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A Book That is Sealed

Isaiah - Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier
Photo credit: The Wallace Collection
The other day, I was studying the Book of Mormon, and I read this in the footnotes for 2 Nephi 12:

"Comparison with the King James Bible in English shows that there are differences in more than half of the 433 verses of Isaiah quoted in the Book of Mormon, while about 200 verses have the same wording as KJV."

And being the engineer that I am, I thought - "I bet I can figure out exactly what the differences are between the King James version and what Nephi wrote down from the Brass Plates."

For those of my audience who don't have experience reading diff files, the text highlighted in blue are the characters/words that are different between the two columns, and the text in black is the same.  Because of the nature of the algorithm, sometimes there will be a few characters in black while the rest is blue.  Usually, unless the whole word is black, there isn't a noticeable similarity, and it's just coincidence.

Comparison

I started with what I thought would be the most interesting comparison, the prophecy of "the book that is sealed," found in 2 Nephi 27.  As far as I know, this is the only time in the Book of Mormon, in which an entire chapter of Isaiah is quoted, that the verse numbers do not line up with those in the Old Testament.

2 Nephi 27 vs Isaiah 29

You may have noticed that the first few verses of Isaiah 29 don't match up very well with 2 Nephi 27; however, they do match up fairly well with part of 2 Nephi 26.  I compared the verses I thought relevant from the two chapters, with a little bit of extra context thrown in.

2 Nephi 26:14-19 vs Isaiah 29:1-5

What can be learned from this comparison?

I have a few thoughts, which I will outline below, but I would love to hear other people's thoughts on what can be learned from these comparisons.

Thoughts:

  • It is more clear who Isaiah is talking about in 2 Nephi: Zion, the covenant people of the Lord.
  • 2 Nephi 27:4 - It is the wicked who will be punished for their iniquity
  • 2 Nephi 27:5 - it is the people who have closed their eyes to revelation, not the Lord.
  • There is a very large section missing from the record in the KJV, but which was still preserved on the brass plates.  It is an amazing prophecy of Joseph Smith and part of his story in translating the Book of Mormon.  It is also a testimony that God is a God of miracles.
  • In 2 Nephi 27:27-31, there a few phrases added that show how God is in command of all of these things which will happen in the last days.

Conclusion

In the future, I will be comparing more of the chapters of Isaiah that are quoted in the Book of Mormon, including those in 1 Nephi and 3 Nephi.

I found a cool website that lists all of the times Isaiah is quoted in the Book of Mormon.

Technical note: I used the software Beyond Compare to generate the diffs.  Perhaps later I will release my work flow so others can do similar projects.  Also, sorry about the random spaces in the text; that's an artifact of where I removed the footnote characters from the text.

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