressed form. Every element comes from 2 Nephi 27. Not one element is demanded by Isaiah 29 itself. The table juxtaposes the two columns, presents Nephi’s expansive version as a kind of corrective gloss on the truncated KJV, and invites the reader to assume that the longer version represents what Isaiah really meant. The methodology is not historical-grammatical exegesis. It is, in the precise sense of the term, eisegesis \u2014 reading into the text \u2014 masquerading as exegesis.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

When a writer like Gregersen takes up Isaiah 29, then he is not constructing an argument so much as reciting a creed. His commentary belongs to the same genre as Apostle Russell M. Nelson’s 2007 General Conference address, \u201cScriptural Witnesses,\u201d<\/em> in which Nelson cites Isaiah 29:4 \u2014 \u201cthou shalt speak out of the ground\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 and asks rhetorically, \u201cCould any words be more descriptive of the Book of Mormon, coming as it did ‘out of the ground’ to ‘whisper out of the dust’ to people of our day?\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>The rhetorical question presupposes the very thing in dispute. Of course, many words would more naturally describe a Mesopotamian-style siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C., when the conquered would literally be brought low and would speak from the dust of their own destroyed walls \u2014 but that ordinary reading never enters the LDS exposition. The tradition has settled on its application, and the application has solidified into doctrine.<\/p>\n

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VIII. THE PARALLEL CLAIM: ISAIAH 29 IN ISLAMIC APOLOGETICS<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Anyone who has worked at length with the LDS appropriation of Isaiah 29 will, sooner or later, encounter the strange phenomenon that Islamic apologists make precisely the same claim about the same passage \u2014 albeit attached to a different prophet and a different book. The parallel is so close that it deserves examination on its own merits.<\/p>\n

The Islamic argument, like the Mormon argument, focuses on verses 11 and 12. The sealed book, on the Islamic reading, is the Qur’an in its preexistent celestial form (the umm al-kitab, the Mother of the Book). The illiterate man to whom the book is delivered is the prophet Muhammad, who, according to the Sira tradition, was unlettered (ummi) and could neither read nor write. When the angel Gabriel appeared to him in the Cave of Hira in approximately A.D. 610 and commanded him iqra \u2014 \u201cRecite!\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>\u2014 Muhammad’s reported reply was ma ana bi-qari’ \u2014 \u201cI am not a reader\u201d or \u201cI cannot read.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The Islamic apologist sees in this exchange the literal fulfillment of Isaiah 29:12: the book is delivered to him who is not learned, and he saith, I cannot read.<\/p>\n

The structural identity between the LDS and Islamic claims is striking.<\/strong> <\/span>In both, Isaiah 29:11\u201312 is read as a literal prophecy of a future book and a future prophet. In both, the prophet is identified as the illiterate figure of verse 12. In both, the \u201clearned\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>figure of verse 11 plays a secondary role \u2014 sometimes the surrounding religious establishment, sometimes a specific individual. In both, the prophet’s later success in transmitting the book is taken to validate the original prophecy, even though Isaiah’s text says nothing of such success.<\/p>\n

The Islamic argument carries its own internal complications. Muhammad’s reply in the Cave of Hira, as preserved in the hadith of Bukhari and Muslim, is not in fact identical to Isaiah’s wording. Isaiah’s illiterate man is offered a book; Muhammad is offered no book in the Cave of Hira but is commanded to recite oral revelation. The Qur’an in its written form did not exist in the Cave of Hira; it was being delivered orally and was not codified until decades after Muhammad’s death. The illiterate man of Isaiah 29:12 declines to read a sealed book; Muhammad declines to recite an oral command. These are not the same scene.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the Islamic apologist must, like the LDS apologist, ignore the historical setting of Isaiah 29.<\/strong> <\/span>The verses appear in an oracle addressed to ancient Jerusalem in the eighth century B.C., concerning the Assyrian siege and the spiritual blindness of Hezekiah’s contemporaries. Nothing in the verses, in their Hebrew syntax, or in their immediate literary context offers any indication that an event in seventh-century Arabia is being foretold. The exegetical principle that the text means what it says to its original audience excludes the Islamic application no less decisively than it excludes the Mormon application.<\/p>\n

What is illuminating about the comparison is what it reveals about the underlying interpretive method. When two distinct religious traditions, separated by twelve centuries and by enormous theological distance, can both read precisely the same verses as a prophecy of their own founder, the most parsimonious explanation is that the method itself \u2014 the extraction of a fragment from its historical setting and its reinscription onto a new event \u2014 is the source of the alleged \u201cfulfillment,\u201d<\/strong><\/span> not the text. Almost any short text can be read prophetically of almost any subsequent event if one is willing to dispense with the original context. The illiterate man delivered a sealed book; it could be Muhammad in the Cave of Hira, or Joseph Smith at Hill Cumorah, or a future receiver of yet a third revelation that has not yet been claimed. The text, abstracted from its setting, does not adjudicate among these possibilities. Only the historical setting does \u2014 and the historical setting excludes all of them.<\/p>\n

Christian apologetic writers, when responding to the Islamic claim, have made essentially the same arguments that apply to the Mormon claim. Luke Wayne’s CARM article treats both claims in a single short essay. The Evidence for Christianity site, in its discussion of the Muhammad claim, observes that the Hebrew literary form of the simile \u2014 comparing the experience of Jerusalem’s people to a sealed scroll \u2014 is fatal to the literal-prediction reading. Articles on the Hermeneutics Stack Exchange, discussing the Quran-related claim, reach the same conclusion. The parallel between the two traditions of misreading is widely noted in the Christian counter-apologetic literature precisely because the same arguments dispatch both.<\/p>\n

For Latter-day Saints who find the Islamic application of Isaiah 29 strained or implausible \u2014 and most Latter-day Saints do \u2014 the comparison serves a useful purpose. The Islamic application, viewed from the outside, displays in clear form the interpretive structure that the LDS reading shares: isolation of fragments, transposition to a later setting, identification of named figures, and treatment of vague resemblance as prophetic precision. If the same method does not establish a prophecy of Muhammad in Isaiah 29, neither does it establish a prophecy of Joseph Smith. The reverse implication holds with equal force.<\/p>\n

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IX. WHEN LATTER-DAY SAINT SCHOLARS BREAK RANKS<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

It is sometimes assumed in non-LDS circles that the entire LDS interpretive community uniformly accepts the traditional reading of Isaiah 29. This assumption deserves correction. Over the past three decades, several LDS scholars writing within the broad framework of faithful LDS scholarship have, on this particular passage, declined to endorse the conventional view. Their candor, while still a minority position, is significant.<\/p>\n

Robert A. Cloward’s chapter \u201cIsaiah 29 and the Book of Mormon\u201d<\/em> in the 1998 FARMS volume Isaiah in the Book of Mormon is the most extensive example. Cloward distinguishes carefully between Isaiah 29 and 2 Nephi 27. He maintains that Isaiah 29 in its original setting is \u201ca prophecy about the fall and restoration of Jerusalem, specifically.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>He concedes that Nephi is not actually quoting Isaiah 29 verbatim in 2 Nephi 27 but is using Isaiah’s verbiage and expanding on it to express his own prophecy. He goes on to acknowledge that no specific book is mentioned in Isaiah’s text, and that Isaiah’s symbolic sealed book is still sealed today. The reader will note that this concession effectively dismantles the traditional LDS reading, since the traditional reading depends precisely on identifying Isaiah’s sealed book with a specific extant volume. Cloward’s framework \u2014 Isaiah for Jerusalem, Nephi for the latter days \u2014 is internally coherent but external to the conventional apologetic case.<\/p>\n

Charles R. Harrell, professor of microbiology and molecular biology at Brigham Young University and a long-time scholar of Mormon doctrinal development, made a still more direct concession in his 2011 book This Is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology. Discussing Isaiah 29 specifically, Harrell wrote that Isaiah isn’t talking about a literal book, much less one that would come forth in the future. He observed that Latter-day Saints go beyond the traditionally accepted allegorical meaning of this passage and its fulfillment in ancient Israel \u2014 that is, beyond the reading shared by Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant exegesis \u2014 to see a literal book that came to light in the latter days through the \u201cunlearned\u201d<\/strong><\/span> prophet Joseph Smith. Harrell then traced this approach back to Joseph Smith personally, noting that Joseph Smith saw the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon as a direct fulfillment of Isaiah 29. Harrell’s tone is descriptive rather than polemic, but the descriptive content is devastating to the apologetic argument: the LDS reading is not derived from Isaiah but imposed upon him from outside.<\/p>\n

John Bytheway, the popular LDS author and Especially for Youth speaker, has likewise softened the conventional reading in his Isaiah for Airheads, observing that Nephi applied certain Isaiah passages concerning the inhabitants of Judah to his own people. The verb is significant. \u201cApplied\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is not the same as \u201ctranslated.\u201d<\/strong><\/span> It is the LDS technical term for likening, and it concedes implicitly that Isaiah’s text and Nephi’s text are not the same prophecy.<\/p>\n

Hoyt W. Brewster, in his commentary Isaiah: Plain and Simple, makes the same distinction: the figures of Isaiah 29 could refer to the nations of Judah and Israel being brought low, or destroyed \u2014 that is, to the immediate historical event \u2014 and only secondarily to the Restoration. Donald W. Parry, the leading LDS Isaiah scholar of the past generation, has acknowledged in Understanding Isaiah (co-authored with Tina M. Peterson and Jay A. Parry) that the chapter has multiple referents and that the primary referent is the Assyrian crisis. Victor L. Ludlow’s Unlocking Isaiah in the Book of Mormon maintains the traditional reading but acknowledges the necessary distinction between Isaiah’s primary historical meaning and Nephi’s secondary application.<\/p>\n

What unites these LDS voices is a quiet, scholarly admission: when Isaiah 29 is read as Isaiah, it does not predict Joseph Smith. The traditional LDS reading is a separate interpretive layer, derived from 2 Nephi 27 and overlaid upon Isaiah after the fact.<\/strong> <\/span>The serious LDS scholar, faced with the text, faces the same exegetical realities that the non-LDS scholar faces. The wholly different question \u2014 whether 2 Nephi 27 should be regarded as inspired commentary or as a nineteenth-century composition \u2014 is one that LDS scholarship answers within its own framework and that non-LDS scholarship answers within its own framework. But on the narrower point \u2014 whether Isaiah by himself, on his own terms, predicts the Book of Mormon \u2014 the answer given even by Latter-day Saint scholars trained in textual and historical method is increasingly: no.<\/p>\n

Ben Gregersen’s commentary, in contrast, makes no such distinction. It proceeds on the assumption that Isaiah 29, taken straightforwardly, predicts the Book of Mormon. It treats the merger of Isaiah 29 with 2 Nephi 27 as natural and unproblematic. It does not engage Cloward, Harrell, Bytheway, Brewster, Parry, or Ludlow at the precise points where those scholars have raised the very objections that the commentary would need to address. It thus belongs to the older, popular-apologetic stream of LDS interpretation, in which the conclusions of careful internal scholarship have not yet penetrated. That is not, in itself, a unique failing. The same stream of unsupported, uncritical, popular-style appropriation continues among Islamic apologists, making the parallel claim about Muhammad, and among various Christian-adjacent groups across history, making similar claims about their founders. The stream is recognizable. It is also, by any rigorous historical-grammatical standard, exegetically untenable.<\/p>\n

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CONCLUSION: WHAT ISAIAH SAID, AND WHAT HE DID NOT<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The aim of this essay has not been to attack the spiritual sincerity of Latter-day Saints, who hold their reading of Isaiah 29 with conviction and devotion. The aim has been to determine whether that reading can be sustained by the text of Isaiah, taken in its original setting, with the tools that ordinary historical and grammatical exegesis applies to any document of the ancient world. The findings have been consistent.<\/p>\n

Isaiah 29 is an oracle delivered by the prophet Isaiah ben Amoz to the citizens of Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah, in the immediate context of the Assyrian invasion under Sennacherib in 701 B.C. The chapter announces the impending siege of the city (vv. 1\u20134), the sudden divine deliverance from the siege (vv. 5\u20138), the spiritual blindness of the inhabitants under judgment (vv. 9\u201312), the depth of their hypocrisy and self-deception (vv. 13\u201316), and the eventual eschatological reversal in which the deaf will hear and the meek will rejoice (vv. 17\u201324). The chapter contains no prediction of a book that will come forth in the latter days. It contains no prediction of a Charles Anthon, no prediction of a Martin Harris, no prediction of a Joseph Smith. The \u201csealed book\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is a simile \u2014 explicitly marked as such by the comparative particle \u2014 describing the inability of Jerusalem’s people in Isaiah’s own day to apprehend the vision he had delivered to them. The \u201cmarvelous work and a wonder\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>is a present-tense divine judgment on the wisdom of the wise of Jerusalem, fulfilled in the political-military events of 701 B.C. and capable of typological reapplication, by apostolic warrant, to the gospel of the crucified Christ (1 Corinthians 1:19) \u2014 but not to any later event independent of that apostolic warrant.<\/p>\n

The LDS reading of Isaiah 29 derives, on close inspection, not from Isaiah but from 2 Nephi 27, a separate document of approximately 35 verses that imports Isaiah’s vocabulary into an entirely new narrative concerning the gold plates, Joseph Smith, Charles Anthon, the three witnesses, and the eventual unsealing of the rest of the book. This material is not in Isaiah. It is not preserved in the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, or any other manuscript witness to the Book of Isaiah.<\/strong> <\/span>It originated with Joseph Smith in the late 1820s. To treat 2 Nephi 27 as a faithful expansion of Isaiah 29 is, in effect, to treat the Book of Mormon as an authoritative interpretation of the Bible, which is, of course, a matter of faith for Latter-day Saints, but is not a matter that can be established based on Isaiah alone.<\/p>\n

The parallel Islamic appropriation of the same passage demonstrates that the underlying interpretive method \u2014 extraction of a fragment from its historical setting and reinscription onto a later event \u2014 is not unique to the LDS tradition. Wherever the method is applied, it produces alleged prophecies. Wherever the method is suspended in favor of ordinary contextual exegesis, the alleged prophecies dissolve.<\/p>\n

Ben Gregersen’s Medium commentary, the immediate occasion of this response, sustains the traditional LDS reading with affection and sincerity. But it engages none of the substantive objections that have accumulated against that reading over a century and a half of scholarly attention, including the objections raised by Latter-day Saint scholars themselves. Its analysis would be strengthened by direct engagement with Robert A. Cloward’s concession that no specific book is mentioned in Isaiah, with Charles R. Harrell’s concession that Isaiah is not talking about a literal future book, with the manuscript evidence from Qumran, and with the basic Hebrew grammatical observation that Isaiah’s \u201cas the words of a book\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is a simile rather than a prediction. Without such engagement, the commentary simply repeats what has been said many times before and does not advance the apologetic case.<\/p>\n

There remains a serious and legitimate question to be asked about the Book of Mormon’s overall claims; this essay does not pretend to settle that broader question. But on the narrower exegetical question \u2014 whether the Bible, in Isaiah 29, predicts the coming forth of the Book of Mormon \u2014 the answer that emerges from careful examination of the text, its grammar, its historical setting, and the testimony even of thoughtful Latter-day Saint scholars, is that it does not. Isaiah’s vision was not sealed up until 1827. It was sealed only to those whose hearts were closed in his own day. The book he describes was never a book at all. The simile, beautiful and severe, has its own meaning \u2014 and that meaning is not what the tradition has claimed for it.<\/p>\n

The seal that was never broken was the seal that was never there.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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PRIMARY <\/b>SOURCES<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

The list below documents every public source consulted in the preparation of this essay.<\/p>\n

Latter-day Saint Sources<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Alder, Darryl.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah 29 (2 Nephi 25, 26, 27) a Marvelous Work and a Wonder.\u201d Search Isaiah. https:\/\/searchisaiah.org\/discover\/isaiah-29-and-2-nephi-27\/
\n\u2022 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah 29 \u2014 A Marvelous Work and a Wonder.\u201d Old Testament Seminary Student Study Guide. https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/manual\/old-testament-seminary-student-study-guide-obs\/the-book-of-isaiah\/isaiah-29-a-marvelous-work-and-a-wonder?lang=eng
\n\u2022 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cLesson 125: Isaiah 29.\u201d Old Testament Seminary Teacher Material 2018. https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/manual\/old-testament-seminary-teacher-material-2018\/isaiah\/lesson-125?lang=eng
\n\u2022 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cThe Bible: A Sealed Book.\u201d Teaching Seminary Preservice Readings. https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/manual\/teaching-seminary-preservice-readings-religion-370-471-and-475\/the-bible-a-sealed-book?lang=eng
\n\u2022 Cloward, Robert A.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah 29 and the Book of Mormon.\u201d In Isaiah in the Book of Mormon (FARMS, 1998). https:\/\/archive.bookofmormoncentral.org\/sites\/default\/files\/archive-files\/pdf\/cloward\/2016-02-05\/09_robert_a._cloward_isaiah_29_in_the_book_of_mormon_191-247.pdf
\n\u2022 Search Isaiah.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cInsights on Isaiah: A Marvelous Work.\u201d https:\/\/searchisaiah.org\/watch-isaiah\/insights-isaiah-marvelous-work\/
\n\u2022 Clear LDS Doctrine.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHistorical Setting for the Book of Isaiah.\u201d https:\/\/clearldsdoctrine.neocities.org\/ltltbom\/supp\/historicalsettingforthebookofisaiah<\/span><\/p>\n

Christian Counter-Apologetic and Exegetical Sources<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Johnson, Eric.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cDoes Isaiah 29:4\u201312 predict the coming forth of the Book of Mormon?\u201d Mormonism Research Ministry. https:\/\/mrm.org\/isaiah-29
\n\u2022 Wayne, Luke.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah 29:11\u201312, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith.\u201d Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM). https:\/\/carm.org\/isaiah-2911-12-muhammad-and-joseph-smith
\n\u2022 The Righteous Cause.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cExegesis of Isaiah 29.\u201d The Righteous Cause. https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Exegesis_Isaiah_29.pdf
\n\u2022 Saraland Christians.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cFinding God in the Dark: Isaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/saralandchristians.com\/sermons\/finding-god-in-the-dark-isaiah-29
\n\u2022 Christianity.com.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cMatthew Henry Commentary on Isaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/www.christianity.com\/bible\/commentary\/matthew-henry-complete\/isaiah\/29
\n\u2022 BibleRef.<\/span> <\/strong>\u201cWhat does Isaiah chapter 29 mean?\u201d https:\/\/www.bibleref.com\/Isaiah\/29\/Isaiah-chapter-29.html
\n\u2022 StudyLight.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cDr. Constable’s Expository Notes on Isaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/studylight.org\/commentaries\/eng\/dcc\/isaiah-29.html
\n\u2022 StudyLight.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cCoffman’s Commentary on Isaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/studylight.org\/commentaries\/eng\/bcc\/isaiah-29.html
\n\u2022 BibleHub.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cJamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary on Isaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/biblehub.com\/commentaries\/jfb\/isaiah\/29.htm
\n\u2022 Daily Verse \/ Knowing Jesus.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cIsaiah 29:14.\u201d https:\/\/dailyverse.knowing-jesus.com\/isaiah-29-14
\n\u2022 Be Like Christ.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cIsaiah 29: A Bible Study in 5 Minutes.\u201d https:\/\/www.2belikechrist.com\/articles\/isaiah-29-bible-study-in-5-minute
\n\u2022 Bible Notes.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/www.biblenotes.org.uk\/old-testament\/Isaiah\/29\/
\n\u2022 Berean Searching.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah Chapter 29: A Book that is Sealed.\u201d https:\/\/bereansearching.com\/2018\/02\/16\/isaiah-chapter-29-a-book-that-is-sealed\/
\n\u2022 BibleHub.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cWhat history shaped Isaiah 29:13?\u201d https:\/\/biblehub.com\/q\/What_history_shaped_Isaiah_29_13.htm
\n\u2022 BibleHub.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cWhat history influenced Isaiah 29:17?\u201d https:\/\/biblehub.com\/q\/What_history_influenced_Isaiah_29_17.htm
\n\u2022 BibleHub.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cWhat history shaped Isaiah 29:12’s message?\u201d https:\/\/biblehub.com\/q\/What_history_shaped_Isaiah_29_12_s_message.htm
\n\u2022 BibleHub.<\/strong><\/span> \u201cIsaiah 29:11’s impact on prophecy.\u201d https:\/\/biblehub.com\/q\/Isaiah_29_11_s_impact_on_prophecy.htm
\n\u2022 BibleHub.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cWhy is Isaiah 29:11 sealed to all?\u201d https:\/\/biblehub.com\/q\/Why_is_Isaiah_29_11_sealed_to_all.htm
\n\u2022 Jenkins, Ferrell.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cVisualizing Isaiah 29: A Book That Is Sealed.\u201d https:\/\/ferrelljenkins.blog\/2014\/04\/04\/visualizing-isaiah-29-a-book-that-is-sealed\/<\/span><\/p>\n

Islamic Apologetics and Counter-Apologetics<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Third Millennium Ministries.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cIsaiah 29:12 and Islamic Claims.\u201d https:\/\/thirdmill.org\/answers\/answer.asp\/file\/40473
\n\u2022 Hermeneutics Stack Exchange.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cIsaiah 29:18 about the Quran?\u201d https:\/\/hermeneutics.stackexchange.com\/questions\/93025\/isaiah-2918-about-the-quran
\n\u2022 Evidence for Christianity.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cIs Isaiah 29:12 a Prophecy of Muhammad?\u201d https:\/\/evidenceforchristianity.org\/is-isaiah-2912-a-prophecy-of-mohammed-as-a-muslim-i-talked-to-claims-it-mentions-someone-who-says-i-am-not-learned-which-mohammed-also-said\/
\n\u2022 Too Many Marys.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cMuhammad in the Bible: Isaiah 29:12?\u201d https:\/\/toomanymarys.com\/the-quran-and-the-bible\/muhammad-in-the-bible-isaiah-2912\/<\/span><\/p>\n

Reference and Background<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Wikipedia.<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cIsaiah 29.\u201d https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Isaiah_29<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

In recent years, some have voiced concern that artificial intelligence may distort facts or introduce inaccuracies into serious research. That criticism deserves acknowledgment. However, AI has now evolved into the most powerful research instrument available to any dedicated scholar\u2014capable of analyzing vast datasets, cross\u2011referencing historical records, and surfacing overlooked connections across sources. This work represents a collaboration between the author\u2019s investigative inquiry, verified primary documentation, and the advanced analytic capabilities of AI research tools. Here, AI was not used as a ghostwriter or a shortcut for scholarship, but as a disciplined research partner devoted to rigor, accuracy, and transparency.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI\u2011generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer\u2011reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found\u2014and they were found\u2014corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed, historical details are precisely rendered, and theological claims fairly represent the positions they describe or critique.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader\u2014whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here\u2014and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, a misrepresented teaching, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. The goal of this work is not to win a debate but to get the history right. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions without hesitation.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Truth, after all, has nothing to fear from scrutiny\u2014and neither does this work.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joseph Smith’s Golden Plates, and the Anatomy of a Repackaged Prophecy \u2766 \u2766 \u2766 A Critical Theological Examination INTRODUCTION: A PROPHECY IN SEARCH OF A FULFILLMENT In the centuries since the Latter-day Saint movement first appropriated the twenty-ninth chapter of Isaiah as a foretelling of the Book of Mormon, no LDS apologist has felt obligated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-must-read"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Isaiah-29-header.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8504"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8510,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504\/revisions\/8510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}