Where the manuscripts differ · Isaiah 53:11
"He shall see light": the word the Dead Sea Scrolls restored
The Hebrew text copied through the Middle Ages says the Servant "shall see and be satisfied"; two Isaiah scrolls from Qumran and the ancient Greek translation say he shall see *light*. The NIV, the NRSV, the CSB and the Berean text this site prints adopt it; the ESV, the NASB and the NKJV keep the Masoretic reading and note the scrolls beneath the line.
Almost every textual question a reader meets in a study Bible is a Greek question about the New Testament. This one is a Hebrew question about the Old, and it runs the opposite way from the usual pattern: here the earliest witnesses have *more* words, not fewer, and the modern translations are the ones printing the longer reading.
The Hebrew Bible used for centuries, the Masoretic Text, preserved with extraordinary care by Jewish scribes and known to us in complete manuscripts whose own colophons date them, the Aleppo Codex to about 930 and the Leningrad Codex to 1008, reads at this point, "He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied." The sentence is a little compressed; "see" has no object.
Then in 1947 the Great Isaiah Scroll came out of a cave at Qumran, a complete copy of Isaiah roughly a thousand years older than any Hebrew Isaiah manuscript then known. At this verse it has an extra word: *light*. He shall see light, and be satisfied. And the Greek translation of Isaiah made by Jewish scholars in the centuries before Christ says the same thing. Two witnesses, one Hebrew and one Greek, independent of each other, both older than the medieval copies, agreeing on a word the later text lacks.
What the manuscripts actually show
| Witness | Date | What it reads here |
|---|---|---|
| The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaᵃ) | roughly the second century BC | "he shall see light" — the extra word present in the Hebrew. |
| A second Isaiah scroll from the same caves | Dead Sea Scrolls period, last centuries BC | Also supports the reading with "light." |
| The Greek Old Testament (Septuagint) | translated in the last centuries BC; surviving in later manuscripts | Reads "to show him light", inside a sentence built differently from the Hebrew. |
| The Masoretic Hebrew text | the Aleppo Codex, about AD 930; the Leningrad Codex, AD 1008 | "He shall see, he shall be satisfied", without "light". |
The case each way
That it belongs in the text
Two ancient Hebrew scrolls and an ancient Greek translation, from different places and different transmission streams, agree on the word.
It repairs a rough sentence. In Hebrew, "he shall see" without an object is awkward, and "see light" is a natural, well-attested Hebrew idiom for coming alive or coming out of darkness, Job uses it that way.
It is the harder reading to explain as an addition. A copyist would have no obvious reason to insert "light" here, while a copyist's eye could easily lose a short word in a line of similar letters.
That it came later
The Masoretic tradition is not a careless one. Its scribes counted letters, and their text has repeatedly proved reliable against much older witnesses, the same Isaiah scroll confirms the medieval Hebrew almost everywhere else, which is the far bigger story of that discovery.
The Qumran scrolls sometimes expand or smooth a text, so agreement between a scroll and the Greek does not settle every case by itself.
The sense of the verse is not materially different either way. That is an argument for caution about changing a long-standing text over a word that adds no new content.