MOSIAH 14:1-12—ABINADI PRESENTED
ISAIAH’S ‘SUFFERING SERVANT’ TEXT MESSIANICALLY
Abinadi recited the chapter in Isaiah
that addressed the suffering servant of the Lord and elucidated it as referring
to the Messiah. Interestingly, the text in Isaiah 52:14 says, “His [the Servant’s]
visage was . . . marred,” but in the Isiaha scroll from Qumran, the word
for marred is absent—one letter had been added, and the word was anointed,
rather than marred. The word for anointed in Greek is Christos.
Abinadi must have used this version because he says, “Even until the resurrection
of Christ—for so shall he be called” (Mosiah 15:21). (John W. Welch, Inspiration
and Insights from the Book of Mormon: A Come, Follow Me Commentary [American
Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications, Inc., 2023], 126)
The
MT (which 1QIsab agrees with) reads מִשְׁחַ֥ת while 1QIsaa reads משחתי.
Commenting on this, Donald Parry wrote the following:
The notorious variant of 1QIsaa
(משחתי) has caused much scholarly discussion. 1QIsaa may be
translated to read “I anointed” (qal perf. first common sg.), which is
perhaps a harmonization of Ps 45:8 (שִׂמְּחֽוּךָ). As Reider points out, “I
anointed his appearance” dos not make sense; “Surely one anointed a person, not
his appearance.” Reider concludes that “the real explanation of [1QISaa’s
reading] is the fondness of the copyist for vowel letters,” i.e., there is no
real variant between MT and the scrolls. Other scholars view the variant in
1QISaa as an intentional change to reflect a Messianic understanding.
Rubenstein sees the reading of 1QIsaa
as a “hoph’al participle in the const. state with a yodh ending. Such a
conclusion would link up with the reading of מִשְׁחַ֥ת, which could hardly have
been transmitted without the authority of one school or another of Eastern
Massoretes. The conjecture that the original MT reading was a hoph’al participle
would thereby gain in plausibility.” If 1QIsaa’s reading is indeed a
textual variant, then MT and 1QISab present the primary reading. (Donald
W. Parry, Exploring the Isaiah Scrolls and Their Textual Variants
[Supplements to the Textual History of the Bible 3; Leiden: Brill, 2020], 369)
