What does Isaiah 53 mean?

Who is the suffering servant in Isaiah 53?

Isaiah 53 never names its suffering servant. Christian tradition reads him as Jesus, and Jewish interpreters tended to read him as their people in exile. The text gives no personal details that point to one historical figure. Paba De Andrado sets the question of identity aside and asks instead what the servant does in the poem.² Jewish and Christian readers have asked who the servant is for twenty centuries.⁵

In the New Testament, several passages cite Isaiah 53 as pointing to Jesus, among them Matthew 8:17, Acts 8:32-33 and 1 Peter 2:22.⁶ In Acts 8, a royal official of the queen of Meroe, in Nubia, rides from Jerusalem in a chariot, reading Isaiah. The official managed the queen’s treasury, and the chariot and the book show the wealth of her kingdom. The official was most likely reading Isaiah in the ancient Greek translation. Philip asks the official whom the prophet means, himself or someone else. Philip then connects the passage to Jesus, and the official asks to be baptized.⁷

David Mishkin reports two main views in traditional Jewish interpretation: the passage speaks of the Messiah, or of the nation of Israel.⁶ De Andrado finds that Jewish interpreters tended toward the second.² For the medieval rabbi Rashi, the suffering servant is the people of Israel suffering in exile. Rashi’s reading answered the Christian one. The same reading comforted Jews under persecution. Rashi also read that suffering as atonement by Israel, for its own sins and for those of all humanity.⁵

Francisco Varo reports that some authors date Rashi’s commentary on Isaiah to 1096. Not all agree with that date. The call to the First Crusade was followed by massacres of Jews in France and Germany. A 1096 date places the commentary at the time news of those massacres was reaching Rashi.⁵

In medieval debates between Christians and Jews, the Christian side read the Servant Songs as fulfilled in Jesus. The Jewish side denied that they referred to him. The Spanish-Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra objected that the promises of children and long life in verse 10 did not fit Jesus. The first major Jewish polemical work in Spain was composed in 1168 by Jacob ben Reuben. Jacob ben Reuben argued that one whom Christians call God could not be called “my servant,” a term of disgrace for a god.⁵

Modern scholars give four main answers: the Messiah, Israel as a people, one person who is not the Messiah, or several meanings at once. Reading the servant as historical Israel is one of the most popular views in recent times. Names proposed for a single servant include Moses, Jehoiachin, Josiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Cyrus, Zerubbabel and Job. Among those, the most widely accepted is that the servant is the prophet himself.⁵

Why does Isaiah 53 begin in chapter 52?

Isaiah 53 begins in chapter 52 because its poem, the fourth Servant Song, opens at Isaiah 52:13 and closes at 53:12. The Servant Songs are four passages in the second part of Isaiah: 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, and 52:13 to 53:12.⁵ In the traditional Hebrew text, the limits of the fourth song are not in dispute.⁴

Across the four songs, the hostility toward the servant rises: his calling, his mission, the first resistance, and his death. Marta García Fernández reads the fourth song as the only one that tells of the servant’s death and burial.⁴

In the frame of the poem, 52:13 to 15 and 53:10 to 12, God speaks of the servant, mostly in the future tense. In the middle, 53:1 to 9, a “we” confesses in the past tense what happened. That middle reads like a creed of how the servant was born, grew up and died. García Fernández reports scholars who doubt the poem’s unity and take 53:1 to 9 as its original core, with the frame added later.⁴

García Fernández also reports a reading in which the “many” of 52:13 to 15 include foreign peoples. The kings of 52:15 come to understand by seeing what no one had told them. The “we” of 53:1 learn by hearing instead: “Who has believed our message?”⁴

Isaiah 52:14 says the servant’s appearance “was marred more than any man.” Paba De Andrado notes that at that word, a scroll of Isaiah among the Dead Sea Scrolls has a form meaning “I have anointed.” Anointing links the servant to the priests, who were consecrated with oil. In 52:15 the text on this page says the servant “will cleanse many nations.” The verb commonly describes a priest sprinkling blood for atonement. The same study reports scholars who dispute that priestly sense on grounds of grammar.²

What does “by his stripes we are healed” mean?

In Isaiah 53:5, which reads “by his wounds we are healed” on this page, the people who speak in the poem are healed through the servant’s suffering for their wrongs. Verse 4 begins with what the servant took on: “he has borne our sickness, and carried our suffering.” The ancient Greek translation renders the Hebrew word for “sickness” there with its word for sins.² Verse 5 goes on: “He was crushed for our iniquities” and “The punishment that brought our peace was on him.” Verses 4 and 5 first move the harm one way, onto the servant, and the end of verse 5 moves healing the other way. Marta García Fernández reads the line as an exchange: harm passes to the servant, and good passes back to the people. García Fernández finds the exchange again at the poem’s close, where bearing others’ sin is what lets the servant intercede for them.⁴ Verse 12 ends: “he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

The temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed in 587 BCE, and the exiles had to seek peace with God without a sanctuary. Exile itself was seen as a punishment for sin. The grief of that time shows in Lamentations, which ends by pleading with God to restore the people. Paba De Andrado argues that the servant takes the temple’s place for atonement: priest, offering and sinner meet in one person.² García Fernández doubts the temple reading, because in García Fernández’s dating the temple in Jerusalem had already been rebuilt.⁴

Verse 10 speaks of making the servant’s soul “an offering for sin.” The word for that offering first meant compensation or reparation, and later a reparation sacrifice in priestly law.⁴ The reparation offering was the only kind of sacrifice that could be paid in money, the temple shekel. The priest assessed the damage, plus a fee of one fifth.²

Suffering in place of others gets its fullest expression in the Old Testament in Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12. Ezekiel, a prophet of the exile, taught that only the guilty suffer the consequences of their actions. In this poem an innocent person suffers, and the suffering is for others.¹

Until the middle of the 20th century, most Christian commentators read the servant’s suffering as suffering in the place of others. Ananda Geyser-Fouchè and Thomas Munengwa report that from the middle of the century, a number of commentators questioned that reading. Geyser-Fouchè and Munengwa still speak of suffering in place of others, in a broad sense: taking another’s place, and sharing another’s pain.¹

What does “as a lamb to the slaughter” mean?

In Isaiah 53:7, Paba De Andrado reads “As a lamb that is led to the slaughter” as a comparison with one of the commonest animals offered in sacrifice. The picture calls up the temple, and the servant suffers unjustly, like an innocent lamb. A blemished animal could not be offered, but the servant is called righteous, and verse 9 says he had done no violence.²

De Andrado also reports an objection: the word for slaughter here belongs to butchers and cooks killing for food, not to temple ritual. The same picture of a lamb led to the slaughter appears in Jeremiah 11:19 and Psalm 44, for innocent people treated unjustly.²

The poem may also call up the goat of the Day of Atonement, in Leviticus 16. There the high priest laid his hands on the goat and confessed the people’s wrongs. Then the goat was sent into the wilderness, which is, literally, a land cut off. Both the goat and the servant bear the wrongs of others.² Verse 8 says the servant was “cut off out of the land of the living.”

Marta García Fernández finds a run of verbs in verses 7 to 9 in which things are done to the servant. García Fernández reads the servant’s silence at his trial, “he didn’t open his mouth,” as a choice to submit.⁴

When was Isaiah 53 written?

The date of Isaiah 53 is uncertain. Tradition places it, with the rest of Isaiah 40 to 55, in Babylonia during the exile.² The first deportation to Babylon came in 597 BCE. Jerusalem’s final destruction and exile came in 587 BCE. Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 BCE. The exiles’ return began in 538 BCE.³

Paba De Andrado takes Isaiah 53 to be composed before the temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt, in answer to the ordeal of exile.² Ananda Geyser-Fouchè and Thomas Munengwa credit Isaiah 40 to 55 to an anonymous prophet of the exile, often called Second Isaiah.¹ Scholars still dispute whether that prophet composed Isaiah 53 itself.² García Fernández reports an estimate that the editing of the whole book of Isaiah lasted about 500 years.⁴

Marta García Fernández dates the poem later, after the exile. García Fernández places it in the second half of the 400s BCE, or even the first half of the 300s BCE. By current estimates, Babylon deported about 25,000 men, a quarter of the population. The count leaves out women and children. Excavations confirm that Jerusalem suffered a harsh siege. The city probably stayed in ruins until the Persian period. The town of Mizpah took over as the region’s center of government. The rebuilding of the temple began around 520 BCE and ran until 515 BCE. The lack of remains on the temple grounds suggests a modest remodeling.⁴

Verse 11 on this page says of the servant: “he will see the light.” In the traditional Hebrew text, the verb “see” in that line has no object. Some ancient copies supply one, the word “light,” among them three of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient Greek translation. Other ancient versions lack it, among them the Latin Vulgate and the Syriac. If “light” is original, a copyist dropped it from the Hebrew by accident. García Fernández judges the opposite: “light” is a later reading that makes the line easier. Elsewhere in Isaiah, the verb “see” sometimes stands with no object, as in 41:5 and 49:7.⁴