What do the Dead Sea Scrolls say about Isaiah 45:7?

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a difference in Isaiah 45:7 that most translations silently pass over. It is not a trivial spelling variant — it is a different word — and it has not been resolved.

What the manuscripts actually say

Isaiah 45:7 ends its middle couplet with either well-being or good standing against calamity. The manuscripts split:

• The Masoretic Text (the standardized Hebrew text preserved in codices from around AD 900) reads שָׁלוֹם (šālôm, H7965): "making well-being and creating calamity."
• The Septuagint (the Greek translation made roughly 250–200 BC) reads εἰρήνην (eirēnēn) — peace — which is the standard Greek rendering of šālôm. The LXX's translator had a Hebrew text that matched the Masoretic reading.
• The Great Isaiah Scroll — known as 1QIsaᵃ, copied at Qumran around 125 BC — reads טוֹב (ṭôv, H2896): "making good and creating calamity" (column 38, line 13).

The oldest surviving Hebrew manuscript reads ṭôv. The oldest surviving Greek translation of Isaiah reads what answers to šālôm. Two oldest witnesses, two different words.

Why this matters

Both readings leave the verse claiming YHWH controls both poles. Under either reading, the structure is the same: one good pole, one adverse pole, both in YHWH's hands. But the theological stakes shift slightly between them.

With שָׁלוֹם/šālôm, the pair is welfare against calamity — a clean weal-and-woe polarity with no moral charge. With טוֹב/ṭôv, the pair is good against evil or calamity — which carries a possible moral charge and echoes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2:9, where the same two words (טוֹב and רָע) appear together. If 1QIsaᵃ's reading is original, then Job 2:10 and Lamentations 3:38 — which both pair ṭôv and rāʿ as the two things God sends — become the closest canonical parallels to this verse by vocabulary, not just theme.

What other scrolls say — and what they do not

Two other Isaiah scrolls are sometimes invoked in this discussion, but they cannot be witnesses here. 1Q8 (also called 1QIsaᵇ) begins its preserved text mid-verse at this point; the šālôm/ṭôv word falls in a physical gap and is simply absent from the leather. 4Q57 (4QIsaᶜ) has the word inside editorial reconstruction brackets — the editors restored it from surrounding context, and it is not legibly visible on the manuscript. Neither confirms either reading, and an honest account does not count them.

The variant is genuine, the two oldest witnesses diverge, and no later manuscript evidence settles the question. The reading is unresolved.

A detail the Greek translator preserved

Even where the Greek sides with the Masoretic Text on the šālôm word, the translator made a striking choice at the verse's other crux. In the Hebrew, the Genesis creation verb בָּרָא is used twice — for both darkness and calamity. The Septuagint spread four different Greek verbs across the four clauses, but the one creation-specific Greek verb, κτίζω (ktizō), was reserved for creating calamity (κακά, kaka — bad things/calamities; LXX Isaiah 45:7). The translator could have softened that claim; instead he heightened it by focusing the one sovereign-creation verb on exactly the pole that causes discomfort.

For the full comparison table of all three witnesses, the two scrolls that cannot be cited, and the theological stakes under each reading, see I Form Light and Create Darkness.