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Isaiah 53: Why God’s Suffering Servant is Not Israel

By Author Eli Kittim

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The Bible sometimes uses metaphorical language that often involves multiple layers of meaning. Here’s a case in point. Isaiah 49.3 does mention the suffering servant as “Israel.” But four verses later the servant begins to take on unique individual qualities and characteristics that decidedly distinguish him from the earlier collective qualities of the nation of Israel. In fact, he is later contrasted with the nations, described with a masculine pronoun as an individual person who is “deeply despised” and rejected. Isa. 49.7 reads as follows:

Thus says the Lord, the

Redeemer of Israel and

his Holy One, to one

deeply despised,

abhorred by the nations,

the slave of rulers, ‘Kings

shall see and stand up,

princes, and they shall

prostrate themselves,

because of the Lord, who

is faithful, the Holy One

of Israel, who has chosen

you.’ [1]

This rejection is given more full treatment in chapter 53. So, the question arises: How can he be both a human being and the nation of *Israel* at the same time? Answer: He cannot!

In other words, as these chapters begin to unfold, the image of the *suffering servant* evolves considerably, so much so that he’s later described with a masculine personal pronoun and depicted as an individual *man,* indeed a male: “He” (Hb. הוּא hu, which is the equivalent of the Greek αὐτὸς).[2] Therefore, it behooves us to read the Isaian passage (53.3-8) in its entirety:

He was despised and rejected by others; a

man of suffering and acquainted with

infirmity; and as one from whom others hide

their faces he was despised, and we held

him of no account. Surely he has borne our

infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we

accounted him stricken, struck down by

God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for

our transgressions, crushed for our

iniquities; upon him was the punishment

that made us whole, and by his bruises we

are healed. All we like sheep have gone

astray; we have all turned to our own way,

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of

us all. He was oppressed, and he was

afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like

a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like

a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so

he did not open his mouth. By a perversion

of justice he was taken away. Who could

have imagined his future? For he was cut

off from the land of the living, stricken for

the transgression of my people.

Does this sound like a characterization of a nation, let alone that of Israel? On the contrary, the suffering servant is described in the third-person singular with the masculine personal pronoun “he,” in the sense that it is he who “is led to the slaughter” (Isa. 53.7), not the nation of Israel! He is also described as “a man.” The third-person masculine pronoun “he” is then reiterated in v. 8 in order to establish not only the male identity of the suffering servant but also his personal demise:

For he was cut off from the land of the living

[slain], stricken for the transgression of my

people.

In this particular context, it cannot be a nation that is “cut off from the land of the living . . . for the transgression of” the people. That would strain the contextual meaning to give it a rather absurd interpretation. This is Atonement language regarding a specific man who is slain, and who dies as a sin offering! Isaiah 53.5 adds that his punishment “made us whole,” and “by his bruises we are healed”:

He was wounded for our transgressions,

crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the

punishment that made us whole, and by his

bruises we are healed.

We would normally expect to find this type of language——describing an explicit sacrifice as an atonement for sin——in the New Testament, not in the Hebrew Bible. For the aforementioned reasons, this passage does not square well with the so-called “nation of Israel” philological exegesis. This Hebraic insistence on the nation of Israel is therefore utterly disingenuous and dishonest!

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Past Tenses Do Not Imply Past Actions

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Insofar as the New Testament is concerned, verbal aspect theory, which is at the cutting edge of Hellenistic Greek linguistics, demonstrates that tense-forms do not have any temporal implications. According to Stanley E Porter, a leading authority on New Testament linguistics, past tenses are not necessarily references to past history:

Temporal values (past, present, future) are

not established in Greek by use of the

verbal aspects (or tense-forms) alone. This

may come as a surprise to those who, like

most students of Greek, were taught at an

elementary level that certain tense-forms

automatically refer to certain times when an

action occurs. [3]

In other words, past tenses do not necessarily imply past history! Similarly, Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have tenses. It’s an “aspectual” language. This means that the same form of a verb can be translated as either past, present, or future! In fact, prophecies are sometimes written in the past tense. Bottom line, one cannot use the past-tense argument to demonstrate that the authorial intent precludes prophetic material.

Conclusion

Isaiah is seemingly writing about prophecy, and the suffering servant is clearly not the nation of Israel but rather a male individual (cf. Rev. 12.5) whose sin offering (Isa. 53.6) is described as a sacrifice for the sins of the people (cf. Rom. 3.23-25; Heb. 9.26b)! He is also described as “a lamb that is led to the slaughter,” reminiscent of the “lamb without . . . blemish” (1 Pet. 1.19; cf. Lev. 4.32), the so-called sin offering sacrifice according to the Mosaic Law! Upon further scrutiny, Isaiah 49 ff. and, especially, Isaiah 53 are explicit references that are more in line with New Testament Soteriology than with the Judaic interpretation of the nation of Israel!

In fact, according to “The Dying Messiah Redux” article, by atheist historian Richard Carrier, the notion of a dying messiah predates Christianity and can also be found in the Talmud: “b.Sanhedrin 98b explicitly says the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is the messiah.” What is more, “b.Sanhedrin 93b says the messiah will endure great suffering . . . and b.Sukkah 52a-b likewise has a dying-and-rising ‘Christ son of Joseph’ ideology in it . . . even saying (quoting Zechariah 12:10) that this messiah will be ‘pierced’ to death.” Carrier concludes:

there is no plausible way later Jews would

invent interpretations of their scripture that

supported and vindicated Christians. They

would not invent a Messiah with a father

named Joseph who dies and is resurrected.

They would not proclaim Isaiah 53 to be

about the messiah and admit that Isaiah

there predicted the messiah would die and

be resurrected. That was the very chapter

Christians were using to prove their case

(and which scholars like Bart Ehrman keep

insisting only Christians saw as messianic).

So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief

that predates Christian evangelizing, even if

the evidence survives only in later sources.

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Notes

1 All Scripture quotes are from Michael D. Coogan (ed.), “The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha”: New Revised Standard Version (4th rev. edn; New York: Oxford U., 2010).

2 The Hebrew text is from Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph (eds.), “Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia” (4th rev. edn; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1967-77).

3 Stanley E. Porter, “Idioms of the Greek New Testament” (2nd edn; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), p. 25.

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