A Second Autograph of Isaiah — The Textual Case

Critics say the Isaiah chapters were copied out of a King James Bible. Four graduate studies stopped assuming that and counted the differences instead. What they found is a text that fits a recognized category in mainstream textual criticism — and copied text does not fit that category.

The Argument

The charge is old and it is usually stated with confidence. Twenty-one chapters of Isaiah appear in the Book of Mormon, much of it in Jacobean English, and the conclusion is drawn from there:

The Four Claims

• The wording matches — whole verses run word for word with the 1769 King James text a farm boy in Palmyra could buy for a dollar.
• The italics came along — words the King James translators inserted to smooth English syntax show up in a book that claims a Hebrew original.
• The errors came along — places where the King James renders the Hebrew badly are reproduced rather than corrected.
• Therefore no ancient source — a genuine translation from plates would not track a seventeenth-century English Bible this closely.

Two of those four are simply true, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time. The wording does match in long stretches. Sidney Sperry, who spent his career on this problem, put the number at 199 verses word for word with the old English version, and he wrote plainly that Joseph Smith used the King James Version when he came to the Isaiah text. So the honest question is not whether King James English is in the book. It is what the other verses are doing — because the same count that gives 199 identical verses gives 234 that are not identical, and those are the ones nobody copied from anywhere.

The Response

1. The Charge Smuggles In Its Own Premise

Every version of this argument rests on an unstated assumption: that there was one Hebrew Isaiah in antiquity, that the Masoretic Text preserves it, and that any reading which departs from that line is therefore a mistake. Accept that assumption and the argument works. So is it true? It died in a cave above the Dead Sea.

The Israel Museum, Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project

“The evidence emerging from the Qumran scrolls is that there were several concurrent versions of the biblical text.”

Twenty-two Isaiah manuscripts came out of the Judean desert. They do not all agree, they were copied and kept side by side, and there is no sign anyone at Qumran tried to suppress the divergent ones. Before 1947 a scholar could talk about “the” Hebrew text of Isaiah and mean something. What does that phrase mean now? It needs a footnote.

Now put the Book of Mormon’s own claim next to that. Nephi’s family carried away a Hebrew record on brass plates that already contained “the prophecies of the holy prophets” in about 600 BC, roughly a century after Isaiah spoke. That copy then left Palestine entirely. It never met the scribal glosses, the exile, the standardization, or any of the later handling that shaped the surviving Hebrew line. If the book is telling the truth about itself, its Isaiah is a branch that split off before the trunk we have was formed — and a branch that split early should agree with the trunk often and disagree with it in a distinctive way. That is a testable prediction. Somebody tested it.

2. What the Count Actually Shows

In 2001 Carol F. Ellertson submitted a master’s thesis at Brigham Young University under Donald W. Parry, an editor on the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team. She compared every quoted Isaiah verse in the Book of Mormon against the King James Version, the Masoretic Text, the Greek Septuagint (LXX), and the Qumran Isaiah scrolls, one variant at a time. Here is the tally:

Sit with the shape of that. Half the quoted verses differ from the King James Bible. The differences scatter across three separate ancient witnesses in small amounts, and then a plurality of them — 150 readings, forty percent — land nowhere at all. What kind of document produces that spread? A copyist produces none of those columns. An editor with a Bible and an opinion produces the last column and nothing else.

3. There Is Already a Name for This Kind of Text

Here is where the case stops being an apologetic and starts being textual criticism. Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University is among the most cited scholars alive on the text of the Hebrew Bible, and he has no interest whatever in the Book of Mormon. Sorting the Qumran material, he found manuscripts that would not fit the standard families. What do you do with those? Rather than force them, he made a category:

Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 116

“Usually the employment of the term non-aligned merely implies that the texts under consideration follow an inconsistent pattern of agreements and disagreements with M, SP, and G, but the texts which are most manifestly non-aligned and actually independent are texts which contain readings that diverge significantly from the other texts.”

Read the definition and then read the table again. Inconsistent agreement with the Masoretic Text? Fifty-two variants, and departures throughout. Inconsistent agreement with the Septuagint and with Qumran? Forty and twenty-eight, and departures throughout. Exclusive readings found nowhere else? One hundred and fifty of them. Tov built that category for a Leviticus scroll from Cave 11 that behaved exactly this way, and he concluded that the scroll “actually forms a fourth text alongside the three sources that were known before the Qumran discoveries.”

Ellertson’s conclusion applies the same five tests, one by one, and reaches the same place. Book of Mormon Isaiah agrees with and departs from the Masoretic Text. It agrees with and departs from the LXX. It agrees with and departs from Qumran. It carries exclusive readings found nowhere. And so it forms a fourth text standing beside the other three — separate, distinct, and independent.

That is the whole argument in one move, and it is worth stating bluntly. The critic says the Isaiah chapters look like a copy. The measured profile of those chapters matches a category that a non-Latter-day Saint scholar invented for manuscripts that are demonstrably not copies of anything we have. The label was not built to rescue the Book of Mormon. It was built for Cave 11, and the Book of Mormon walked into it.

4. The Italics Objection Falls Apart Under Counting

The italics argument is the one critics like best, so it deserves the sharpest treatment. King James italics mark words the 1611 translators supplied to make Hebrew read as English. The claim is that finding them in the Book of Mormon proves the text was lifted. Does it?

But 119 of the 370 variants are variants in the italics themselves, and they do not move in one direction:

What Happens to the Italics

• 59 variants — the italicized words are dropped entirely
• 51 variants — the italicized words are replaced by different words
• 9 variants — the italics are kept and other words inserted around them

Take 1 Nephi 20:8 against Isaiah 48:8. The King James reads “from that time that thine ear was not opened.” That italicized that is a translator’s word. The Book of Mormon does not have it, and the sentence means something slightly different without it. Or take 2 Nephi 23:15 against Isaiah 13:15, where the italic phrase “that is joined unto them” is replaced with “that is joined to the wicked” — naming exactly whom the verse warns against joining, which the rest of the verse then explains.

So the objection has to be restated before it can even be examined. It is not that the Book of Mormon reproduces the italics. It is that the Book of Mormon reproduces some, deletes more, rewrites others, and expands a few. What editorial theory covers that? A man cleaning up a Bible removes italics or he leaves them; he does not sort 119 of them into three different treatments across those chapters and then leave 251 further variants that have nothing to do with italics at all.

And there is a simpler point underneath. If the underlying record differs from the Masoretic Hebrew, then wherever the King James translators guessed at a missing word, an independent text would sometimes have the word, sometimes have a different word, and sometimes have nothing. Which is precisely the distribution above.

5. Where It Corrects the King James Against the Hebrew

This is the category that ought to end the plagiarism charge by itself. Ellertson identified 26 verses where the underlying Hebrew supports the Book of Mormon reading and the King James Version gets it wrong. You cannot copy a correction out of the text you are correcting.

Notice what kind of corrections these are. A prefixed preposition. A pronominal suffix. An implied verb tense. These are features of Hebrew morphology that a reader of English cannot see and would have no reason to invent. Who gets them right by accident? Getting them right is what a translator working from a Hebrew text does without thinking about it. Sperry pressed the same point with 2 Nephi 7:2, where the Book of Mormon keeps both “dried up” and “stink” — two Hebrew verbs that look and sound nearly alike, one of which fell out of the Hebrew line and the other out of the Greek. The Book of Mormon preserves both, which is exactly what the ancestor of both would have to look like.

6. Where It Sides with Qumran — Buried Before Christ, Read in 1947

Twenty-eight variants find support in the Isaiah scrolls from the Judean desert. Twenty of those support the Book of Mormon against the Masoretic Text outright. The scrolls were found in 1947. The Book of Mormon was dictated in 1829. How does a reading get from one to the other?

The cleanest example is 2 Nephi 19:3, against Isaiah 9:3. Hebrew has two small words that sound identical: lo’, meaning “not,” and lo, meaning “to him.” The Masoretic Text has the negative, and so the King James reads “Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy” — a sentence at war with the rejoicing in the rest of the verse. The Qumran scroll does not have the negative. Neither does the Book of Mormon. Coincidence?

Or Mosiah 14:7, quoting Isaiah 53:7. The King James has “so he openeth not his mouth,” a present-tense verb sitting in a chapter where nearly every other verb is past. The Qumran reading is past tense. The Book of Mormon reads “so he opened not his mouth,” which restores the pattern.

Now weigh what a critic has to claim here. Not that Joseph Smith made lucky guesses in general, but that he made them on Hebrew homonyms and Hebrew verb aspect, in the direction a scroll buried since before Christ would later confirm, more than a century before anyone dug it up. Wayne Ham built a whole 1961 thesis on this comparison and Gary Bishop extended it in 1974, and both were working before all twenty-two Isaiah fragments had been published. Ellertson had them all. The agreements went up, not down.

7. Where It Sides with the Septuagint

The LXX was translated from Hebrew manuscripts older than any Hebrew copy that survived. So what does it mean when a reading turns up there and not in the Masoretic line? Forty Book of Mormon variants have full or partial LXX support, and another thirty-six agree with it.

At Isaiah 6:10 the King James reads “and convert, and be healed.” The Greek verb is passive. So is 2 Nephi 16:10: “and be converted, and be healed.” Is that cosmetic? One voice has a man turning himself; the other has him turned by a power outside himself.

At Isaiah 14:3 the King James has “in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest.” The Greek uses a demonstrative pronoun pointing at a specific day already named elsewhere. 2 Nephi 24:3 reads “in that day that the Lord shall give thee rest.” A single word, and the verse acquires an antecedent. Where would an editor get that?

8. The Poetry Test — The Hardest One to Fake

Hebrew prophecy is poetry, and its structure is built out of parallel lines rather than rhyme. Thirty-one of the non-aligned variants do something no forger has an incentive to do: they add material that completes or extends a Hebrew poetic pattern the King James Version leaves broken.

Isaiah 2:14 in the King James gives two parallel lines — the high mountains, the hills that are lifted up. 2 Nephi 12:14 gives four, adding the nations that are lifted up and every people, so the couplet becomes a full synonymous quatrain. Is the addition decoration? It follows the rule.

The showpiece is Isaiah 49:1. The King James has five words: “Listen, O isles, unto me.” 1 Nephi 21:1 puts a passage in front of it that turns the whole opening into a chiasmus — a nested inversion running out to five levels and back, with the King James line sitting at the closing edge:

1 Nephi 21:1 — Chiastic Structure

a  Hearken
  b  O ye house of Israel
    c  all ye that are broken off
      d  and are driven out
        e  because of the wickedness of the pastors of my people
      d  yea, all ye that are broken off
    c  that are scattered abroad
  b  who are of my people, O house of Israel
a  Listen, O isles, unto me

Ellertson catalogues the others by name: epistrophe, antithetical parallelism, synonymia, polysyndeton, anaphora, extended alternate, extended synonymous. These are technical terms for structures Hebrew scholarship had barely begun to describe in 1829. Robert Lowth had opened the study of parallelism. But the serious analysis of chiasmus in Hebrew scripture belongs to the twentieth century.

Which leaves a question the copying theory has to answer. If these parallelisms were in the Hebrew, why did they survive into the Book of Mormon and not into the Masoretic Text, the Greek, or the scrolls? And if they were not in the Hebrew, who in Palmyra put them there — correctly, thirty-one times, in forms that would not be catalogued for another century?

9. Four Studies, Sixty Years, One Result

The finding does not rest on one thesis. Four researchers came at this with different tools and different amounts of scroll evidence, and they converged.

The Convergence

• Sperry (1939) — 433 verses, 234 modified; the ancient versions vindicate Book of Mormon readings where the Hebrew fails, indicating a version of Isaiah older than any now in existence
• Ham (1961) — first systematic comparison against the Great Isaiah Scroll, written before most fragments were published
• Bishop (1974) — of the Book of Mormon differences, 41% trace to some combination of the known traditions and 59% trace to none; the text “definitely tends to follow its own course”
• Ellertson (2001) — all 22 Isaiah manuscripts available; 370 variants classified against Tov’s framework; verdict, non-aligned

Bishop’s phrasing is the one to keep. He was not arguing toward a conclusion. He was reporting where the numbers went. When the differences between the Book of Mormon and the King James Version are sorted against the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, most of them cannot be assigned to either. A text that follows its own course is the definition of an independent witness.

Bishop also made an observation worth repeating. The Book of Mormon record stands only twice removed from a seventh-century BC document — Isaiah to the brass plates, brass plates to Nephi. Every other witness we possess is separated from its original by six hundred to fifteen hundred years of copying. Which one would you expect to preserve readings the others lost?

The Verdict

Give the critic the strongest form of his case. The King James Version supplied the English. Sperry said so in 1939 and no serious defender has denied it since. Where the familiar version already carried the sense of the record, it was allowed to stand, which is why 199 verses run word for word.

But the language of a translation and the source of a translation are two different questions, and the argument only ever addressed the first. Evidence for a source lives in the differences. There are 370 of them across 216 verses, and they are not random noise. Fifty-two land on the Hebrew against the English. Forty land on the LXX. Twenty-eight land on scrolls that came out of the ground 118 years after the dictation. Thirty-one restore Hebrew poetic forms that scholarship had not yet catalogued. And 150 land nowhere on earth.

What could produce that pattern? Copying cannot — a copy inherits its exemplar’s errors and adds nothing that corrects them. Editing cannot — an editor’s changes are random with respect to Hebrew morphology, Greek voice, and unexcavated scrolls, and these changes are not random with respect to any of the three. Guessing cannot survive being right twenty-eight times in the direction of a manuscript nobody would see for another century.

One explanation covers all four columns at once. A Hebrew Isaiah left Jerusalem around 600 BC on the brass plates and stopped sharing a history with the manuscripts that stayed behind. It kept readings the Masoretic line lost, kept readings the LXX preserved, kept readings that survived at Qumran, and kept a great many that survived nowhere else. Translated in 1829, it produced exactly the profile Ellertson measured.

That profile has a name in the field, and the name was not coined by anyone with a stake in this book. Tov’s non-aligned category exists because manuscripts like this actually turn up. What does the discipline call one when it appears? A fourth text, standing beside the Masoretic Text, the LXX, and the scrolls. Book of Mormon Isaiah meets every criterion he set.

So the objection inverts. The Isaiah chapters were never the Book of Mormon’s soft spot; they are one of the few places where its claims can be checked against physical manuscripts, and they check out. Twenty-one chapters of a lost Hebrew Isaiah came through, and if the ratio holds across the whole book, the brass plates carried something on the order of 550 non-aligned readings and better than a thousand variants of all kinds. What critics call the plagiarized part of the Book of Mormon is a second autograph of Isaiah — the only ancient witness to that book that reached us without passing through Palestine.

Sources

The Four Studies (Full Text, Free)

• Carol F. Ellertson, “The Isaiah Passages in the Book of Mormon: A Non-Aligned Text” — MA thesis, BYU, 2001. The variant counts, the Tov analysis, and a verse-by-verse apparatus of all 216 verses in the appendix.
• Gary L. Bishop, “The Tradition of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon” — MA thesis, BYU, 1974. Source of the 41%/59% split and the “follows its own course” conclusion.
• Wayne Ham, “A Textual Comparison of the Isaiah Passages in the Book of Mormon with the Same Passages in the St. Mark’s Isaiah Scroll of the Dead Sea Community” — MA thesis, BYU, 1961.
• Sidney B. Sperry, “The ‘Isaiah Problem’ in the Book of Mormon” — Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4/1 (1995): 129–52; first published in the Improvement Era, 1939. Source of the 433/234/199 verse counts.

Textual Criticism and Manuscripts

• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) — the non-aligned category is defined at p. 116; the Cave 11 Leviticus scroll discussion at p. 162.
• Emanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (Jerusalem: Simor, 1997) — on treating every deviation as a potential variant reading.
• The Great Isaiah Scroll — Israel Museum, Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project — the full scroll, chapter by chapter, with English translation. Source of the “several concurrent versions” statement.
• Martin Abegg Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) — the translation of the Qumran Isaiah material used in Ellertson’s comparisons, alongside the Rahlfs Septuaginta for the LXX.

Related

• William L. Riley, “A Comparison of Passages from Isaiah and Other Old Testament Prophets in Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon” — MA thesis, BYU, 1971. Tests the other standard source theory and finds the two books do not use Isaiah alike.
• Isaiah in the Book of Mormon — the companion page, answering the charge that quoting Isaiah 40–66 is an anachronism.