“The lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

Isaiah writes that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. The lion appears in the verse, but paired with the calf and the fatling, with a little child leading them.

This misquote is so widespread that it turns up in sermon titles, painted murals, and peace treaties, and almost nobody checks it. Isaiah writes that the wolf also 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. The popular version takes the lion from the third pairing and the lamb from the first and welds them together. What gets lost is the accumulating strangeness of the actual list, predator after predator set beside prey, until the whole created order has been reversed. What also gets lost is the little child leading them, which is the line Isaiah puts at the end for a reason. The passage is not a general wish for peace. It describes the reign of the Branch out of the stem of Jesse, when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

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