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Art Resource, NY

American minister and folk artist Edward Hicks (1780–1849) depicts an Eden-like Peaceable Kingdom, based on the vision of Isaiah. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them,” declares Isaiah 11:6—at least in translation. Scholars have long suspected that the text was based on a mistranslation; noting the parallel structure of the phrases, they expected a verb in place of “the fatling.”

With the discovery of the Isaiah Scroll among the first Dead Sea Scrolls, those scholars were vindicated: The Isaiah Scroll varies slightly from the traditional Hebrew text at this point, reading “will feed.” The prophet’s vision concludes “the calf and young lion will feed together.” Author Harvey Minkoff, in the accompanying article, notes that this is just one of numerous instances where the Dead Sea Scrolls have yielded variations in the biblical text, many of them improvements over the version used in most translations.