[NOTE.
The use of Roman Numerals
to
identify Scriptural Texts have been changed. –
Ed]
INTRODUCTION
TO NEW EDITION
No
greater service has been rendered to the Christian
public during the past few
years than the republishing of David Baron’s works. David Baron
was not only an unusually able
and consecrated missionary to his people - the Jews -
but he was a spiritual
giant, mighty in the Scriptures.
He
brought to his task the rare and happy combination of
keen spiritual insight
and sane and sanctified scholarship.
In these days when Jewish leaders, as a defence against
Christianity, are trying to eliminate from the pages of
the Old Testament the
doctrine of a personal Messiah, and so, in reality,
undermining the very
foundations of true Judaism, and “liberal”
writers within the “Church”
are devoted to the
same purpose, it is a source of genuine satisfaction and
strength to the cause
of Christ in general and to Jewish Evangelism in
particular that such a work as
The Servant
of Jehovah should again be made available to the public.
Thoroughly steeped in Rabbinic lore
and literature and the polemics of Judaism, no one was
better able to expose
the fallacies of the more modem Jewish interpretation of
this great and sublime
portion of the Old Testament, Isaiah 53, which has been aptly referred to as “the bad conscience of the Synagogue.”
But David Baron’s purpose in the writing of this book was not
only the critical and controversial but the continuous
exposition of this
greatest of all prophetic utterances, to convince of its
truth and to
strengthen faith, so that like Philip of old when one
came to him concerning
this passage asking “of whom speaketh the prophet this?” we may be
better able to preach unto
them Jesus (Acts 8: 34).
And the reader will realize a spiritual
exaltation through the reading
of this rich exposition, and a fuller comprehension of
the meaning of the
glorious atonement accomplished by “The Servant of Jehovah,”
-------
PREFACE
It is, I can
sincerely say, with
unfeigned diffidence that I send forth this little work
on its mission, for I
am deeply conscious of the greatness and sublimity of
the theme and of the
inadequate way in which I have been able to deal with
it. I felt
inwardly impelled to write it, and
have gladly devoted to it what days and hours could
possibly be spared in a
life of strain and pressure on account of many other
tasks and
responsibilities.
But though sensible of the shortcoming and imperfection of my
effort, I have the heart assurance that there is a
blessing in it, and if the
reader receives only a fraction of the spiritual help
and enjoyment which the
writer found in the course of his meditation and
exposition of this truly
wonderful Scripture he will be amply rewarded.
It has confirmed his faith in the supernatural
character of prophecy and
made him feel as never before that Holy Scripture has
upon it “the stamp of
its Divine Author - the mark of heaven - the impress
of eternity.”
It has, if possible, wrought deeper conviction in his heart
that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Christ, the
promised Redeemer of Israel -
He “of whom Moses in the law and the
prophets did write”;
for it is beyond even the wildest
credulity to believe that the resemblance in every
feature and minutest detail
between this prophetic portraiture drawn centuries
before His advent and the
story of His life, and death, and glorious resurrection
as narrated in the
Gospels, can be mere accident or fortuitous coincidence. It has also
strengthened my hope for the
future blessing of the nation from which I have sprung,
and for which I have
not ceased to yearn with the yearnings of Him who wept
over Jerusalem, and even
on the Cross prayed for them: “Father, forgive
them, for they know
not what they do”;
for, in the words of Franz
Delitzsch, “we must not
overlook the fact that this golden passional is also one of the
greatest prophecies of the future conversion of the
nation which has rejected
the Servant of God, and allowed the Gentiles to be
the first to recognize Him.
At last, though very late, it will feel
remorse. And when
this shall once take place, then, and
not till then, will this chapter - which, to use
an old epithet, will ever be carnificina Rabbinorum
-
receive its complete historical fulfilment.”
As will be seen, the book consists of two parts.
In the first part it has been impossible to
avoid controversy and criticism in order to clear the
ground, and to
demonstrate the firm foundation on which the Messianic
interpretation of the
prophecies concerning the Servant of Jehovah in the Book
of Isaiah is based;
while in the second part, which is a continuous
exposition of the great
Scripture which forms the subject of the whole, I have
tried as much as
possible to avoid controversy and criticism, but to make
it spiritually
helpful to believers.
There is nothing in these pages which should be too difficult
or abstruse for the ordinary intelligent reader who
knows no other language
than English; the Hebrew words and phrases where they
occur being ill
transliterated as well as translated.
To
those, however, who have no interest in the history of
interpretation, and do
not care to follow Jewish and rationalistic
misinterpretations, I would
recommend to read the exposition first, or to pass over
Chapters II. and III. of the first part.
DAVID BARON.
-------
CONTENTS
PART I
A CRITICAL
EXAMINATION OF THE
NON-MESSIANIC
INTERPRETATIONS
OF ISAIAH 53
CHAPTER I.
THE PROPHETIC GEM
AND ITS SETTING Page 3
CHAPTER II.
THE ANCIENT JEWISH INTERPRETATION
OF ISAIAH 53. Page 10
CHAPTER III. THE MODERN JEWISH AND
RATIONALISTIC
CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION Page 16
CHAPTER IV. THE UNTENABLENESS OF
THE MODERN
INTERPRETATION Page 33
PART II
THE
EXPOSITION
I. JEHOVAH’S INTRODUCTION OF HIS SERVANT:
A SUMMARY OF THE WHOLE PROPHECY Page 51
II.
THE STORY OF THE SERVANT OF JEHOVAH UNFOLDED
Page
67
(1)
The Early Years and Unobtrusive
Character
of the Servant of
Jehovah. Page
69
(2)
The Despised and Rejected of
Men Page 73
(3)
The Vicarious Character of His
Sufferings
Page
83
(4)
The Moral Necessity of His
Sufferings
Page
93
(5)
The Voluntary Character of His
Sufferings Page 98
(6)
The Unjust Trial and Violent Death
of the
Servant
of Jehovah Page101
(7)
God’s Special Interposition in the
Burial
of His Servant Page 109
III. THE
RESURRECTION AND FUTURE GLORY
OF
THE SERVANT OF JEHOVAH Page117
(1)
The Life which is Conditioned
upon His
Death
Page
119
(2)
His Spiritual Seed
Page
121
The
Prolongation of His Days
Page
123
(4)
The Pleasure of Jehovah which
Prospers
in His Hands Page 124
IV. JEHOVAH’S FINAL WORD
CONCERNING HIS
SERVANT: THE
GLORIOUS AWARD FOR
HIS SUFFERINGS
Page
127
APPENDIX
THE SUFFERING
MESSIAH OF THE SYNAGOGUE
Page
143
-------
THE SCRIPTURE
Behold, My Servant shall deal wisely,
He shall be exalted and lifted
up, and shall be very
high.
Like as many were astonished at Thee:
(His visage
was so marred more than any man,
and His form more than the sons of men),
So shall He sprinkle many nations; kings shall
shut their mouths at Him:
for that which had not
been told them shall they see;
and that which
they had not heard shall they understand.
Who hath believed our message? and to
whom bath the arm of Jehovah been revealed?
For
He grew up before Him as
a tender plant, and as a root out of adry
ground.
He
hath no form nor
comeliness; and when
we see Him, there is no
beauty that we should desire Him.
He was despised, and rejected of men; a
man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief:
and as one from whom men hide
their face He was despised and we esteemed Him not.
Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried
our sorrows yet we did esteem Him stricken,
smitten of God, and
afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions. He was
bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have
turned every one to his own way,
and Jehovah
hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, yet when He was afflicted He opened
not His mouth; as a
lamb that is led to the
slaughter, and as a
sheep that before its
shearers is dumb, so He
opened not His mouth.
By oppression and judgment He was taken away;
and as for
His generation, who
among them considered that
He was cut off out of the land of the living for the
transgression of My people
to whom the stroke was due?
And they made His grave with the wicked, and with a
rich man in His death;
although He had done no
violence neither was any deceit in His month.
Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise Him; He hath put
Him to grief: when Thou
shalt make His soul an
offering for sin, He
shall see His seed, He
shall prolong His days,
and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His
hands.
He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be
satisfied: by the
knowledge of Himself shall My
righteous Servant justify many;
and He shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great,
and He shall
divide the spoil with the strong; because He poured
out His soul unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors:
yet He bare the sin of
many,
and made intercession for the
transgressors.
[Translation
of the American “Standard Edition.”]
[Page
1]
PART I
A CRITICAL
EXAMINATION OF THE
NON-MESSIANIC INTERPRETATIONS
OF ISAIAH 53.
“I
pray thee,
of whom
speaketh the prophet
this? of himself, or
of some other?”
- ACTS
8:
34.
[Page 2 blank: Page 3]
CHAPTER I
THE PROPHETIC GEM AND ITS SETTING
The great
Scripture we are about to consider has sometimes been
called “the fifth
Gospel.” “Methinks,”
said Augustine,
“Isaiah
writes not a prophecy but a gospel.” This he said of
the
whole book, but it is especially true of this chapter. Polycarp,
the disciple of John, called it “the
golden Passional of the
Old Testament”; and a great German
scholar writes: “It looks as if it had been written
beneath the cross of
“It is prelude to much that is most distinctive in New Testament doctrine,
and is the root from which not a little of the thinking
of Christian ages has
grown. Its
phraseology has entered
largely into Christian speech, [Page 4] and it has supplied more texts to
the gospel preacher than
any other portion of
the Old Testament. There are individual phrases in it
resembling peaks, from
which we faintly descry vast realms of truth which we
cannot yet explore, but
which shine with a mystic light whose source is
Divine. Beyond
question, this chapter is the heart of
the Hebrew prophetic writings. It embraces and
harmonizes the ideas contained
in such seemingly discordant predictions as Psalms
2., 22., 72., and 110.; and from the standpoint which it
furnishes we are enabled
to see the consistency of Messianic prophecy
throughout.
“Elsewhere, indeed, we find greater
splendour of language, force of passion, wealth of
imagery, and imaginative
elevation, but nowhere so full, minute, and vivid
forth-showing of God’s
purpose. Truths
elsewhere seen in
twilight and transitory glimpses here stand forth for
calm inspection in the
light of day. Elsewhere we find line or touch or
feature in keeping with what
is here; but nowhere so finished and complete a
portraiture.
It is as if the prophet had shaded and filled
up with colours the outlines elsewhere given.
The hints of One passing through shame and
suffering to victory, which
elsewhere appear as ‘dark
sayings,’ here kindle
into a great life-filled picture, in
which we see not only His surpassing
sorrow, but also the mystery of its meaning, and the
glory which finally comes
of it. Not
merely is there broad
outline, but those more delicate lines and contours
which give perfect
individuality to the portrait.
“The
chapter holds much the same place in Old Testament [Page 5] prophecy that the narrative of Christ’s death, burial, and
resurrection holds in New Testament history; and with
this chapter all Hebrew
prophecy as a Divine thing stands or falls.”*
*
The Man of Sorrows and the joy that was Set before
Him - a very excellent booklet by the late James
Culross, D.D.,
published by the Drummond Tract
Depository, to which I shall have occasion to make many
references in the
exposition.
But most precious and beautiful as this Old Testament
prophetic gem is in itself, its lustre is greatly
intensified by its setting.
The second half of the Book of Isaiah, consisting of the last
twenty-seven chapters, is the sublimest and richest
portion of Old Testament
revelation. It
forms a single continuous
prophecy which occupies the same position in the
prophetic Scriptures as the
Book of Deuteronomy in the Pentateuch, and the Gospel of
John in relation to
the Synoptic Gospels.
It is true that “it does not
flow on in even current like a history,” and to the superficial reader it may have a desultory
appearance, but “after patient study the first sense
of confusedness is got
over, and we perceive its magnificent and harmonious
completeness as it rounds
itself into one glorious vision.”
It may be called the prophetic Messianic epic of the Old
Testament. It
is sublime in its very
style and language, and wonderful in its
comprehensiveness anticipating, as it
does, the whole order of the New Testament.
It begins, where the New Testament begins, with
the ministry of John the
Baptist - “the voice of [Page
6]
him
that crieth in the wilderness,
Prepare ye
the way of the Lord,” and it ends, where the New Testament ends, with the new heavens and a new
earth, wherein shall dwell righteousness.*
*
Chaps. 65: 17-20, 66:
22.
On examining the glorious prophecy closely, we find that the
twenty-seven chapters range themselves into three equal
divisions of nine
chapters each, all ending with nearly the same solemn
refrain, “There is no
peace, saith my God,
to the wicked.”*
*
Chaps. 48: 22,
57: 21,
66: 24.
One great line of thought unfolded in the whole prophecy is
the development of evil and the final overthrow of the
wicked, who are excluded from the
blessings of Messiah’s Kingdom; and
the
sufferings but final glory of the righteous remnant,
who are the subjects
of that Kingdom, and
whose King is
described as leading the way along the same path of
suffering into [millennial] glory.
This subject becomes developed and intensified as we go on,
until it reaches its climax in the last chapter.
The first section is brought to a close at the end of chapter
48.,
where the blessedness of the righteous who are “redeemed” (ver. 20), and peacefully led and satisfied even in the desert, is
contrasted with the state of the wicked to whom “there is no peace.”
In the second division the same subject becomes intensified;
there is development of both evil and good,
righteousness and wickedness, and
it ends with chapter 57., where “Peace!
peace!” is announced
to the [Page 7] righteous, but the wicked have not only “no peace,” but have become “like
the
troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose
waters
cast up mire and dirt.”
In the last division the destiny of both is brought to a
climax and becomes fixed for ever.
“Therefore
thus saith Jehovah God,
Behold, My servants
shall eat, but ye
shall be hungry; behold, My
servants shall drink,
but ye shall be thirsty;
behold, My servants
shall rejoice, but ye
shall be ashamed;
behold, My servants
shall sing for joy, but
ye shall cry for sorrow of heart and shall howl for
vexation
of spirit.
And ye shall leave your name for a curse unto My
chosen, for the Lord
God shall slay thee,
and call His servants by another name.”
This contrast is continued until finally we find
the righteous dwelling
for ever in the new heavens and the new earth, wherein
shall dwell
righteousness; while as to the wicked who have
transgressed against God, “their worm
shall not die, neither
shall their fire be
quenched, and they
shall be an abhorring to all
flesh.”
In the first
section (chaps. 40.
- 48.) the restoration from Babylon (which, however, is portrayed in
terms which far exceeded what actually took place at
that restoration, and
which will only be exhaustively fulfilled in the greater
restoration of Israel
“from
the four
corners of the earth”)
is
the starting-point, and the appointed instrument in
God’s hand to bring about
that restoration, Cyrus, is the central figure.
In
the second or
central section (chaps. 49. - 57.)
the
grand redemption to be accomplished by One [Page 8] greater than Cyrus - even by Him, who in this series of chapters is
pre-eminently the Ebhed Yehovah - the “Servant of Jehovah,” who is sent not
only to raise up “the tribes of
Jacob,”
and to
restore “the preserved of Israel,” but
to be “a light
also to the Gentiles,” and God’s salvation “unto the end of the earth,” is the theme
with which the prophet’s heart overflows; and in the
third or last section the
blessed condition of restored and converted Israel, who shall then be the channel and active propagators of the blessings of Messiah’s gospel
among all nations, is the outstanding subject.
The heart and climax of the whole prophecy is to be found in
the brief section which forms its inmost centre (chaps.
52: 13 to 53:
12), which, instead
of a prophecy uttered
centuries in advance, reads like an historic summary of
the Gospel narrative of
the sufferings of the Christ and
the glory - [during the “Age”
to come] - that should follow.
Taking our position at this central point, we are almost
overwhelmed with the evidence of design in the very
structure of this prophecy,
for on closer examination we find that each book is
subdivided into three
sections of three chapters each, nearly corresponding to
the divisions in the
Authorized Version.
Thus the middle book
is chapters
49.
- 57. The middle section of the
middle
book is chapters
52., 53.,
54., and chapter 53. is the middle chapter of the middle section of
the middle book - forming, as it were, the heart and
centre of this wonderful
Messianic poem, as well as the heart and centre [Page 9] of all Old
Testament prophecy.
The central verse of this central paragraph,
which begins properly with chap. 52: 13,
is: “He was wounded for our
transgressions,
He was
bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement with
a view to our peace was upon Him; and
with His stripes we are healed.”
The doctrine it enshrines, namely, substitution, is one of the
leading truths unfolded in Old and New Testaments, and
it forms the central
thought in this great prophecy.
It is,
moreover, the essence of the message of comfort with
which the prophet begins (40:
1, 2), solving the
problem as to how “her iniquity
is pardoned.”
*
*
*
[Page 10]
CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENT JEWISH INTERPRETATION
OF ISAIAH 53
There is
truth in the observation of a scholarly writer that this
great prophecy was “an enigma
which could not be fully understood in the days before
Christ, but which
has been solved by the sufferings,
death, resurrection, and exaltation of Him who was
both Son of Man and Son of
God.”*
* Dr. C. H. H. Wright, The
Servant of
Jehovah.
It is therefore not surprising to find that in the Talmud
and Rabbinic Midrashim there is much
confusion and contradiction in the various
interpretations advanced by the
Rabbis. But
though it may be true, as Professor
Dalman observes,* that the
Messianic interpretation was not the general one, or the
one officially
recognized in Israel (any more than any of the other
interpretations can be
said to have been either generally or officially
recognized), yet from most
ancient times there have not been wanting authoritative
teachers who
interpreted the chapter of the Messiah - in spite of the
fact that the picture
of the Redeemer which is here drawn is utterly [Page 11] opposed to the
disposition and to the
perverted hopes and expectations in reference to the
Messiah which have
developed in Rabbinic Judaism.
*
Jesaja
Iiii., Das Prophetenwart.
vom
Suhnleiden
des Hoilmittlers.
In proof of this, the following few brief extracts from ancient
Jewish interpretations will interest the Christian
reader:
First, let me quote Jonathan
ben Uzziel
(first
century A.D.), who begins his Targum with, “Behold, my Servant Messiah shall
prosper; He shall be high and increase, and be
exceeding strong.”
And then, to reconcile the interpretation of this
scripture of the
Messiah with his reluctance to recognize that the
promised Deliverer must
suffer and die for the sins of the nation, he
proceeds
to juggle with the scripture in a most extraordinary
manner, making
all the references to exaltation and glory in the
chapter to apply to the
Messiah, but the references to tribulation and
sufferings to Israel.
In illustration of the method by which this
is accomplished I need quote only his paraphrase of the
very next verse (52:
14), which reads: “As
the House
of Israel looked to Him during many days, because
their countenance was darkened among the peoples,
and their complexion beyond the
sons of men.”
In the Talmud Babylon,* among other
opinions,
we find the following: “The
Messiah - what is His
name? ... The Rabbis
say the ‘leprous one’;** (those)
of the [Page 12] house of Rabbi (say), ‘the
sick one,’
as it is said, ‘Surely
He hath borne our
sicknesses.’”***
* Sanhedrin,
fol. 98b. ** This is based on a wrong interpretation of the word nagua - “stricken” or “plagued,”
as
meaning “leprous.”
***
The other names of the Messiah mentioned in this passage are:
“Shiloh,” with reference
to Gen. 49:
10, “until
Shiloh come”;
“Yinnon,”
with reference
to Ps. 72:
17, “His
name shall
endure for ever; before
the sun (was created)
his name was Vinnon;
“Haninah,”
in
reference to Jer.
16: 13,
“where no Haninah
(favour) will
he given to you”;
“M’nahem,”
son of
Hezekiah, in reference to Lam.
1: 16,
“the Comforter (M’nahem) that
should
restore my soul is far from me.”
That the generally received older Jewish interpretation of
this prophecy was the Messianic is admitted by Abrabanel,
who himself proceeds
in a long polemic against the Nazarenes to interpret it
of the Jewish nation.
He begins: “The first question is to ascertain
to whom (this
scripture) refers: for the
learned among the Nazarenes
expound it of the man who was crucified in Jerusalem
at the end of the second
Temple, and who according to them was the Son of God
and took flesh in the
virgin’s womb, as is stated in their writings. Jonathan ben Uzziel
interprets it in the Targum of the future Messiah; and
this is also the opinion of our
learned men in the majority of their Midrashim.”
Similarly another (Rabbi
Mosheh el Sheikh,
commonly known as Alshech,
second
had of the sixteenth century), who also himself follows
the older
interpretation, at any rate of the first three verses (53:
13-15,
which, however, as we shall see when we come to the
interpretation, contain a
summary of the whole prophecy), testifies that our [Page 13] Rabbis with one voice accept and affirm the opinion that the prophet is
speaking of the King Messiah.*
In fact, until Rashi* (Rabbi Solomon Yizchaki) applied it to
the Jewish nation, the
Messianic interpretation of this chapter was almost
universally adopted by
Jews, and his view, which we shall examine presently,
although received by Aben Ezra, Kimchi, and others, was rejected as unsatisfactory by Maimonides,
who
is regarded by the Jews as of highest authority, by Alshech (as stated above), and many others, one of whom* says the
interpretation adopted by Rashi “distorts
the
passage from its natural meaning,” and that in truth “it was given of God as a description
of the Messiah, whereby, when any should claim to be
the Messiah, to judge by
the resemblance or non-resemblance to it whether he
were the Messiah or no.”
And another** says: “The meaning of ‘He
was wounded for our transgressions.
... bruised
for our iniquities,’
is that since the Messiah
bears our iniquities, which produce the effect of His
being bruised, it follows
that whoso will not admit that the Messiah thus
suffers for our iniquities must
endure and suffer for them himself.”
* Rashi, 1040-1105.
** R. Mosheh Kohen
Iben Crispin, of Cordova, and afterwards of
[Page 14]
Before proceeding to an examination of the modern Jewish
interpretation of this chapter, let me add two further
striking testimonies to
its more ancient Messianic interpretation - taken this
time, not from any
Targum, or Midrash, or Rabbinical Commentary, which
might be said to express
the individual opinion of this or that Rabbi, but from the Jewish liturgy, which may be said to bear upon it the seal of
the authority and usage of the whole Synagogue.
The first is taken from the
Liturgy
for the Day of Atonement - the most solemn day in
the Jewish year -
and reads as follows: “We are shrunk up in our misery even
until now! Our
Rock hath not come nigh to us; Messiah
our righteousness (or ‘our Righteous Messiah’) has
departed from us: Horror
hath seized upon us, and we have none to justify us. He hath
borne the yoke of our iniquities and
our transgressions, and is wounded because of our
transgression. He
beareth our sins on His shoulder, that He
may find pardon for our iniquities.
We
shall be healed by His wound at the time the Eternal
will create Him (Messiah)
as a new creature.
0
bring Him up from the circle of the earth, raise Him
up from Seir to assemble
us the second time on
*
This prayer or hymn forms part of the Musaph
Service for the Day of Atonement.
The
author, according to Zunz (Literatur
geschithle der
Syn. Poesie, p. 56,
etc.), was Eleazer ben
Kalir, who lived in
the ninth century.
Yinnon, as will be
seen from the quotation from Talmud
Sanhedrin
on p. 12, was one of the names given by the Rabbis
to the
Messiah, and is derived from Psalm
72: 17,
which the Talmud renders, “Before
the sun was, His name” - a rendering and
explanation which implies a belief in the pre-existence
of the Messiah.
[Page 15]
The other passage is also from the Machsor (Liturgy for
the Festival Services) and
will be found among the prayers on the Feast of
Passover. It
is as follows: the Talmud renders, “Flee,
my beloved, until the end of the vision shall speak;
hasten, and the shadows shall take their flight hence:
high and exalted and
lofty shall be the despised one; he shall be prudent
in judgment, and shall
sprinkle many! Lay
bare thine arm! cry out,
and say: ‘The voice of my beloved; behold he
cometh!’”*
*
David Levi, the English translator of the Machsor, a Jew, says
in a note that this verse
referred to “the true Messiah.”
*
*
*
[Page 16]
CHAPTER III
THE MODERN JEWISH AND RATIONALISTIC CHRISTIAN
INTERPRETATION OF ISAIAH 53.
On
examining the different non-Messianic and controversial
interpretations of this
great prophecy, given by Jewish and unbelieving
Christian Rabbis, it is an important
fact to be borne in mind, as Pusey
points out, that next to nothing turns upon renderings
of the Hebrew. “The objections raised
by Jewish controversialists (and I may add by
the non-Messianic Christian interpreters) in
only
four, or at most five, words
turn on the
language.”
It is not then a
question of knowledge of Hebrew Grammar, or Philology;
and ordinary intelligent
English readers, with the Authorized or Revised Version
of the Scriptures in
their hands, are well able to judge of the merits of the
different
interpretations which are advanced.
“The characteristics in which all
agree are, that there would be a prevailing unbelief
as to the subject of the
prophecy, lowly beginnings, among circumstances
outwardly unfavourable, but
before God, and protected by Him; sorrows, injustice,
contempt, death, which
were the portion of the sufferer; that he was
accounted a [Page 17] transgressor, yet that his sufferings were, in some way,
vicarious, the just for the unjust; his meek silence;
his willing acceptance of
his death; his being with the rich in his death; his
soul being (in some way)
an offering for sin, and God’s acceptance of it; his
prolonged life; his making
many righteous; his continued intercession for
transgressors; the greatness of
his exaltation, in proportion to the depth of his
humiliation; the submission
of kings to him; his abiding reign.”*
* Pusey
in his Introduction to The Jewish
Interpreters of Isaiah 53.
Now these characteristics stand out in all literal
translations (as distinguished from mere paraphrases)
whether made by Jews or
Christians, in the east or in the west.
“The question,”
as the writer whom I
have just quoted observes, “is
not, ‘What is the
picture?’ - in
this all are agreed - but ‘Whose image or likeness does it bear?’”
It is not necessary for us to examine those Jewish
interpretations which apply this chapter to Jeremiah,
Isaiah himself, Hezekiah,
Josiah, or Job, etc., for they have been sufficiently
refuted by Jewish writers
themselves, but I may quote Hengstenberg’s
observation in reference to those Christian writers
who have followed in
the same lines.
“Among the interpretations which
refer the prophecy to a single individual other than
the Messiah,” he
says, “scarcely any one has
found another defender
than its own author.
They are of
importance only in so far as [Page
18]
they show
that the prophecy does most decidedly make the
impression that its subject is a
real person, not a personification; and further, that
it could not by any means
be an exegetical interest which induced rationalism to
reject the
interpretation which referred it to Christ.”
The most generally accepted modern Jewish interpretation of
this prophecy is that which makes it apply to the Jewish
nation.
The first mention we have of this explanation is by Origen,* who, in his
work against Celsus,
says, “I remember once having
used these prophecies in
disquisition with those called wise among the Jews,
whereon the Jews said that
these things were prophesied of the whole people as
one which was both
dispersed abroad and smitten.”
But this may then have been the opinion of that
particular Rabbi, or the
counter-explanation may have been advanced by him (as
has been done by later
Rabbis and Jewish commentators) as a device, “in
order
to answer heretics” who were pressing them with
the remarkable
resemblance between the prophecy and its fulfilment in
Jesus of Nazareth.
* Born,
185 or 186 A.D.; died, 253.
The first of
the authoritative Jewish
commentators who applied this chapter to the Jewish
nation was Rashi,
and since
his time it has become more and more the “generally
received” interpretation among the Jews.
And that unbelieving Israel should have departed
from the ancient
interpretation which applied this prophecy to the
Messiah is really not to be
wondered at, for first [Page
19] the
idea of a suffering expiatory
Messiah became more and more repugnant to Rabbinic
Judaism, which lost the
knowledge of sin and the consciousness of the need of
salvation, such as alone
could make the doctrine of a vicariously suffering
Redeemer acceptable.
“Not knowing the
holiness of God, and being ignorant of the true import
of the Law,” as Hengstenberg
observes, “they imagine that in
their own strength they can be
justified before God.
What they longed
for was only an outward deliverance from their misery
and oppressors, not an
inward deliverance from sin.
For this
reason the Synagogue occupied itself exclusively with
those Scriptures which
announce a Messiah in glory, which passages also it
misinterpreted.”
Secondly, lacking or rejecting the key to the true
understanding of this prophecy, namely, its fulfilment
in Jesus of Nazareth,
Jewish commentators were encountered by great
difficulties and inexplicabilities
in their attempts to expound it.
This
picture of a Messiah, which represented Him as passing
through the deepest
humiliation and suffering, and pouring out His soul unto
death, appeared to
them irreconcilable with those prophecies which speak of
the Messiah as coming
in power and glory.
And, thirdly, this explanation was not only “too
flattering to the national feeling not to be
extensively
adopted,”* as Pusey
observes, but it has really something [Page 20] plausible from
their point of view as
its basis. Is
not
* “Every truly Christian reader feels
humbled as he reads this
portion of Scripture, because he sees in it a
description of his Saviour, and
the cost of his redemption; almost every Jew is likely
to feel lifted up,
because he sees in it a description of the value of
Israel to the nations of
the world, and of his own sufferings as a means of
peace and prosperity to
Gentiles. There
is thus a fundamental
difference in the two interpretations of the chapter,
answering to the
fundamental difference that there is between Judaism
and Christianity - the one
a religion which magnifies human efforts, the other
one which makes humiliation
of soul necessary to true exaltation.”- Canon
A. Lukyn
Williams in Christian Evidence for Jewish People.
To give Christian readers a good idea of what this modern
Jewish
interpretation involves and how consistently it is
carried through, I reproduce
the exposition of Manasseh-ben-Israel,* which is an embodiment of practically all that Jewish
controversialists and rationalistic Christian writers
who have followed on the
same lines, have to say on this subject.
He calls his Commentary the Reconciliation, or an answer to the question, “If this
chapter is to be interpreted of the people of Israel,
how came Isaiah to say
that it bore the sin of many, whereas every one,
according to the testimony of
Ezekiel,
18:
20,
pays only for his own
guilt?” and proceeds:
* Born
about 1604; died, 1657; Rabbi at
RECONCILIATION
The subject of this question demands long argument, and for our
verses to be perfectly understood it will be necessary
to explain the whole of
the chapter, which we shall do with all possible
brevity, without starting any
objections which may be made against other expositions,
[Page 22] as our intention is solely to show what our own opinion is.
Accordingly, for greater clearness I shall
set down the literal text with a paraphrase of my own,
and then illustrate it
by notes.
“Isaiah prophesies:
(1) The extreme prosperity
of
[Page 23]
[Page 24]
[Page 25]
Of his “Commentary” I am only
able,
for lack of space, to reproduce his notes on those
verses which speak
particularly of the vicariousness of the sufferings of
Jehovah’s righteous
servant. He
says, on chap. 13:
“ ‘Servant’ was one of the many titles of honour with which the blessed
God honoured Israel (Isa. 41: 8; Jer. 30: 10; Ezek. 37:
25;
Ps.
136:
22). And as the
prophet in this chapter praises
the fidelity with which Israel, as loyal servants,
were ever in the service of
the blessed Lord, suffering innumerable persecutions
in this captivity, he
therefore applies this title to them here.
Whence it appears that the sole subject of this
prophecy is the people
of Israel; and that is the true meaning of it; and the
certainty of this is
further proved by its connection with the preceding
chapter, where the prophet
says, ‘Awake, awake; put
on thy strength, 0 Zion,’
etc. (52: 1-12);
and then he continues (ver.
13),
‘Behold my servant
shall prosper, or understand,
etc.’
“The prophet addresses himself to the people, and shows that in the same
manner as the nations of the [Page
26]
world wondered at their
low estate and fortunes, even going so far as to charge
them with being
disfigured, having a form unsuitable to man, and unlike
other mortals, so at
that period will they wonder at their prosperity and
elevated state; for,
seeing the sudden change in the fortune of Israel,
rising from such extreme
meanness to such extensive empire, all the kings of the
earth will wonder and discourse
on the subject. And
he gives the reason
of this, namely, because what had never been told them
of any nation they see
in the people of
On verses 4-7
he puts the following words into the mouth of
the Gentile nations: “We unbelievers more justly merited
the troubles and
calamities which this innocent people suffered in
their captivity.
But we were so blind that we considered him
to be wounded, smitten, and afflicted by God, and not
through ourselves, and
that all this came on them for keeping themselves
apart from the truth, and not
joining with us in our religion.
“But it was quite the contrary, for our wickedness alone was the cause of his
troubles; did they not arise from any hatred God bore
them. The punishment (…, musar) or
discipline of our peace, was
upon him, for, [Page
27]
as grief always
accompanies pleasure, the chastisement of this happiness
appears to have fallen
on him. Or
it may also mean, when in the
enjoyment of peace adversaries were wanting, we
immediately turned our arms
against this people, and what we established for the
discipline and good
government of our states all rebounded in measures
against him, decrees of death,
banishment, and confiscation of property, as experience
daily shows. Or
otherwise, the doctrine (…, musar)
taught by our preachers
was that our tranquillity depended upon our being
irritated against him, and
ultimately we should find health in wounding him.
“But all we like sheep went astray, etc. That is, they
will
not only acknowledge the ill-treatment and bodily
inflictions they had made
Israel suffer, but at the same time their errors,
attributing their wickedness
thereto; for many will say, We all (Ishmaelites and
Idumeans) like sheep went
astray, each in his own way following a new sect, just
as the prophet Jeremiah
says (16:
I9). And the Lord
made to fall on him the
wickedness of us all.
That is, we erred;
they followed the truth; consequently they suffered
the punishments which we
deserved.
“We deprived them of their property as tribute, and afflicted their bodies
with various kinds of torture, yet he opened not his
mouth, etc. The
experience of this is seen every day,
particularly in the cruelties of the Inquisition, and
the false testimony raised
against them
to take their wool and rob them of their property. And
[Page 28] it is exactly this that the Psalmist says, ‘Thou
hast given us,
0
Lord,
like
sheep appointed for
meat’
(44: 12); and further on, ‘For
thy
sake are we killed every day;
we are counted as sheep
for the slaughter’ (44:
23), suffering
daily
with the greatest patience these acts of tyranny and
fearful calamities.”
On verse 9 he says: “The
nations continue, We
have frequently condemned this people to death, and
buried them with
malefactors, and with the rich, i,nic2, in their various
deaths, though it is
certain that, in order to take away their property, we
raised against them
innumerable false testimonies, and martyred them,
without them having committed
any crime or our having any charge against them, except
of having accumulated
wealth, as he continues, although he had committed no Onn,
robbery, and there was no deceit in his mouth, that is,
allowing themselves to
be robbed of the property they had not robbed, and to be
killed for the
sanctification of the Lord, and refusing to acknowledge
with their mouth any
other religion.
“From verse
10
onward the
prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and relates the
reason why these
troubles were suffered, and the reward to be hoped from
them. And,
firstly, he says that the will and
determination of the Lord has been to crush them and to
make them sick by so
many different calamities, that, being purified by these
means, they may become
worthy of such great felicity.
If he
offer
his soul as an expiation,
… surrendering
it for the sake
of the Law; or, if he [Page 29] give himself up and acknowledge himself guilty, becoming
repentant, as Joseph’s brethren, who said, ‘But we are guilty’ (Gen. xlii. 21), he shall see seed,
that is, they shall multiply
infinitely (Ezek. 36: 37; Zech. 10: 10; Deut. 30:
5). He shall prolong days. The
same
prophet confirms this where he says, ‘As
the
days of the tree,’
that is, the tree of
life, ‘are the days of
my people’ (65:
22);
and Zechariah, ‘And every man with his
staff in his hand from multitude of days’
(8: 4).
Lastly, and the
will of the Lord,
which is to
oppress him and make him sick with punishments for his
greater glory, shall
prosper in his hand,
for the
purpose and end to which they are directed will be
attained. Or,
the will of the Lord, which is that all
should be saved and come to the holy knowledge of
himself, will prosper through
his hand and means and take effect.
“By his knowledge my righteous servant shall justify many. That is, Israel, who is termed ‘a righteous people and holy nation,’
justifies many by his
knowledge and wisdom, bringing them with brotherly love
over to the true
religion, and separating them from their vain sects; and
this at the very time
that he bears their iniquities, patiently suffering the
tyranny of their
wickedness. Or it may otherwise mean, At
that time my
servant
“And he shall bear their iniquities. For,
being a most religious
and holy people, he will take charge of the spiritual
administration of the
observance of the Law,
[Page 30] as Moses says to Aaron, ‘Thou and thy sons with thee shall
bear the iniquity of the sanctuary’ (Num. 18: 1).
“Because he poured out his soul unto death, etc. The prophet here attributes four merits to them,
for which they justly deserve the reward of that
happiness; and again in the
form of a compendium he recapitulates the contents of
the chapter. (I) Because he
delivered himself up to death, allowing himself
to be killed for the sanctification of the Lord’s name
and the observance of
His most holy Law. (2) Because he was reckoned among the
wicked, patiently
enduring to be called a heretic. (3) For having borne
the sin of many, the
wickedness and tyranny of others falling on his
shoulders. (4) Lastly, in
having observed the precept of Jeremiah, ‘Seek the welfare of the city whither I have caused
you to be carried captive’ (29: 7) ;
and this, too, so
carefully that in all their prayers they pray for the
health of the prince, and
the peace of the kingdom or province wherein they
reside; and, what is more, it
may be even for the welfare of those from whom they are
receiving insult and
wrong, which is highly meritorious, and a convincing
proof of the constancy and
patience with which they receive from the Lord’s hand
the yoke of captivity and
the sufferings of its misfortunes.”
This, then, is
the modern Jewish view
of this prophecy. “Among Christians,”
to
quote the words of a great German Bible student, “the
interpretation has taken nearly the same course as
among the Jews.”
[Page
31]
Similar causes have produced similar
effects in both cases.
By both, the true
explanation was relinquished, when the prevailing
tendencies had become opposed
to its results. And
if
we descend to
particulars, we shall find a great resemblance even
between the modes of
interpretation proposed by both.
Even a priori, we could not but suppose otherwise than that the
Christian Church, as long as she possessed Christ, found
Him here also, where
He is so clearly and distinctly set before our eyes -
that as long as she in
general still acknowledged the authority of Christ and
of the Apostles, she
could not but, here too, follow their distinct,
often-repeated testimony.
And so, indeed, do we find it to be.
With the exception of a certain Silesian
called Seidel
- who, given up to
total unbelief, asserted that the Messiah had never yet
come, nor would ever
come - and of Grotius,
both of whom supposed Jeremiah to be the subject - no one of the
Christian
Church has, for seventeen centuries, ventured to
call in question the Messianic
interpretation.
“On the contrary, this passage was
always considered to be the most distinct and glorious
of all the Messianic
prophecies. It was reserved to
the last quarter of the eighteenth century to be
the first to reject the
Messianic interpretation. At a time when Naturalism
exercised its sway, it could no longer be
retained.
For, if this passage contains a
Messianic
prophecy at all, its contents offer so striking an
argument with the history of
Christ that its origin cannot at all be accounted for
in the natural
[Page 32]
way. Expedients
were
therefore sought for; and these were so much the more
easily found that
the Jews had, in this matter, already opened up the
way.
“All that was necessary was only to
appropriate their arguments and counter-arguments, and
to invest them with the
semblance of solidity by means of a learned apparatus.”
*
*
*
[Page 33]
CHAPTER IV
THE UNTENABLENESS OF THE MODERN INTERPRETATION
I shall
now proceed to show the untenableness
of this modem
interpretation; but before doing so it is necessary to
point out that, like
most of the false teaching of the present day, it
contains a germ of truth
which lends plausibility to the error.
The germ of truth contained in this explanation is that, as
has already been observed above, the term “Servant
of
Jehovah” is indeed again and again applied to
*
Isa. 41:
8.
** Isa. 43: 10.
“Yet
now hear,
0 Jacob My servant; and
* Isa. 44:
1.
This is
*
Isa. 42:
18-20.
But
*
The following suggestive note is from Franz Delitzsch on Isaiah: “The idea of
the Servant of Jehovah assumed, so to speak,
figuratively, the form of a
pyramid. The
base was
“Listen,
0 isles,
unto me; and
hearken, ye
peoples,
from far; Jehovah
hath
called me from the womb; from
the bowels of my
mother hath He
made
mention of my name.
And He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword;
in the
shadow of His hand hath He hid me, and
He hath
made me a polished shaft;
in His quiver hath He kept
me close;
And He said unto me,
Thou art My
servant,
But I said, I
have
laboured in vain, I
have spent my strength for
nought, and for vanity: yet
surely my judgment
is with Jehovah, and
my recompence with my God.
And now, saith Jehovah that formed me from the womb
to be His servant, to bring Jacob again to Him, and
that Israel be gathered unto Him: (for I am
honourable in the eyes of Jehovah, and
my God is
become my strength.)
Yea, He saith, It
is too light a thing that thou shouldest be My
servant to raise
up Me tribes of Jacob, and
to restore the
preserved of Israel; I will give thee for a light to the Gentiles, and
that thou mayest be My salvation unto the end of
the earth.”*
* Isa. 49:
1-6.
That it is not of the nation
of
Israel that this prophecy speaks is clear, and manifest
to every unbiased mind,
[Page37] since the One
who is here thus
dramatically introduced as proclaiming His own call and
enduement for His
office, and whom Jehovah addresses, is the One who is
sent as the
Redeemer
of Israel,
namely, “to raise
up the
tribes of Jacob and to
restore the
preserved of Israel,” i.e.
not
only to their
land, but to their
God.
Here God says to him, “Thou art My servant, 0
Here, too, as in chapter 42:
1-9,
where the ideal personal Servant of Jehovah is
contrasted with the nation whose
failure and unfaithfulness is depicted in verses
18-25 of the
same chapter, His mission extends, not only
to Israel, whom He is to raise up and restore, and to
whom He is to be, not
only the mediator, but the very embodiment of “the
covenant” which shall be everlastingly
established between them and
their God, but is to be the light also of the Gentiles,
and God’s salvation
unto the very ends of the earth.
And as in chapters
42.
and 49.,
so also in Isa.
53. itself,
“where the figure of the
Servant of Jehovah unfolds its
entire fullness of meaning,” He is clearly and
definitely distinguished
from the nation. Thus,
for instance, we
read in the 8th
verse, “For
the transgressions
[Page
38]
of my people was He
stricken.” The speaker is
either Jehovah or the prophet,
but in either case …, ami, “my people,” [in this context] can
apply only to
Now, none of these points is found in the Jewish nation.
* See
The
Shepherd of
Modern Rabbis, in spite of the definite statement in the
chapter itself, that it was “for
the transgressions of
My people” (Israel) that the righteous servant
was stricken, put verses 1-9 into
the mouth of the Gentile nations, and make them say that “he (i.e. Israel) suffered the sickness and
sufferings which we Gentiles deserved”; but
this is only part of the self-deception which characterizes the modern teachers and leaders
of the [Gentile Church and] Synagogue, and which has led them
to perversive views of
their own Scriptures and facts
of history. It is this
same spirit of pharisaic
self-satisfaction which regards the dispersion among the
nations as a blessing,
and denies the necessity of atonement and of a mediator
between God and man.
But whether we will heed or not, the solemn fact remains that
At the very beginning of their history Moses foretold what the
consequences would be if they departed from their God. “If
ye will not
for all this
hearken unto Me, but walk contrary unto Me,
then I will walk contrary unto you in furry: and
I also will chastise you seven times for your sins.
... And I will make your
cities a waste and your sanctuaries a
desolation. ...
And you
will I scatter among the nations,
and I will
draw out the sword after[Page 40] you.
... And you shall perish
among the nations, and the
land of your enemies shall eat you up.
And they that are left of you (far from atoning by
their sufferings for the sins of the Gentile nations) shall
pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’
lands.
And also in the iniquities of their
fathers
shall they pine away with them.”
And this is to last until “they
shall confess their iniquities, and the iniquity of their
fathers in their trespass which they trespassed
against Me,
and also that because they
walked contrary unto Me.
... If then their
uncircumcised heart be humbled and they accept
of the punishment of their iniquity, then will I remember My
covenant with Jacob; and also My covenant with
Isaac, and also
My covenant with Abraham will I remember;
and I will remember the land.”*
* Lev. 26:
14-45.
And what Moses
announced in advance in
Lev. 26.
and Deut. 28., etc., is repeated
and confirmed by all the
prophets. We
need only contemplate the
picture of
* Isa. 1: 2-9.
** Isa. 59: 2-15.
[Page 41]
In the 42nd chapter
*
Isa. 42:
23-25.
To evade the force of this truth, that the nation could not be
the innocent sufferer set forth in the personal
portraiture of the Servant of Jehovah
in chapters 42., 49.,
50, 53.,
and
61., some Jewish and
rationalistic
writers have interpreted this great prophecy of the
godly remnant in the
nation. But,
though relatively the pious
in the nation may be spoken of as righteous when
compared with the godless
majority, they are not absolutely righteous, and, far
from being able to render
a vicarious satisfaction for others, they cannot even
stand themselves before
God on the ground of their own righteousness.
It is indeed the godly remnant in the nation which is
described in the second part of Isaiah as of “a
contrite [Page
42]
and humble
spirit,” who are themselves waiting for the
salvation of God, which will
be wholly of grace.
It is they – “the
righteous ones” - who confess for themselves
and the entire nation that
“we are all become
as one that is unclean,
and all our righteousnesses are
as a polluted garment;
and we all do fade as a leaf; and
our iniquities, like the
wind, take us away.”*
*Isa.
64: 6.
It is perfectly true, therefore, that Isaiah speaks of the “entire nation
as needing
enlightening, redeeming, and reconciling to God,”
and the godly remnant
of it, far from being represented in these chapters as
rendering satisfaction
for others by their sufferings, “appears
on the
contrary a fainting flock which the Servant of Jehovah
is to release, and
refresh, and for whose justification He is to suffer
and die.”*
* Von
Orelli
And as
Still less can it be asserted that
* Doctrine and
Interpretation of the Fifty Third Chapter of Isaiah,
by Dr. Alexander M’Caul.
And yet in spite of these facts a modern Jewish writer (Dr.
A. Kohut,
in Discussions on Isaiah
52: 13
- 53: 12) can allow
himself to write: “We have
suffered much and murmured less; the annals of
history teem with the atrocious crimes of cruel Torquemadas,
but fail to
reproach us with even a breath of remonstrance. ... We
have whispered sweetly
of our wrongs, not imprecations of revenge, but
hope-fraught hymns of glad
release.” But it is a fact, as
Dr.
Lukyn Williams
observes in reply, that “meekness
is not, and never has been, a characteristic of
Jews, and they have not hesitated to call down the
vengeance of God upon their
enemies in their private or public devotions.
So, for example, in the Service for the
Festival of the Dedication:
‘When Thou shalt have prepared a slaughter of the
blaspheming foe, I will
complete with song and psalm the dedication of Thy
altar,’ and, at the
end of the same piece, though omitted by Dr.
Singer: ‘Lay
bare Thy holy arm, and bring the time of Thy salvation
near. Take vengeance
for the blood of Thy servants from the wicked nation’”
(Christian Evidence for Jewish People, by Canon
A. Lukyn Williams,
vol. 1. p. 168).
Neither have the sufferings of the Jewish nation ended in
death,
as is the lot of the
Servant of Jehovah in Isa.
53.
No;
I must bring this introductory section to a close, but [Page 45] I may add to all that has been said that it is clear and manifest to all
unprejudiced minds that the chapter cannot be applied to
a collective body
personified, but must refer to an individual person. To quote from
another writer, “Not one
analogous instance can be quoted in favour of a
personification carried on through a whole section,
without the slightest
intimation that it is not a single individual who is
spoken of. In
verse 3 the subject is called …
(ish,
‘a man’
in verses 10 and 12
a soul is ascribed
to
Him; grave and death are used so as to imply a subject
in the singular.
Scripture never leaves anything to be
guessed. If
we had an allegory before
us, distinct hints as to the interpretation would
certainly not be
wanting. It
is, e.g., quite different in
those passages where the prophet designates
*
Compare Isa.
41: 8,
44: 1,
2, 21,
45: 4,
48: 20.
**E.g. 43: 10-14, 48:
20, 21.
No, this prophecy speaks of an individual, and there is only
one
person in the history of the world whom
it fits. “Let
any one steep his mind in the contents of this chapter,”
observes Professor
James Orr, “and then read
what is said about Jesus in the Gospels, and
as he stands under the shadow of the Cross, say if
there is [Page 46] not the most perfect correspondence between the
two. In Jesus of
Thus Rabbi Abraham Farissol,* who himself proceeds to misinterpret the prophecy of
Israel, says: “In this chapter
there seem to be
considerable resemblances and allusions to the work of
the Christian Messiah
and to the events which are asserted to have happened
to him - so that no other
prophecy can be found, the gist and subject of which
can be so immediately
applied to him.”
And as a matter
of fact this glorious prophecy of the sufferings of the
Messiah and the glory which should follow has been used of God more
than any Scripture in opening the eyes of Jews to
recognize in Jesus Israel’s
Redeemer-King.**
* Rabbi Farissol, early in
the sixteenth century,
author of Iggereth Oreehoth
0lam; Itinera Mundi.
**
“Blessed, precious chapter, how many
of
God’s ancient covenant people have been led by thee to
the foot of Christ’s
cross! - that cross over
which was written, ‘Jesus
Christ, the King of the Jews!’ And oh! what
a glorious commentary shall be
given of thee when, in the latter days, repentant and
believing Israel, looking
unto Him whom they have pierced, shall exclaim, ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet
we did esteem Him stricken,
smitten of God, and
afflicted!’”- Adolph Saphir,
D.D., The Sinner
and the Saviour.
[Page 47]
Is this, perhaps, the chief reason why this chapter is omitted
from the public readings in the Synagogue?
We know, of course, that whereas the whole Torah (the Pentateuch) is
read through on the Sabbaths in the course of the year,
only selections from
the prophets are appointed for the Haphtarahs,
but it is none the less remarkable
that in these “selections”
the portion for one
Sabbath should end with the 12th
verse
of the 52nd. chapter,
and the one for the following should begin with the 54th.
chapter, and that
the whole of this sublime
section about the suffering Servant, through the
knowledge of whom the many are
made righteous, is passed over.
It certainly gives ground for the statement that the 53rd
of Isaiah is “the bad
conscience of the Synagogue,” which it dare
not face because it reminds them too much of Him whom
the nation, alas! in its
blindness still despises and rejects, and considers “smitten of God and afflicted.” But this very
feeling and attitude on the
part of the Jewish nation is one great proof that Jesus
is the Messiah, and
that it is to Him that this prophecy refers.
* *
*
[Page 48 blank: Page 49]
PART II
THE
EXPOSITION
“Then
Philip
opened his mouth, and
began at the
same scripture,
and preached unto him Jesus.” - Acts 8: 35.
-------
[Page 51]
CHAPTER I
JEHOVAH’S INTRODUCTION OF HIS SER VAST AND
A SUMMARY OF HIS REDEEMING WORK
THE DIVISIONS
We will
now seek, apart from controversy and criticisms, to look
into the heart of this
great prophecy, and I will make no further apologies if
in the handling of this
chapter I do so in the full light which is thrown upon
it in the New Testament
as well as the Old.
The whole prophecy
divides itself into three sections.
The first section consists of verses
13-15 of chapter 53.,
and may be described as God’s Ecce
Homo. In
it God introduces His
Servant, and seeks to direct the attention of all men to
Him. This
introductory section is really a summary
of the whole prophecy, and contains in brief the whole
story of Messiah’s
sufferings and
the glory which should follow.
The second section, consisting of verses
1-9 of chapter 53.,
is primarily the
lament and confession of penitent
[Page 52]
The third section, consisting of the last three verses, sets
forth the
blessed fruit of Messiah’s
sufferings, or the glory which should follow.
The prophecy really begins and ends with a description of the
exaltation and glory of the Righteous Servant, but in
between the mountain-tops
of glory lies the deep
valley of shame and suffering,
which “for us men and our
salvation” He has to
pass.
“Behold My Servant”
The prophecy
begins with the word …,
hinneh
(“behold”).
This is the little word by which in Scripture God seeks to
call the attention of men to matters which are of the
utmost importance for them
to know. Here
it is on His beloved and
only-begotten Son in the form of a servant that He would
have our eyes fixed.
We may note in passing that several different times is the
Messiah introduced in the Old Testament by this word “behold,”
and in four different aspects.
Here (as
in Zech. 3:
8, which refers back
to the passages about
the Servant of Jehovah in the second part of Isaiah) it
is “Behold My Servant.”
In Zech. 6:
12 we read,
“Behold the Man whose name is the Branch”; and in chap.
9: 9
of
the same prophecy, the announcement to the daughter of
Zion is, “Behold, thy
King cometh
unto thee”; while the proclamation in the
sublime prologue to the second half of Isaiah unto the
cities of Judah is, “Behold
your God”; [Page 53] and that it is
of the Epiphany of God in the person of the Messiah that
the prophet speaks is
evident from the whole context of those chapters.
Under these four different aspects also is
Messiah spoken of by the name of “Branch”
- “the Branch of Jehovah”
(Isa.
4: 2);
“the Branch of David”
(Jer.
23: 5,
6); “My
Servant, the Branch”
(Zech. 3:
8); and “the
Man whose name is the ‘Branch’”
(Zech. 6:
12).
The Man - the
Servant - the Son of
David - and the Son of God.
And this fourfold portraiture of the Redeemer in the Old
Testament corresponds (as I first pointed out in a small
work many years ago)* to the fourfold
picture of our Saviour in the New Testament.
*
Rays of Messiah’s Glory, now out of
print. The
subject is also more fully
dealt with in the exposition of the 3rd
chapter of Zechariah
in The Visions and Prophecies of
Zechariah.
We have four different and independent accounts of the Life of
Christ, and so harmonious and similar are the main
features and facts about His
character and work in all the Four Gospels that no one
who has ever read them
has had to be told that they all speak of the same
blessed Person. Yet
each one of the Evangelists was led by
the Spirit of God to portray a different aspect of His
character.
Over the Gospel of Matthew
- which was primarily written for the Jews, and which
sets forth Christ as the
Redeemer-King of Israel, the Messiah promised to the
fathers - the inscription
may be written, “Behold thy King.”
[Page 54]
Over the Gospel of Mark
- a summary more of His deeds than of His words,
written, in the first
instance, for the practical Roman world of power and
action - the words, “Behold My Servant,” are, so to say, inscribed, for there it is the Servant aspect of our
Saviour that is portrayed
before us - “how God anointed
Him with the Holy Spirit
and with power; who went
about doing
good, and healing all that were oppressed with the
devil; for God was with
Him.”
In the Gospel of Luke,
written primarily for the Greek, who, in the New
Testament, stands as the
representative of the Gentile world, it is as the Son of Man
that He is pictured to us, who, by His
human nature, stands related as Kinsman-Redeemer
to
the whole race, and is therefore able and willing to
save men of all nations
and kindreds and peoples who
turn to
God through Him.
Over this Gospel
the words, “Behold the Man whose name is the Branch,” may be written; while over the
Gospel of John, which was designed neither for Jews nor
Gentiles, neither for
Greek nor Roman, but for the Church - the congregation
of the faithful, those
whose eyes are opened to behold His glory, “the
glory
as of the only-begotten of the Father, full
of
grace and truth” - the words, “Behold
your God,”
are
graven in letters of gold.
In our chapter,
however, it is as the
Servant that He is introduced to us by the Father - as One
who is sent to accomplish a work and to fulfil a
mission. And
it is with special satisfaction and
complacency that [Page
55]
God speaks of His only-begotten Son
in His character as Servant.
“Behold My Servant,”
whom I uphold; Mine elect (“My
chosen One”), “in
whom My soul
delighteth”
- one
reason being, perhaps, because in this respect this
ideal Servant stands out as
the great contrast, not only to Israel nationally, who
was called to be God’s
servant, but proved unfaithful, but to all other men. The curse of
man and the cause of his ruin is
pride, self-will - the striving to be independent of
God, and seeking to strike
out a career for himself. By seeking to
be free, and thinking that
freedom consists in doing, not what he ought, but what
he pleases, man landed
himself in bondage to sin and Satan.
But here is One
who says, “Lo, I
am come; in the scroll
of the book it is written of Me, I
delight to do Thy will, 0 My
God: yea,
Thy Law is within My heart,” and who, when on earth, could say, “I came down from heaven, not to
do Mine own will but the will of Him that sent Me”;
“My meat is to do the will of Him
that sent Me,
and
to finish His work.”
Insignificant,
fallen man ever aims at
exalting himself, but here is One who, though in the
form of God counted not
His equality with God a prize (“to
be grasped”
at), but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant “and being found in fashion as a man, He
humbled Himself, becoming
obedient even unto
death, yea, the
death of the Cross.”
No wonder,
then, that the Father points with delight to Him,
saying, “Behold My Servant,”
and would have our eyes fixed on
Him, not [Page 56] only as our Saviour, but as our example, that we might
follow in His footsteps.
This
true Servant of Jehoyah, we
read, “shall deal
prudently.” The verb
… his'kil, primarily
means “to act wisely,”
but since “wise
action as a rule is also effective,” and leads
to prosperity, the verb
is used also sometimes as a synonym for “prosperously.”
It
is used in such passages as 1
Sam. 23: 14, “And
David was acting
wisely in all his ways, and the Lord was with him”; and in David’s
charge to Solomon (1 Kings 2:
3), “And
keep the charge
of the Lord thy God ... in
order that thou
mayest act wisely in all
that thou doest.”
In Jer. 23:
5, this verb is used
directly of the
Messiah, and describes one feature of His blessed rule,
“Behold, the
days come,
saith Jehovah, that I will raise unto David a
righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and
prosper (his'kil, ‘deal
wisely’),
and shall execute judgment and
justice in the land.”
Here, in Isaiah
52: 13, it
is used to describe the
action of the Servant of Jehovah in relation to the
great task which is
entrusted to Him. “He shall
‘deal wisely’ and
accomplish
His great work skilfully” - an assurance, as it were, at the very
outset, that “the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in
His hand.” He
shall be exalted and extolled
(“lifted up”),
and
be very high.
There is an
ancient Rabbinic
Midrash on this
sentence, which says, “He shall
be exalted above Abraham;
He shall be lifted up above Moses, and be higher than
the ministering angels.”
[Page
57]
I sometimes think that when the
inspired writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews sat down
to write that wonderful
and comprehensive treatise on the supremacy and greater
glory of the Messiah,
and took for his keynote the little phrase “better
than,”* and proceeded
to show how Christ was greater, and higher, and “better”
than the angels, than Moses, than Joshua, than Aaron and
the whole Aaronic
priesthood and ritual, and than all
the
types and shadows of the Old Covenant, the substance
and fulfilment of which
are to be found in Him alone - he must have had
the thought expressed in
this Midrash in his mind.
*
Heb.
1: 4.
Yes, our Lord Jesus is exalted above Abraham, the father of
the faithful, who stands at the head of the history of
the peculiar people,
whose history also prefigures and unfolds the story of
Redemption, inasmuch as
He is not only Abraham’s Son but Abraham’s Lord, whose day* Abraham rejoiced to see “from afar,”* through whom the great promise that in Abraham’s seed
all the families of the earth should be blessed is [and will, in a
more literal sense, be]
realized, and in and through whom the history of Abraham and of the nation
which sprang from his loins receives its true
significance and glory.
*
2 Pet. 3: 8.
*
John
8:
56.
And “He is lifted up above Moses”
because He is the Mediator of a better covenant which
rests upon better promises,
who brings us out of a greater bondage than that of
Egypt, and whose “law of the
spirit of Life” implanted in our hearts
enables us to render that [Page
57]
obedience to God which the mere
letter of the law graven on tablets of stone could not
do.
And “He is higher than the angels,
for to which of the angels did
God say at any time,
Sit thou on My right hand till I
make thine enemies the
footstool of thy feet?” which is the height of
exaltation attained by
the Servant of Jehovah as the Son of Man, who through
the deepest sufferings
enters into glory.*
*
“Rosenmuller
observes on ver.
13b, ‘There
is no need to discuss, or even to inquire, what
precise difference there is in the meaning of the
separate words’; but
this a very superficial remark.
If we consider that ‘rum’ signifies not only
to be high, but to rise up (Prov.
11: 11) and become exalted, and also to
become manifest as exalted
(Ps.
21:
14),
and that …, nisa,
according to the
immediate and original reflective meaning of the niphal,
signifies to raise one’s self, whereas gubhah
expresses merely the condition, without
the subordinate idea of activity, we obtain this chain
of thought: he will rise
up, he will raise himself still higher, he will stand
on high. The
three verbs (of which the two perfects
are defined by the previous future) consequently
denote the commencement, the
continuation, and the result or climax of the
exaltation; and Stier
is not
wrong in recalling to mind the three principal steps
of the exaltatio in the
historical fulfilment, namely,
the resurrection, the ascension, and the sitting down
at the right hand of
God. The
addition of the word …,
m'od, shows very clearly that …, gabha,
is intended to be
taken as the final result; the Servant of
Jehovah, rising from stage to stage, reaches at last
an immeasurable height
that towers above everything besides” (Delitzsch).
The climax in the height of His exaltation, as set forth by
the three verbs in this sentence, is expressed by the
word …, m'od, lit.
very much,
with which the sentence ends.
“He shall be exalted
and lifted up and be high very
much, or exceedingly.”
[Page 59]
Of the glorious fulfilment of it in the person of our Lord
Jesus we are told in the New Testament.
“Wherefore” - because for our salvation He descended so low, and became
obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross – “God also
hath highly exalted Him”;
yes,
“far above all principality and
power,
and
might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this
world, but also in that which is to
come.”*
* Eph. 1:
20-23;
Phil. 2:
9-11.
But after what
may be called this
preface of glory, which tells us at the very outset what
shall be the end of
His path of humiliation, the next verse of this
introductory section gives a glimpse
of the valley of sorrow and suffering through which the
Servant of Jehovah has
first to emerge - the valley which is, so to say,
lengthened out and extended
in the more detailed account of His sufferings in the
next section. Verses 14
and 15 are in the
Hebrew linked together by
the words … ka’asher, “like,” or, “just
as,” and …, ken, “so.”
They express, if I may so put it, the balance
of proportion, and announce in advance that the effect
shall be commensurable
with the greatness of the cause.
Let me
first translate these verses literally.
“Like
(or, ‘just as’) many
were
astonished at Thee (so
marred, or ‘disfigured,’
or ‘distorted’
was His visage more than that of
any man, and His form
more than the sons of men)*-
So shall He
sprinkle many nations,” etc.
* Delitzsch
renders,
“So disfigured, His appearance was not human and His form not like that of the children of
men”; and Von
Orelli, “So
disfigured was His visage beneath man’s, and His
form so unlike man’s.”
The sudden transition from the second to the third person is
not exceptional, but is found in many other places in
the prophetic writings.
[Page 60]
It is generally agreed among commentators that the words which
I have enclosed in brackets must be regarded as a
parenthesis and explain the
reason of the astonishment at Him on the part of many. The verb …,
shamem,
which
is rendered “astonished,”
means to be desolate
or waste; to be thrown by anything into a desolate or
bereaved condition; to be
startled, confused, as it were petrified by paralysing
astonishment.*
Even to such an extent will many be
astonished at Him because of
the greatness of His suffering, which shall cause His
blessed countenance and
form to be so “marred”
that it shall appear, as
it were, “disfigurement”
itself, without any
trace of the grace and beauty which belong to the human
face and figure.**
*
See its use in Lev. 26: 32;
Ezek. 26:
16.
**
His appearance and His form were altogether distortion (mishehath, an
expression stronger than mashchath,
which means distorted - lit. away from
men, out beyond men), i.e. a distortion that destroys
all likeness to man.
“The Church before the time of
By these strong words and expressions the Spirit of God seeks
to give us a glimpse into the depth and [Page 61] intensity of the vicarious
sufferings of our Saviour, and of the greatness of the
cost of our redemption;
and as we contemplate this picture of the Man of
Sorrows, with the “face”
which for us was “marred”
more than that of any man, and with His form bowed and
disfigured more than the
sons of men, may our hearts be stirred with shame and
sorrow for the sin which
was the cause of it all, and with greater love and
undying gratitude to Him who
bore all this for us!
But as His humiliation and sufferings were great, yea, “more
than that of any other man,” so also shall the
blessed fruit and consequences of them be.
The fifteenth verse
is, so to say,
the antithesis to the fourteenth,
and sets
forth the state of glory after the suffering.
“Like (or ‘just
as’) many were
astonished at Thee
(because His visage and form were distorted by suffering
(‘beyond men’) - so
shall He sprinkle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths
at Him”
with
astonishment and reverence, for that which could not “have
been told them” by any man, and which was
previously altogether unheard
of, shall they now “see”
and “understand”; or, in
the words of the seventh
verse of chapter
49., which might be described as Isa.
53.
in miniature, for it summarizes in few words the
sufferings of the Messiah and
the glory which should follow - [Page
62] “Kings shall see and
arise,
princes and they
shall worship,
because of Jehovah
that is faithful,
the Holy One of
Israel who hath chosen Thee” - they
shall see that the One whom
man humbled God has exalted; that He who was despised of
man, and abhorred of
the nation, is, after all, He whom the Holy One of
Israel hath chosen; that in
spite of their vain counsels, and their individual and
united efforts, His kingdom progresses, and is destined to triumph - and they shall “arise” from their thrones
in token of reverence, and
shall signify their submission and allegiance by
prostrating themselves before
Him in worship; and all this “because
of
Jehovah that is faithful” to His covenants and
promises, “even the Holy One,”
who will never draw back from His
word, and shall, by espousing and vindicating His
Servant’s cause, make it manifest in the sight of the whole world that He hath chosen
Him!
In a measure
this has already been
fulfilled. Because
“He hath humbled Himself,
becoming
obedient unto death, even
the death of the Cross,
therefore also God bath highly
exalted Him, and given
unto Him the Name which is above every name;
that in the Name of Jesus every
knee should bow,
of things in
heaven, and
things on earth, and things under
the earth, and
that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord, to the glory of
God the Father.”
Already before
the crucified Nazarene
kings must rise from their thrones, and princes fall in
the dust, not, indeed,
necessarily because their hearts have been [Page 63] subdued by His
grace, or their eyes
opened to His essential glory as the Son of God, but
because they have found
out by experience that it is no longer safe to resist
His power. But
even though the obedience be feigned, and
the worship be outward, it is still a testimony to
Christ’s exaltation, and to
the faithfulness of Jehovah, in lifting Him out of the
valley of humiliation,
and appointing Him His “First-born,
higher than the kings of the
earth.” But
we are looking forward to a fuller, more
visible, and universal fulfilment, when He who was
“despised and rejected of
men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” shall be the acknowledged King over the whole earth, and when -
“He shall
have dominion from sea to sea
And from the River unto the ends of the earth.
They
that dwell in the
wilderness shall
bow before Him;
And
His enemies shall
lick the dust.
The
kings of Tarshish and of
the isles shall
bring presents;
The
kings of
Yea, all kings shall fall down before
Him;
All nations shall
serve Him”
(Ps.
72: 8-11).
But I must return for a moment to the first sentence in this fifteenth verse,
concerning which there has been
much discussion. Most
modern scholars
object to the rendering of the word yazzeh,
by “He shall
sprinkle,”* as is given in the Authorized and
Revised Versions of the
English Bible, and translate the phrase, “so
shall He
startle,” or “make to
tremble,” or “cause to
leap” - [Page 64] either for joy
or fear - on the ground
chiefly that the parallelism between the fourteenth and
fifteenth verses
demands that this phrase should express “a
change in
those who formerly abhorred the Servant,” or,
as another prominent Bible
scholar puts it, as a parallel to the words, “were
astonished
at
Thee, we have the word yazzeh (which he
renders, ‘He shall make
to tremble’)
- in other words, the effect which He produces by what
He
does stands over against the effect produced by what
He suffers.”
But to this it has been replied that the real
parallel (or, rather, contrast) to the words, “as
many
were astonished,” in the fourteenth verse are
the words, “kings shall shut their mouths,” in the
fifteenth verse, as is shown by
the correspondence of the words, “at
Thee,” and
“at Him” in these two
sentences. I
shall not enter into a minute controversial
disquisition on this point, as nothing of a fundamental
character really turns
on it.
The priestly and atoning functions of the Servant of Jehovah
stand out prominently enough in the next section of the
prophecy. I
will only briefly state my own grounds for
retaining the rendering “sprinkle,”
first and
chiefly because of the general usage of the Hebrew word.
The verb …, nazah, occurs
in very many passages in the Old
Testament, and the hiphil
form of it,
… hizzah (which is used in Isaiah 52: 15)
invariably signifies “to
sprinkle.”
It is true
also, as another writer
observes, that [Page
65]
it is specially set apart and used for
the sprinkling with the blood of atonement and the water
of purification.*
*
It is used, for instance, in Lev.
4: 6,
16: 14-19, 14:
7, Num.
19: 19,
and in.
many other places.
Delitzsch, who himself
renders the word “He shall make
to tremble,” writes: “The hiphil
hizzah
(to sprinkle) generally means to spirt
or sprinkle (adspergere), and
is applied to the sprinkling of the blood with the
finger, more especially upon
the capporeth and altar of incense on the Day of Atonement (differing in this
respect
from zaraq, the swinging of the blood out of the bowl), also to the
sprinkling of the water of purification upon a leper
with the bunch of hyssop (Lev.
14: 7),
and of the ashes of the red heifer upon those
defiled through touching a corpse (Num.
19: 18);
in
fact, generally, to sprinkling for the purpose of
expiation and
sanctification. And
Vitringa,
Hengstenberg, and others, accordingly follow the Syriac and Vulgate
in adopting the rendering adspergret
(he will sprinkle).
They have the usage of the language in their favour; and this
explanation also commends itself from a reference to … (nagua) in chapter
53: 4, and
… (nega) in chapter
53: 8
(words which are generally used
of leprosy, and on account of which the suffering
Messiah is called in b. Sanhedrin
98b
by an emblematical name adopted from the old synagogue,
“the leper of Rabbi’s school”),
since it yields the
significant antithesis, that He who was Himself regarded
as unclean, even as a
second Job, would sprinkle and sanctify whole nations,
and thus abolish the
wall of partition between Israel and the heathen, and gather together into one holy church with Israel those who had
hitherto been pronounced “unclean”
(chap. 52:
1).
It is true that hizzah (to
sprinkle) is usually construed with the accusative, in
which case the
preposition …, ‘al’, “upon,” should follow the
verb. But
slight deviations and
irregularities in the construction of phrases do
sometimes occur in the Hebrew
Bible; they do not, however, alter the meaning of words,
and in this [Page 66] case, though hizzah al would mean “sprinkle upon,” hizzah by
itself still means “sprinkle,”
or, more
properly, “besprinkle.”
Secondly, the only other passage in the second half of Isaiah
where
another form of this same verb occurs*
is chap.
63: 3,
and there the word most certainly means “sprinkle.” It is alleged
against the rendering of the
phrase, “so shall He sprinkle,”
that “there would be something
very abrupt in the sudden
representation of the Servant as priest”; but
there is no more
abruptness, it seems to me, in the introduction of this
idea of priesthood in
this passage than in the sudden transition from the
exaltation described in the
thirteenth verse to the depth of humiliation in the
fourteenth verse.
*
… v’yea,
which is Kal future, 3rd
person sing.
masc. of the verb …
In this introductory section we have, as stated at the
beginning, a brief summary in terse, condensed form, of
the whole prophecy, which
is fully developed in the 53rd
chapter. And
to my mind it would seem strange if there
were no reference also to the priestly atoning function
of the Servant (of
which the next section is so full), in this introductory
summary.
*
*
*
[Page 67]
CHAPTER II
The
second section, into which the whole prophecy divides
itself, is, as stated
above, primarily the sorrowful lament and confession of
repentant
Let me say, at the beginning of this exposition, that the
tenses in these verses are perfects, the
future
being regarded prophetically as already past. “Who
hath believed
our report?”
- literally,
“that which we hear,”
namely, the wonderful
story about this glorious Servant [Page
68]
of Jehovah, who, through His
self-humiliation and vicarious suffering even unto
death, has accomplished for
us so great a salvation, and is now exalted to such
height of glory - “and
the arm of Jehovah over
(or ‘upon’)
whom has it been revealed?”
The arm of Jehovah is the emblem of divine power.
In the 51st
chapter we have the remnant of
* Chap.
51:
9. ** Chap. 52:
10.
From the context we see that it is the manifestation of this
power of God in and through the Messiah that is here
spoken of. “In the Servant of
Jehovah who is depicted in this prophecy,” an
old writer truly observes,
“the redeeming arm of Jehovah
manifests itself: so to
say, personifies itself.
The Messiah
Himself is, as it were, the outstretched arm of
Jehovah,” and the
message (the proclaiming) concerning Him, “the
power of
God unto salvation to all who believe.”
But who hath believed this message? and
whose
eyes were opened to behold in this despised and
humiliated Servant the very
embodiment of the power of God and the wisdom of God? The answer
implied in the first question is
that very
few,
if any,
did believe it;
and to the second question, that only such upon whom an
[Page 69] operation of divine power has been performed, only those “over”
or “upon” whom
the arm of Jehovah has been revealed, could believe it - so marvellous, so utterly incredible to mere
human thought and imagination is the wonderful story
which, in all its saving
power and glory, is now made plain to us.
Truly, the message, or “report,”
of a
full and perfect salvation through a suffering Messiah,
who through humiliation
and death enters into glory, could not have been known
or believed, and much
less invented, by either Jew or Gentile; but all the
more it bears upon it the
seal of Divine wisdom and Divine power. “As
it is written,
Eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of
man, the things
which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But
God hath revealed
them unto us by His Spirit.”*
*
1 Cor.
2:
9, 10.
(1)
The Early Years
and Unobtrusive
Character of the Servant of Jehovah
In the plaintive confession which follows there is incidentally
unfolded also the whole earthly life-story of the
Servant of Jehovah, beginning
with His tender youth, which gradually develops into a
manhood of suffering,
and ends in a violent and ignominious death.
“For (or
‘And’)
He
grew up
before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry
ground.”
“Jehovah’s Servant,” as has
been well said by another, “does
not burst upon the
world all at once in sudden [Page
70]
splendour of
daring or achievement, dazzling all eyes and
captivating all hearts. He
conforms to God’s slow, silent law of
growth. This
law holds in every
*
James Culross.
The word … yoneq, translated
“tender plant,” literally
means “suckling,” but is
used here figuratively (in a
horticultural sense) for the tender twig upon a tree or
trunk, or stalk.*
Taken in connection with chap.
40: 1, we
see that it springs up out of the decayed stump of
Jesse, “after the proud cedar
of the Davidic monarchy had been
felled.” But
the second verse of
Isaiah
53. presents not
only a parallel but also a
contrast to chapter 11.
There, the figure is
that of a strong, vigorous shoot coming out of the root
of the decayed house of
David; here, it is the frail “tender
twig” or
sapling, struggling out of the dry ground.
Here, men are represented as turning away in
disappointment, if not in
disgust, from this “root”
springing up out of
such unpromising surroundings; there, we read in the tenth
verse, “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the
root of Jesse, which
standeth
for
an ensign of the
peoples, unto
[Page 71] Him shall the nations seek, and His resting place shall be glory.”
* Ezek. 17:
23.
The difference is explained by the fact that whereas in chapter 53. it
is
Messiah’s sufferings and rejection which are depicted, it is especially
His millennial glory and reign, the beneficent
effects of which extend even to
the animal creation, which are described in chapter
11.
But, to
return for a moment to a more
minute examination of the second verse. We have
here
incidentally a prophetic description of our Lord Jesus
during the early years
of His life, concerning which there is so little
recorded in the Gospel
narrative. According
to the manifest
suggestion of the passage, “He
grew up in obscurity
and lowliness. Not
as a prince royal, on
whom the hopes and eyes of a nation are fixed, and all
whose movements are
chronicled in Court Gazette or Circular.
Here is one living a lowly life in lowly
environments. …
Men expected ‘a plant
of renown,’ fairer
and statelier than all the trees in the garden of God,
with boughs lifted
cedar-like in majesty; instead, there is a suckling, a
sprout from the root of
a tree that had been cut down, with nothing fair or
magnificent about it.
It owes nothing to the soil in which it
grows. The
ground is dry, an arid waste
without moisture; the plant is a tender one; and in
that unpropitious soil
whence no sweet juices can be drawn it grows up
stunted, dwarfed, unattractive.”
The expression “out of dry ground”
(which, as [Page
72]
Delitzsch
correctly observes, belongs to both figures, namely “tender
twig,” or “suckling,”
and “root”) is intended
to depict “the
miserable character of the external circumstances in
the midst of which the
birth and growth of the Servant would take place.” The “dry
ground”
describes the then-existing state of the enslaved and
degraded nation; i.e. “He was
subject to all the conditions inseparable from a
nation that had been given up to the power of the
world, and was in utter
ignorance; in a word, the dry ground is the corrupt
character of the age.”*
*
Delitzsch.
And yet, in spite of all the obscure and adverse circumstances
of His earthly environment, “He
grew up before
Him,”
that is, before
Jehovah - “increasing in wisdom
and stature and in
favour with God and men,” with the eye of His
heavenly Father ever
complacently resting upon Him.
In rendering the last part of the second verse, most modern
commentators depart from the accents of the Massoretic
text, and translate, “He
had no form and comeliness that we should look on
Him,
and
no beauty that we should desire Him,” but the
English Authorized and Revised
Versions properly adhere to the punctuation of the
Hebrew text, and render, “He
hath no form nor comeliness;
and
when we shall see Him there is no beauty that we
should
desire Him.”
There was nothing in His appearance or surroundings that the
carnal or worldly minded could be attracted by; [Page 73] everything was
so different from what
they had pictured or anticipated.
It is not inconsistent with the language of the text to
suppose that “there may have
been in His aspect,
power, grace, majesty, blended with sorrow and
meekness. The
heart of the thing is,
that men did not see the beauty that was there; He did
not answer to their
ideal; He wanted the qualities which they admired; His
greatness was not shaped
to their thoughts.
Having misread the
prophecies, having imagined another Deliverer than God
had promised, being
blind to the heavenly, while their souls lay open to
the carnal and earthly,
they found nothing worth gazing upon in Jehovah’s
Servant when He came.
They would have welcomed a plumed and
mail-clad warrior, riding forth to battle against the
oppressor, would have
shouted before him, ‘Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, 0
most mighty, with thy
glory and with thy majesty!’
They have
no admiration and no welcome for One who comes, meek
and lowly, to make His
soul an offering for sin, and to be God’s salvation to
the end of the
earth. It
was not sin that troubled
them: how should a Saviour from sin delight them? What was
there in a Bringer-in of
righteousness to inspire such hearts?”*
*
Culross.
(2) The Despised and Rejected of
Men
The penitential confession proceeds in the third verse to set
forth the positive aversion and hostility [Page 74] which the
nation in its former
ignorance manifested towards Jehovah’s righteous
Servant. “He was
despised and rejected
(or
‘forsaken’)
of
men.”
The first description of Him in this line - … nibhzeh, “despised” - takes our
thoughts back once more to what has
already been said of Jehovah’s Servant in the seventh
verse of the 49th
chapter:
“Thus saith Jehovah, the
Redeemer of Israel, and
His Holy One, to Him
whom man despiseth, to
Him whom the nation abhorreth.”*
* Or “despised of soul,” as the
words in Isa.
49:
7 may best be
rendered, describing the depth
of contempt, as from the very soul of man,
which He shall encounter.
If, instead of prophecy uttered centuries before His advent,
it were history written subsequent to the events, no
more terse or graphic
description could be given of the attitude and feeling
of the Jewish nation in
relation to Jesus
of Nazareth: “despised and
rejected of men” - “whom
man despiseth and the nation abhorreth.”
No person in the history of the Jews has provoked such
deep-seated
abhorrence as He who came only to bless them, and who
even on the cross prayed,
“Father, forgive
them,
for they know not what they do.” When on earth,
at the end of His
three-and-a-half years of blessed ministry among them,
they finally rejected
Him. Their
hatred was intense and
mysterious. “Away
with this man; release
unto us Barabbas.
... Crucify Him, crucify
Him!” was their cry.
And all
through the centuries no name has provoked such intense
abhorrence among the
Jews as the name of Jesus.
[Page 75]
I have known personally most amiable, and as men, lovable
characters among the Jews; but immediately the name “Jesus”
was mentioned, a change came over their countenances,
and they would fall into
a passion of anger.
In the course of my
missionary experiences these past thirty five or forty
years, how often has it
been my lot to witness some of my people almost mad with
rage - clenching their
fists, gnashing their teeth, and spitting on the ground
at the very mention of
the Name which to the believer “is
as ointment poured
forth”!
The Holy One who knew no sin nor was guile found in His mouth,
is often styled “the
Transgressor”; and another
term frequently in the mouth of the Jews is “Tolui” (“the
hanged
one”), which is equivalent to “the
accursed one.”
There are also other hateful designations,
such as “Ben Stada,”
or
“Ben Pandera,”
which
imply blasphemies not only against Him, but against her
who is “blessed among women.”
And
This may be painful reading to some Christians, and the Lord
knows
it is far from my thoughts to write anything which might
tend to foster
unchristian prejudice against my people, but it is
necessary to show how
literally the prophetic forecast has been verified, and
how deep-seated and
mysterious Jewish hatred has been to Him who, according
to His human nature, is
flesh of their flesh, and bone of their bone, and in
whom is bound up all their
hope and salvation.
Let it be remembered also that Jewish hatred to Christ and His
followers, at any rate in more modern times, is partly to be traced to the sufferings which they have endured at
the hands of so-called
Christians, and also that it is not our Lord
Jesus as we know Him, that
Israel in ignorance thus blasphemes, but the
caricature of Him as presented to
them by apostate persecuting Christendom in the dark
ages and since.
[Page
77]
Often the only way left to the Jews
to avenge their terrible sufferings and massacres was to
write blasphemously of
Him in whose name they were ignorantly perpetrated.
Neither is it to be forgotten that if Christ has been, and
alas! to a large extent still is, “abhorred
of the
nation,” there has always been a remnant in the
nation to whom He has
been “the fairest of ten
thousand and altogether lovely,”
and who, for the love of Him, counted not even their
lives dear unto them.
It was a man of Israel and a Pharisee who
wrote: “But what things were gain to me, those
I counted loss for Christ, yea,
doubtless, and I
count
all things but loss, for
the excellency of the
knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; for
whom I
have suffered the loss of all things, and do count
them but dung that I might
win Christ.”
And when the “blindness in part”
which has befallen Israel shall be removed, and their
eyes are open to behold the
true glory of Him whom they have pierced, then
the
whole nation shall show an example of love and zeal
for their Messiah, such
as has not been known in the world.
The phrase …,
chadal ishim, “rejected
(or ‘forsaken’) of
men has been variously
rendered. To
quote only two or three
examples, Hengstenberg
translates
the clause, “the most unworthy
among men”; Moses
Margoliouth,
“the meanest of men”; and
Von Orelli, “shunned of men.”
But it seems to me that Franz Delitzsch has caught the true force of the Hebrew [Page 78] idiom. “The predicate chadal
ishim” (rendered in
the Authorized Version “rejected
of men”), he says, “is
misunderstood by nearly all the commentators, inasmuch
as they take ishim, the
word for ‘men,’ as synonymous with b’ne Adam (children
of men), whereas it is rather
used in the sense of b’ne ish (men of
high rank, lords) as
distinguished from b’ne Adam (ordinary men, or common people).
Hence Cocceius
explains it
thus: ‘wanting in men,’ i.e. having no respectable men
with Him to support Him
with their authority.
In Hebrew …, chadal, has
not only the transitive meaning to discontinue or
‘leave off’ a thing, but the
intransitive to cease, or be in want, so that chadal
ishim
may
mean one in want of men of rank, i.e.
finding
no sympathy from such men.
The chief men
of His nation who towered
above the multitude, the
great men of this world, withdrew their hands from
Him: He had none of the men
of any distinction at His side.”
And this, alas! is still the
case. The great, mighty,
and noble in the world, the “men
of high degree”
(with few exceptions, for which God be praised),
still ignore and despise Him,
and use their power and influence to hinder rather
than to advance His cause
and kingdom.
It was a
reproach brought against Christianity by Celsus
and other early pagan
writers, that it was the religion of slaves, and Jewish
Rabbis still taunt
believers from among their nation that it is to the poor
that the gospel is
preached, and that those who have been drawn to Christ
belong for the most [Page 79] part to “the common people.”
“Have any of the
rulers believed on Him, or of the Pharisees?”*
And not only was He “despised
and forsaken,”
especially by the men of high rank, the leaders of the
nation, but He was ish-makh’obhoth vidua
choli - “a
man of sorrows”
(or, “a man of pains,”
the Hebrew idiom denoting
‘sorrow of heart in all its
forms’), a man
whose chief distinction was
that “His life was one of
constant, painful endurance”
- and “acquainted” (or, “well acquainted”) with grief (or, “sickness”),
the
meaning of which, as Delitzsch
explains,
is not that He had by nature a sickly body, falling from
one disease into
another (as some would explain), but that “the
wrath
instigated by sin, and the zeal of self-sacrifice,**
burnt like the fire of a fever in His soul and body.”
The point emphasised is that sorrow
and
grief were the very characteristics of the Servant of
Jehovah, “the tokens we
know Him by.”
“We have all seen
grief and sorrow in our time,” writes one; “no one can
live long without doing
so, God knows; but it is not one sorrow, or two, that
makes one ‘a man of
sorrows,’ nor one
meeting, or two, with grief that makes him the
acquaintance of it.
* John
7: 47,
48.
**
Ps. 69:
9.
“How
the Servant
endured, with what fortitude and patience, with what
faith in God and
acquiescence in His will, is not here brought into
view, but simply the fact
that sorrows came thick and heavy upon Him, like
wind-driven rain beating on an
unsheltered head, [Page
80]
and that
grief was present with Him as His close companion
through life.”
And the chief causes of His sorrows and grief were not
personal ills, or physical pain, though these were great
enough. It
was heart
sorrow and grief of soul. “A
noble nature,
repelled in all its efforts to bless, is pained
unspeakably more by that
repulse than by the crowding in of merely personal
ills, or by all the slings
and arrows of adversity: and His
sorrow
came, thus, because His brethren rejected the help
He brought, repelled the
Helper, and abode in their lost state.”
The last two sentences in the third verse form, so to say, a climax in the sorrow
and humiliation which
the righteous Servant of Jehovah had
to endure.
The words kh’master panim
mimmennu
(rendered in the Authorized Version, “we
hid as it were our faces from Him”) have been
variously rendered.
The marginal reading
in the A.V. and R.V. is, “He
hid as it were
His face from us,”
which
is the translation adopted by Hengstenberg,
who sees in it an allusion to the law in relation to the
leper, who, according
to Leviticus 13: 45,
had to cover his face,
and cry “Unclean, unclean”;
also by Margoliouth,
who translates, “as one who
would hide his face from us,”
by not revealing to us His true character and glory. But it is now
pretty generally agreed among
scholars that the word master is
a verbal noun, and that
the true translation is that given in the text of the
English versions, [Page 81] namely, “As one from whom men hide their face”* “i.e.
like one whose
repulsive face it is impossible to endure, so that men
turn away their face or
cover it with their dress” (Delitzsch);
or,
as another expresses it: “Instead
of meeting Him with
a joyful gleam in their eyes responding to His grace
and help, men turned away
from Him - as one looks the other way to avoid the eye
of a person whom he
dislikes, or as one shrinks from an object of loathing”
(Culross).
*
A suggestive and possible rendering of the sentence also is: “There was, as
it were, a hiding of
God’s face from Him.”
Lastly, all the predicates of shame and sorrow are summed up
in the word with which also this third verse began, nibhzeh, “He
was
despised” - to which, however, is added a
negative preposition which the
Hebrew idiom requires to mark the depth of the contempt in which He was held – “and
we
esteemed
Him not.”
Instead
of counting Him dear and worthy, we formed a very low
estimate of Him, or
rather we did not estimate Him at all, or, as Luther forcibly expresses it: “we
estimated Him at nothing.”
This, dear Christian reader, will be Israel’s broken-hearted
confession on the day when the Spirit of grace and
supplications is poured upon
them, and their eyes are opened at last to the fearful
error which they
committed as a nation in the rejection of their Messiah. But, as we
read these sad and solemn words, “He
was despised, and we
esteemed Him not,” may we not pause for a
moment to ask ourselves if this
is not true also in professing Christendom to-day?
[Page 82]
“How often,” writes another
Hebrew Christian brother “do we
meet Christians
expatiating on the atrocious wickedness of the Jews in
crucifying the Lord of
Glory; implying, in fact, that if He had appeared
amongst them, He would have met with a more favourable reception.
There was a horrid custom once in the
Christian Church, which rendered the Jews especial
objects of hatred and insult
during Lent, and more particularly during the
ceremonies of Easter week.
The Bishop used to mount the pulpit of the
Cathedral, and address the people to the following
effect: ‘You have among
you, my brethren, the descendants of the impious
wretches who crucified the
Lord Jesus Christ, whose
Passion we are soon to
commemorate. Shew
yourselves animated
with the spirit of your ancestors; arm yourselves
with stones, assail the Jews
with them, and thus, as far as in you lies, revenge
the sufferings of that
Saviour who redeemed you with His own blood.’
Alas! this custom
still prevails in some countries.
You
may be sure, however, that if Christ humbled Himself
once more, and appeared
visibly amongst us, He would be treated in the same
way as He was by the Jews;
yea, ‘crucified
afresh, and put
to an open shame.’ He would
again have to listen to the dogmas
of insolent reasoning; He would once more be disgusted
with the fiend-like
sneers of reprobate men, and the polished cavils of
fashionable contempt.”*
* Moses Margoliouth.
And what about
ourselves, who by the grace
of God [Page 83] do believe on Him?
Do we estimate our Lord Jesus at His true worth? Is He indeed
to us the chiefest of ten
thousand and altogether lovely?
Are we
prepared for His dear sake to forsake all and to follow
Him outside the
camp, esteeming the
reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of
(3) The Vicarious Character of His
Sufferings
The veil lifted from their eyes,
* Delitzsch.
The verb …, nasa, “to bear,”
is continually used in
Leviticus to the expiation effected by the appointed
sacrifices, as, for
instance, Lev. 16:
22, “The
goat shall bear
upon him all their iniquities unto a solitary land.” “When construed with
the accusative of the sin,” as Delitzsch
properly explains, “ ‘nasa’
signifies to take the debt of sin upon oneself, and
carry it as one’s own, i.e. [Page
84] to
look at it and feel it as one’s own (e.g., Lev. 5: 1, 17), or more frequently to bear the punishment occasioned by sin, i.e.
to make expiation for it (Lev. 20: 19, 20; 24: 15),
and in any case in which
the person bearing it is not himself the guilty person (‘nasa’
signifies) to bear sin in a mediatorial capacity for
the purpose of making
expiation for it. It is evident that both the verbs used
in this verse, ‘He
hath borne,’
and ‘He
carried,’
are to be understood in
the sense of an expiatory bearing, and not merely of
taking away, as has been
recently maintained in opposition to the satisfactio
vicaria, as we
may see clearly enough from Ezek. 4: 4-8,
where seth
‘avon
(‘bearing
iniquity’)
is represented by the
prophet in a symbolical action.
But in
the case before us, where it is not the sins, but ‘our
diseases’
and ‘our
pains’
that are the object, this
mediatorial sense remains essentially the same.
The meaning is not merely that the Servant of God
entered into the
fellowship of our sufferings, but that He took upon
Himself the sufferings
which we had to bear, and deserved to bear, and
therefore not only took them
away (as Matt. 8: 17 might make it appear), but bore them in His own person, that
He might deliver us from them.
But when
one person takes upon himself suffering which another
would have had to bear,
and therefore not only endures it with him, but in his
stead, this is called
substitution or representation - an idea which, however
unintelligible to the
understanding, belongs to the actual substance of the
common consciousness of
man, and [Page 85] the realities of the divine government of
the world as brought within the range of our experience,
and one which has
continued even down to the present time to have much
greater vigour in the
Jewish nation, where it has found its true expression in
sacrifice and the
kindred institutions, than in any other, at least so far
as its nationality has
not been entirely annulled.”
As I have already explained, in the more literal translations
of the text of the 3rd
and 4th
verses, the words rendered in the
English versions, “our griefs”
and “our sorrows,” mean
also “our
sicknesses” (or “diseases”)
and “our pains,” and it
is in this sense that the
Evangelist Matthew quotes this passage from Isa. 53. After
recording some of His precious works of
healing - how He cast out the spirits with His word, and
healed all that were
sick, he adds: “that it might be
fulfilled which was
spoken through Isaiah the prophet,
saying, ‘Himself took our infirmities
and bare our diseases.’”
The question has been raised how Christ’s miraculous works of
healing can be a fulfilment of this Scripture which sets
forth Messiah’s
vicarious sufferings for sinners, and in what sense did He Himself “take our infirmities and
bear our sicknesses”?
The answer
is that these cures were in fact and in strictness a
fulfilment of this
Scripture because wrought in His character as Saviour. As
one has said: “Christ was
sent for the general purpose of removing
by the sacrifice of Himself
the
evil which sin had brought into the world. And this
work He commenced when He cured bodily diseases, for [Page 86] these diseases were the consequences and
punishment
of sin. And
more - they were types of
another disease, of the moral and spiritual effects of
man’s fall, which the
prophecy has principally in view, as is evident from
the words which follow.”*
* William
De
Burgh, D.D., The Messianic Prophecies of Isaiah.
To put it still more simply, the mission of the Messiah was to
accomplish a full redemption for His people, and this He
did not only by taking
upon Himself our sins, but our “infirmities”
and
“diseases,” which are the
direct consequences of
sin, though not always of the sin of the individual. The blessed
results of His redeeming work to
us therefore are not only pardon and regeneration, but
the ultimate redemption
of body as well as of
spirit [and soul]
in
resurrection life.
The miracles of healing not only served to certify Him as the
Redeemer, and as “signs”
of the spiritual
healing which He came to bring, but were, so to say,
pledges also of the
ultimate full deliverance of the redeemed, not only from
sin but from every
evil consequence of it in body as well as in soul. Hence our full
salvation includes not only
the perfecting of our spirits, but the “fashioning
anew
of the body of our humiliation that it may be
conformed to the body of His
glory.”
The self-accusing confession of their former blindness as to
the true cause of Messiah’s sufferings is continued in
the second half of the
verse. It
was for us that He bore all
this; it was our crushing burden that He took [Page 87] upon Himself,
they say, “but we regarded Him
as stricken (or ‘plagued’),
smitten of God, and
afflicted.”
Every one of the three expressions, …, nagua’,
“one stricken, i.e.
afflicted with a hateful, shocking disease”
- hence used
particularly of “the plague”
of leprosy (of
which … is, so to say, the nomen proprium),
and
… mukeh Elohim,
“one smitten
of God” (“one who has
been defeated in conflict
with God his Lord”),* and …, m’unneh,
“one
bowed down by
suffering,” is intended to describe one
suffering terrible punishment
for sin.
*
Delitzsch.
The error confessed, as Hengstenberg
well observes, is not in their having considered the
sufferings which the
Servant of Jehovah endured, as a punishment of sin, but
in having considered
them as the punishment for the sins which He Himself
had committed.
This,
alas! is what spiritually
blinded
*
See especially the “Iggereth Ternan,”
the letter
addressed by Maimonides to
the Jewish communities in
** Gittin, 566. The passage
in
the original, with translation and comment, will be
found in Jesus Christ in
the Talmud, etc., by Professors Gustave and Heinrich
Laible.
We can well imagine, therefore, the deep contrition and heartbrokenness of
repentant
“But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was
bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of
our peace was upon Him; and
with His stripes we are healed.”
The …, v’hu
(“and He”),
as contrasted with …, v’anach’nu
(“and we”)
in verses 3 and 4,
continue to set forth the true cause of Messiah’s
sufferings in contrast to our
former false judgment with regard to Him.
“We” in our former
blindness and
ignorance regarded Him as plagued and smitten of God for
His own sin and guilt,
while “He” - which is the
emphatic word in the [Page 89] 5th verse – this Holy One,
whose true glory as our Redeemer we now behold, endured
all in our stead,
paying with His own life for the “transgressions”
and “iniquities” which we
have committed. And
how great were His sufferings, both in
life and in death!
He was wounded,
literally, “He was pierced
through” (as the
verb …, chalal, primarily means) - or, “wounded to death,”
as
Von Orelli,
and others, render it
- an expression which reminds us of Zech.
12: 10: “They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced,” though the
verb for piercing used there
is not exactly the same as here. And “He
was bruised,” literally “crushed” (m’duka), by the heavy
burden of our sin which He
took upon Himself, weighted by the wrath of God.
And it was all - to repeat once again - for our
iniquities and “for our transgressions.”
What else, we ask again, can these words mean
than that He suffered vicariously?
Not
merely with, but for
others?
By no exegesis is it possible to escape this
conclusion. And
there is nothing in the conclusion that
need surprise us.
“It is in keeping with what we know otherwise.
You would not abolish vicariousness by
getting it eliminated from the Bible.
No
one can be unfamiliar with instances of one taking upon
himself the penalty of
another’s recklessness or folly, even within the range
of what we call ‘natural law.’
A child, for instance, playing in a room beside
his mother, moves a bar
which he has been forbidden to touch, and overturns a
vessel of scalding
water. The
mother sees the danger to her
child, [Page 90] and in an instant throws herself
between him and the deadly peril, voluntarily taking
upon herself her child’s
penalty, and saving his life at the cost of cruel
suffering for herself.
Cases less or more resembling this are not
uncommon within the range of ordinary observation.
“To leave out vicarious suffering
were to erase the brightest pages from the story of
the past, - of all golden
deeds, - of men who have died for their country, - of
martyrs who have gone to
stake or scaffold for the truth’s sake, and helped to
pay the purchase-price of
our religious light and freedom; and would leave
history but a poor record of
ignoble selfishness or mean ambition, a record
unutterably sad, little better
than the record of a herd of wolves or a Newgate
Calendar. Seldom,
indeed, has there been
love absolutely pure from the taint of selfish
feeling; and yet it has been
strong enough to take upon itself much suffering in
the stead of others; and
has taught us at least to acknowledge that it is a
sweeter thing to do good
than to enjoy selfish ease and pleasure, a nobler
thing to suffer for others
than to win the world’s renown.
“Among the Jews, the idea of
vicarious suffering was far from strange; their
sacrificial system distinctly
expressed it. Sin
(said the sacrificial
system) is an offence unspeakably odious to God, which
He cannot look upon, but
must punish. Death
is the due punishment
of sin. But
God has no pleasure in the
sinner’s death. He
is full of mercy, and
has Himself opened up a channel, through sacrifice,
whereby sin may be
expiated, [Page
91]
and pardon granted in
righteousness. The
sacrifices under the
law had no intrinsic efficacy to put away sin; but only
symbolized substitution
- the substitution of Jehovah’s righteous Servant in
place of the guilty.
Men may indeed exclaim against the propriety
of one suffering for others, and may insist that every
man be wounded for his
own transgressions and bruised for his own iniquities. But
there is no moral
reason, so far as I can see, to forbid love from
voluntarily stepping in and
suffering for others, to save them from badness and
misery. Now
in this prophecy, here is One suffering
for sins which He never committed - enduring what others
deserved - standing in
the transgressor’s place, as if Himself the
transgressor.
“Within the human bosom, the world
over, are self-accusings and poignant regrets because
of ill that has been
done, and dread of what may be, when God shall reckon
with us. The
case may not be clear to the man himself;
but the sense of guilt is there, ineradicable; - it is
done; I did it; I cannot
undo it; no tears or repentings can change the fact;
and I dread the future,
for I bear a Voice which proclaims with mysterious,
awful sovereign authority,
‘Woe unto the wicked; it
shall be ill with him.’ And so the
conscience of the sinner is in a condition of pain,
varying from mere
uneasiness to darkest and intensest remorse.
“A fire smoulders within that may
blaze up any hour into fierce misery. Under such
conditions, there can be no
true [Page
92]
peace with God, no true
love to Him, no true joy in Him, no true walking before
Him; but revolt and
aversion whenever His will thwarts and crosses ours.
“Oh, if only that guilty past were
blotted out and made as if it had never been!
Oh, if only I could go forward into that
unknown future a pardoned
man! But
the question of blotting out
that guilty past is not so
simple as at first it
seems.
“The forgiveness of sins is a
question of righteousness as truly as of mercy.
If God cannot forgive in righteousness, then He
cannot forgive at
all. If
He were to forgive simply
because He is compassionate, or because (being
sovereign) He so wills it, or
out of mere good nature, He would remove the very
ground on which my conscience
plants itself in all its moral operations.
It behoves that the glory of His character and
the rectitude of His
government should suffer no eclipse, but, on the
contrary, be demonstrated.
But now light is thrown on the case - though
still deep mystery remains - when it is said, ‘The
chastisement of our peace was upon Him.’
Through His
suffering for others, they obtain ‘peace,’ in the sense of reconcilement to
God.”*
* Culress.
The phrase musar sh'lonienu -
the “chastisement
(or punishment) of our
peace” - denotes “the
chastisement which leads to our pace,” or, as
more fully expressed by Von
Orelli,
“The punishment of our
well-being - i.e. by the
bearing of which, on His part, our peace or well-being
is secured - was upon
Him,” i.e. He bore the burden of it in our
stead. The
same thought is [Page 93] differently expressed in the last supplementary clause in this verse: “By His stripes”
(ubhachabhuratho, literally
His wounds) “we were healed (or, healing was brought to us).”* Peace and healing - two most blessed results which accrue to
us from the vicarious suffering and atoning death of our
Saviour. Peace
with
God because of His justifying grace on the ground of what Messiah bore and did for us; and peace
in our own conscience, which can never be at peace until
sin is expiated - and
“healing.”
This, I believe, goes beyond justification, and
hints at the
regenerating, sanctifying grace in
the souls of the justified, for the work of our Saviour
not only procures
pardon and reconciliation with God, but is the ground
also of the work of the
Holy Spirit, who accomplishes within us
His mission of renewal and
sanctification, so that, delivered from spiritual
disease and moral blemish, we
may become conformed to His own image.
* …, chabhurah, denoting a tumour raised by
scourging. Margoliouth translates the clause, “By reason of His
contusions we were healed.”
In Isa.
1: 6
chabhurah is
rendered “bruises” in the
English Version. It
may well lead our thoughts to the cruel
scourging endured by our Saviour on our behalf.
(4) The Moral Necessity of Messiah’s
Sufferings
The 6th verse,
as is well observed by Dr.
J. A.
Alexander, describes the occasion, or rather the necessity,
of the sufferings of the Servant of Jehovah,
which are spoken of in the verses which precede: “All we
like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every
one to his own way, and
Jehovah hath laid
(literally,
‘caused to meet’) upon [Page 94] Him
the iniquity of
us all.”
It is because
men are wholly estranged from God, and an
atonement
was required for their reconciliation, that Messiah
suffered and died.
“As
the sea furnishes a thousand illustrations of life or truth to the ‘inhabiters of the isles,’ so the shepherd
and the flock to the Hebrew prophets and psalmists.
The picture is that
of the scattered flock, all wandering from the pasture
and the protection and
care of the shepherd.
It is not, as in
the parable, the wandering of one sheep out of a
hundred, ninety-and-nine
being left, but the scattering of the whole flock.
Under this figure is represented our
iniquity, the word implying both the
sinful act and its guilt.
Sheep are not to blame for wandering; they
know no better; but in men, with reason, conscience,
and heavenly light, wandering
means sin.”*
* Culross.
Thus, to
repeat, “we all,”
without
any exception, are involved in this sin and guilt and
consequent misery
of having strayed from the Great Shepherd, who is
Himself also the fountain of
life and all blessedness.
But while “the sinful
alienation is universal, the modes of
its manifestation are as various as men and their
tendencies.”
“We have turned every one,”* or, more
literally, each [Page
95]
(one) man, “to
his own way,” which is the very opposite of the
way of God. “We have turned,”
so that we are not only involved in the sin of the mass,
but stand also under a
load of personal and individual guilt which we have
incurred. But
let us not forget that it is primarily
still the penitential confession of the remnant of
Israel, and the special
applicability of the figure employed in this verse to
the nation, which,
because they have wandered away from God, have for many
centuries been a
scattered flock, and as sheep having no shepherd.
* “The second clause is understood by Augustine
as denoting selfishness, and a defect of public
spirit, or benevolence; and
this interpretation is admitted by Hengstenberg
as correct ‘if taken in a deeper sense,’ viz. that
union among men can only
spring from their common union with God.
But this idea, however just it may be in itself,
is wholly out of place
in a comparison with scattered sheep, whose running off
in different directions
does not spring from selfishness, but from confusion,
ignorance, and incapacity
to choose the right path.
A much better
exposition of the figure, though still too limited, is
that of Theodoret,
who
understands it to denote the vast variety of false
religions, as exemplified by
the different idols worshipped in Egypt, Phoenicia,
Scythia, and Greece, alike
in nothing but the common error of departure from the
true God”
(J. A. Alexander).
“Any one taking a view of the state
of the Jewish nation, both spiritual and temporal,
since they rejected their
Messiah,” writes a Hebrew Christian brother, “cannot
fail to be struck with the graphic description in this
concise inspired
sentence. ‘We have
each one of us turned to his
own way.’ We have all
gone in
the path which we
chose. There was no
union in the service of God; no common bond to unite
us; we have not entered
into the thoughts of God, nor endeavoured to follow
His ways, but we went on
the broad way of our own. We were like sheep which are
scattered; which have no
shepherd, which wander
where they please, with [Page 96] no one to collect, defend, or guide them.
One would wander in one direction, and
another in another; and of course solitary and
unprotected, they would be
exposed to the more danger.
Such has
been the state of the Jewish nation since they have
rejected the Lord of Glory;
they have been sifted among all nations like as corn
is sifted, and everywhere
they turn to their own way; they have neither king,
nor prince, nor sacrifice,
nor Ephod.”
Disunion among themselves as well as corporate wandering from
God has marked their history in dispersion. But to
return to the more immediate
context: while ours was the sin and guilt, Jehovah, in
infinite grace and
mercy, “laid (or more
literally, caused to meet, or caused to alight*)
upon
Him the iniquity of us all.”
*
…, hiph’gid, from …, paga’, signifies to cause
anything to strike, or fall upon a person.
The rendering in the English Version (“laid
upon
Him”) is objectionable only because it is too
weak and suggests the idea
of mild and inoffensive gesture, whereas that conveyed
by the Hebrew word is
necessarily a violent one, namely,
that of “causing to strike, or
fall” (Alexander). The verb is
used in such a passage as 2
Sam. 1: 15: “Go near and fall upon him;
and he smote him that he died.”
“In other passages
our iniquity is spoken of as resting on the Holy One,
and He bearing it.
Here it is spoken of as coming upon Him like
a destroying foe and overwhelming Him with the wrath
that it brought with it”
(B. W. Newton).
…, avon
(“iniquity”),
is used to denote not only the transgression itself, but
also the guilt
incurred thereby, and the punishment to which it gives rise. The
last
word, kullanu, translated “of us all,” is the
very same also with which this verse began, rendered “all
we.” It
[Page 97] is repeated to give emphasis that it is the sin of “all
we,” primarily of all redeemed Israel, but
inclusively also of all the redeemed from among all the
nations, yea, of every
individual sinner, who in repentance and faith turns to
God, for as “all we” are
included in the sin and guilt, so also are
we all included in the provision of God’s redeeming
grace.
And it is Jehovah Himself who caused “all
this
great multitude of sins, and mass of guilt, and
‘weight of punishment,’* to
light upon Him.” The previous
verses have shown man’s guilty
hand in the case, now we must mark Jehovah’s action. He it was who placed this awful burden on His shoulders.
This was at once His deepest humiliation and
His most glorious distinction.**
“There is a striking
antithesis in this verse,” writes one. “In
ourselves we are
scattered” - “astray”
- “each one turned
to his own way”; in Christ Jesus we are collected together.
By nature we wander and are driven headlong
towards destruction; in
Christ we find the way by which we are led to the gate
of life. Yes,
Jehovah
hath caused to meet in Him the
iniquity of us all. He was
the object on which all the rays
collected on the focal point, fell.
These fiery rays which would have fallen on all
mankind diverged from
divine justice to the east, west, north, and south, were
deflected from them
and converged in Him.
So the Lord caused
to meet in Him the punishment due to the iniquity of
all. How
wonderful are God’s judgments! ***
* Delitzsch.
** Culross. *** Margoliouth.
[Page 98]
(5) The Voluntary Character of His
Sufferings
But while men, in their ignorance of His true character, “and with wicked hands,”
heaped humiliations and sufferings
upon Him, and Jehovah Himself “laid
upon Him the
iniquity of us all,” the righteous Servant of
Jehovah endured all the
shame and sorrow voluntarily.
This is
set forth in the next three verses, which describe the
manner of Messiah’s
vicarious life and death and burial.
There has been much discussion over the first part of the
seventh verse, and quite a number of different
renderings have been suggested
by the commentators.
The Authorized
Version reads:
“He was oppressed, and He was afflicted; and He opened not
His mouth,”
which the Revised
Version has altered to, “He
was oppressed, yet
when He was afflicted He opened not His mouth.”
Delitzsch translates, “He
was ill-treated, whilst He bowed Himself,” i.e.
“suffered
voluntarily”; and Von
Orelli,
“He was used violently,
though He humbled Himself.” To these I may
add the rendering given by Bishop
Lowth,
which is the same as already suggested by Cyril
(among ancient writers) and by De
Dieu, Tremellius, and others, namely: “It was exacted, and
He was made
answerable, and He
opened not His mouth.”
This last rendering comes, according to my judgment, nearer to
the true sense of the original, but while …, siggas
(rendered
in the English versions, “He was
[Page 99] oppressed”) does indeed mean to exact,
and may here be used in the impersonal
sense, the rendering of the second verb (…, na'aneh)
by “He
was
made answerable” is not in accord with its
usage in the original, for
the word nowhere else conveys the notion of legal
responsibility. Margoliouth, on the ground that …, niggas, is sometimes
applied to the rigorous exaction of debts, paraphrases the first part of the verse thus:
“He was rigorously demanded to pay the debt,
and He submitted Himself, and did not open His
mouth.”
That the Messiah in His love and compassion for man became our
surety and took upon Himself our great moral debt,
paying the ransom with His
own life, is a truth set forth in the whole of this
great prophecy, even if it
be not fully expressed in this particular sentence. What this
passage does emphasize is that He “bowed
Himself” under this heavy burden, which He took
upon our account voluntarily.
“He was oppressed,”
“He was used violently,” “He
was treated
tyrannically” (which is yet another suggested
meaning of the word niggas), and He
- which is the emphatic word in
the verse - “He Himself”
it was who “bowed,” or “humbled,”
or “submitted” Himself,
and opened not His
mouth.
This voluntary endurance is in the second half of the verse set
forth in a simile “As a sheep that is led to the slaughter,”
and
“As a lamb before its shearers is
dumb,
and
opened not His mouth.”
“The object of the whole passage is
to mark the [Page
100]
meek and quiet
subjection of our Redeemer in His prolonged suffering. He was the
subject of cruel and unjust
oppression, yet His persecutors were not crushed. God allowed them to
pursue their course and to accumulate sorrows on the
head of the Holy One; and
He patiently and meekly bowed His head to the
infliction, and opened not His
mouth.”* “When we
suffer,” writes one, “how
hard we find it to be still!
The flames of resentment - how they leap up
in our bosom, and flush our cheek with angry red! What
impatience there often is,
what murmuring, what outcry, what publishing of our
sorrow! Or
if there is silence, it is at
times akin to stoicism, the proud determination not to
let men see how we
feel. But
the spirit of the Servant is
loftier and grander unutterably.
In
sublime and magnanimous silence He endures to the
uttermost, sustained by His
mighty purpose and by the conviction, Jehovah wills
it. I see the temper of
His
mind in this silence; I see His strength; I see His
rest in God; and I look
down into the unfathomed mystery of Love.
He came to do what only Love was equal to -
that is abundantly clear -
and He shrank from no suffering; raised not His arm,
opened not His mouth, in
His own defence, wearied not, fainted not, but was
dumb with silence.”**
* B.
W.
But we may, I believe, go a step further.
In this wonderful patience and silence of the
Servant - which in the history of fulfilment was
exhibited in the silence of
our Lord Jesus before the Jewish Sanbedrin
and before
[Page 101] the Roman Procurator, Pontius
Pilate - we see not only His lamb-like meekness
and “His love for man, which
made Him content to suffer for our
redemption,” but His acquiescence
in the justice of God
in the punishment of sin, the whole burden
of which He bore. To
the Christian this
verse is specially precious
because of the prominence
given to it in the New Testament.
Not
only was it “from this Scripture”
that the
evangelist Philip
“preached Jesus” unto the
Ethiopian eunuch; and not only
does the Apostle
Peter use it as the
basis of his exhortation to believers to be patient in
suffering and to follow
the example of Him, “who when He
was reviled, reviled
not again, and when He
suffered He threatened not, but
committed
Himself to Him that judgeth righteously”; but,
as Delitzsch truly observes, “All the
references in the New Testament to the Lamb of God
(with which the
corresponding allusions to the Passover are
interwoven) spring from this passage in the
book of Isaiah.”
(6) The Trial and Death of the
Servant of Jehovah
We now come to perhaps the most difficult verse in this great
prophecy, the main purport of which is to describe the
closing portion of the
life of the Servant of Jehovah and the manner of death
that He should die.
“No three words in the Hebrew Bible
(with the exception perhaps of the four words which
follow) have been more
variously rendered,” says Dr.
Henderson, than those which constitute the first
sentence in the eighth
verse. [Page 102] It would not be to much profit were we to enter into
examination of the many translations and paraphrases of
these three words in
ancient and modern versions and commentaries.
The Authorized
Version reads,
“He was taken from prison and
from judgment,”
and the Revised Version, “By oppression and
judgment was He taken away.”
A suggestive reading, first given by Dr. Henderson, and adopted by Margoliouth,
is: “Without restraint and without a
sentence He was taken away,”
which of course fits in with the fulfilment of the
prophecy in our Lord
Jesus, who exercised no manner of restraint over His
persecutors, and was given
over to a cruel death in violation of every principle of
justice, and without a
proper trial or sentence.
But this,
though a possible and suggestive rendering, does
somewhat strain the meaning of
the words from their general usage.
On
the whole, I prefer the reading given by Delitzsch,
Von Orelli,
and others: “He was taken away from prison
and from judgment,”
which is almost, though not quite, the
same as that in the Authorized Version.
The principal emphasis (in the sentence) is not
laid upon the fact that
He was taken away from suffering, but that it was out of the midst
of suffering that He was carried off.
The idea that is most prominent in the word …, luqqach (“taken away”),
is that of being snatched or hurried away.*
The word …, otser (rendered “prison”), primarily
means a violent constraint.
“Here, as in Ps. 107:
39,
it signifies a
persecuting treatment which [Page
103] restrains
by outward force,
such as that of prison or bonds. ...
The
word mishpat (‘judgment’)
refers to the judicial
proceedings, in which He was put upon His trial, accused
and convicted as
worthy of death - in other words, to His unjust judgment
...
Hostile oppression and judicial persecution were the
circumstances out of which
He was carried away by death.”**
* See, e.g., chap. 52: 5;
Ezek. 33:
4.
** Delitzsch
The second sentence in this verse, consisting of the four
words …, V’eth doro
mi y'soche-ach, has also been very variously rendered and interpreted by
translators and commentators.
The Authorized Version
reads: “And who shall declare His generation?”
The Revised Version
connects the sentence with the words that follow, and
translates: “And as for His generation, who
among them considereth
that He was cut off from the
land of the living for the transgression of My people?” etc., which
is practically the same as
that given by Delitzsch
and
others. Von Orelli translates: “And among His contemporaries
who was concerned.”
Of other
suggested renderings I may
mention the following:-
(1) “As to His generation, who shall set it forth?” i.e., in all the guilt of their iniquity.
(2) “Who shall declare His life?”
i.e. the
mystery of His Being.
(3) “Who can declare the number of His
generation?” - i.e.
of those
inspired by His spirit or filled with [Page 104] His life.* Luther,
Calvin, and Vitringa
understand the clause
to mean, “Who can declare the
length of His life
hereafter?”; Kimchi,
like Hengstenberg,
explains it to mean, “Who can
declare His posterity?” Yet another rendering
based on the fact that …,
(dor) sometimes stands for “habitation,”
or
“dwelling,” is that
given by Hoffmann
and Margoliouth,
namely, “As for His dwelling, who cares for
it?” (or who can
speak of it?) **
*
Hengstenberg.
** See Isa. 38:
12, R.V.
The new American Jewish translation of the Bible renders: “And with His
generation, who did
reason?”
This great variety of opinions by Bible scholars, both ancient
and modern, Jewish and Christian, will give the reader
an idea of the
difficulty of coming to a positive conclusion as to the
actual meaning of this
clause, and how unbecoming it would be to speak with
anything like dogmatism.
Yet I may venture to suggest an explanation
which seems to me the most probable.
In
the Hebrew Bible …, (dor
rendered “generation”) signifies “an age,”
or
“the
men living
in a particular age”;
or, in an
ethical sense “the
entire body of those who are connected together by
similarity of disposition,”
or likeness of
moral character.
The Pillel verb …, soche’-ach (rendered in A.V. “declare,” and in
R.V. “considereth”),
signifies,
“a
thoughtful consideration,”
“meditation,”* but
it means also “to speak,”
“to complain,” “to
lament,”
and is [Page 105] used in at least one or two places to describe an
exercise very much akin to prayer.
As,
for instance, Ps. 55:
17,
“Evening, morning, and at
noonday will I pray, and
cry aloud: and He
shall hear my voice.”
The words “will I
pray” (the R.V. has, “will
I complain”)
are a translation of this same verb.**
I would therefore translate “As
for His generation - who
(among them) poureth
out
a complaint?” (i.e. at His
treatment); or, “who among them
uttereth a prayer?” (i.e. on His behalf). In
either
case there may be, as suggested already by Bishop
Lowth, a prophetic
allusion to the custom which
prevailed among the Jews in the case of trials for life
to call upon all who
had anything to say in favour of the accused, to come
and “declare it,” or “plead”
on his behalf.
* E.g. Ps. 143:
5,
“I
remember the days of
old, I meditate (…, soche’-ach)
on all Thy doings.”
** As a noun it
is found also in the inscription of Ps.
102. - a
prayer of the afflicted
when he is overwhelmed and poureth out his complaint (…,
sicho)
before Jehovah.
The following striking passage from the Talmud (Sanhedrin fol.
43) may be cited by way of illustration. “There
is a
tradition: On the eve of the Sabbath and the Passover
they hung Jesus.
And the herald went forth before him for
forty days crying, ‘Jesus goeth to be executed,
because he has practised
sorcery and seduced
That this legend about Jesus has for its basis a well-known
custom in the procedure of the Sanhedrin in trials for
life, there is, I think,
no doubt;* for the principle by which they were supposed to be regulated was that “they sat to justify, and not to
condemn; to save life, and
not to destroy.”
That this humane
custom of calling upon those who knew anything in favour
of the accused to come
and declare it, was not observed in the case of Jesus of
Nazareth, and that the
proceedings at this hasty, mock trial before the
Sanhedrin were in flagrant
contradiction with the regulations which were supposed
to govern their
procedure, are facts of history, but there is this much
truth in this Talmudic
passage, that none dared to appear in His favour; and that in the great crisis
when the Christ of God stood on His trial before the
corrupt hostile Jewish
hierarchy and the representatives of the then great
Gentile world power, no one
came forward with a justifying plea “on
His behalf”
for fear of the Jews.
Yea, at that
solemn [Page 107] moment, when the sword awoke to smite the Shepherd, the
sheep were all scattered; and even His own disciples,
who later on when
convinced of His resurrection became as bold as lions,
and willingly laid down
their lives for Him, became demoralized with fear and
forsook Him and fled.
*
Lowth
thinks that our Lord referred to this custom in His
words to the high priest in
John 18: 20,
21, “I
spoke openly
to the world. ... Why
askest thou Me? ask them that have heard Me,”
etc.
And in a sense our Lord Jesus is still on His trial.
Are we, His professed disciples, ready now to
take our stand as His witnesses in the face of a hostile
Jewish and Gentile
world, and make our “justifying
plea” on His
behalf not only in word but
by showing forth the power
of His gospel over our own hearts and lives?
But this has been somewhat of a digression.
The next clause in this verse proclaims clearly
the fact of His death, and the manner of it.
“For He
was cut off out of the land of the living.”
It
is
by wicked and violent hands that this righteous Servant
of Jehovah dies - “cut
off,”
as it were, in the midst of His days.
And then, finally, in repudiation once again of
their previous false
notion that it was for His own sin that He was “stricken
and
smitten of God” (ver.
4), the vicarious atoning character of
His sufferings and death
is yet again emphasized: “For the transgression
of My people the
stroke fell upon Him.”
Ewald,
one of the chief fathers of the
German rationalistic school of interpreters, who assigns
a different (and
earlier) authorship for 53rd
chapter
than the rest of the writings of the Great Unknown,* with
which, [Page 108] according to him, it has somehow become incorporated, adduces the “frequent
repetition of expressions and ideas which occur
nowhere else” in the second part of Isaiah, as
a ground of his theory;
but these “frequent repetitions,”
as Dr. Alexander
observes, “so far from being
rhetorical defects, or indications of
another author, are used with an obvious design,
namely, that of making it
impossible for any ingenuity or learning to eliminate
the doctrine of vicarious
atonement from this passage by presenting it so often,
and in forms so varied
and yet still the same, that he who succeeds in
expelling it from one place is
compelled to meet it in another.
Thus in
this verse, which fills up the last particulars of the
humiliation and
sufferings of the Messiah even unto death, it is once
again repeated that it
was “for the transgression of My
people” that the stroke fell upon Him.”
* The
name with which the critics have
christened their “second Isaiah.”
As already pointed out in the introductory part, the term …, Ammi
(“My people”),
can only apply to Israel, and is one of the many
internal marks which make it
impossible to interpret the prophecy of the Jews as a
nation, for the servant suffers
and dies for the people, and therefore cannot be confounded with
the people. Yes, the
Good Shepherd laid down His life
in the first instance for “My
people” - the
people which in a special
sense He calls “His own,”
and
that is the chief ground of
our hope and confidence for
*
John 11: 51, 52.
(7) Gods Special Interposition in the
Burial of His Servant
The prophetic story of the Servant of Jehovah unfolded in this
penitential confession moves on.
From [Page 110]
** No
little
controversy has centred round the last line of this
verse. It
is contended by Jewish controversialists
that …, lamo (the last word in the verse which I have rendered “upon
Him”), has the plural suffix and ought to be
translated “upon them,”
and this is adduced by
some in proof that it is a collective subject that the prophet speaks of in this chapter, namely,
Israel.
But
first
Kimchi, who
originated this
argument, himself denied it. In his
commentary he says: “I should
like to ask the Nazarenes who explain the Parashah
of Jesus, how the prophet could have said to
them
(…) when he ought to
have said “to him”
(…), for … (lamo)
is plural, being equivalent to … (la-hem).” But
in his grammar he says: “…, (mo) occurs as the affix
of the 3rd person singular, as in Job
20: 23; 22:
2.”
And again, “ …, (mo) is used both of many and of one.” There
are also other instances in the
Hebrew Bible besides these two passages in Job quoted by
Kimchi where the poetic
plural suffix … is used for the singular.
We find it even in this second part of Isaiah,
chap. 44: 15 – “he
maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto” But
even if it be admitted that lamo is here a
plural, there would be no ground for the assertion that
the subject is a
collective one. The
translation would
then be: “For He was cut off
from the land of the
living. For
the transgression of My
people - the stroke or
punishment that should have fallen on them.”
This is admitted in the New American Jewish translation
of the Bible, which
renders: “For the transgression of My
people, to whom the stroke was due.”
His life of
vicarious suffering and
atoning death we come to His burial.
“And
they made
(or “appointed”*) His
grave with the wicked,
And with a rich man in His death,
Because He hath done no violence,
Neither was deceit in His mouth.”
* …
vayyitten
(rendered
in Authorized
Version “He gave”),
is, as generally admitted, used here, as in
many other places in the Hebrew
Bible,
impersonally, as in the German man gab.
“The predictions concerning Christ in
this chapter,” writes Moses
Margoliouth, “are
so numerous
and so minute that they could not possibly have been
dictated by any but by Him
to whom all things are naked and open, and who worketh
all things according to
the counsel of His own will.
The most insignificant
circumstances connected with our Lord’s
death are set forth with as
much accuracy as those which are most important. If we
reflect but for a moment on the
peculiar circumstances which attended our Saviour’s
last hours, we shall see
reason to exclaim with Moses, ‘The
secret things
belong unto the Lord our God’;
or with Paul, ‘0 the
depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the
knowledge of God! how unsearchable are
His judgments, and
His ways past finding out!’ What could
be more unlikely than that the
Messiah should be crucified when crucifixion was not a
Jewish but a Roman
punishment? And
yet David (in Ps. 22.) predicted that such
would be the case centuries [Page
111]
before
*
Deut. 17:
14, 15.
Their Rabbinic law pronounced the most severe anathema
against any one who should deliver a
Jew to a heathen magistrate.
But in this
case - that the word of God may come to
pass - they regard neither their law nor their
tradition, but deliver Jesus to
the judgment of the Roman Procurator and call upon him
to pronounce
sentence. And
when Pilate, half in
remonstrance and half in mockery, said: “Shall
I
crucify your King?” they replied, “We
have no
king but Caesar.”
After the remarkable fulfilment of an extraordinary prophecy
when Jesus was really put to death according to the Roman law, and was
crucified between two male-factors, what more likely
than that He should be
treated as they were?
But no: for when
Pilate, yielding once more to the clamour of the Jews
that the death of the
victims should be hastened so that the bodies should not
remain on the cross on
the Sabbath - “The soldiers [Page
112]
came and broke the
legs of the first and of the other that were
crucified with Him;
but
when they came to Jesus and saw that He was dead
already,
they
broke not
His legs.
Howbeit one of the
soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and straightway there came out
blood and water… These things came
to pass that the scriptures might be fulfilled,
a bone of Him shall not be broken - and
again another
scripture, They shall look upon Him whom they
have pierced.” Again,
“what more insignificant than
that the soldiers should
part
His
garments
and cast
lots
for His vesture? Yet
that
too, with a great number of other incidents equally
minute, was
circumstantially predicted.”* And so also was it with His burial.
*
Margoliouth. I have taken the liberty to
abbreviate and slightly recast his remarks.
The Jewish leaders, not content with the humiliations and
sufferings they heaped upon Him; not appeased even by
the cruel and shameful
death to which at their will He was given over.,
followed Him with hatred even to the grave.
“They appointed His grave with the wicked.”
“In all countries, I suppose, it has
been the rule that persons put to death as criminals
have had ignominious sepulture,”
writes one. “Even
after death shame has followed them, though after ages
have ofttimes reversed
the award and built monuments to them.”
But this was especially the case among the Jews. This was the
law of the time, as stated by Josephus.*
“He that [Page
133]
blasphemeth
God let him be stoned, and let him hang upon a tree
all that day, and let him
be buried in an ignominious and obscure manner.”
Now, it was as a blasphemer that they condemned
Him in their ignorance
and blindness, and what more likely than that as He died
with criminals He
should also be buried with them? But - “with
a rich man
(He was)
in
His death.”**
*
Antiquities, iv. viii. 6.
**
The word for death is in the plural, and some have argued that
it should be rendered, “in His
deaths,” and
have adduced it as yet another proof that the subject of
the prophecy is a collective
one. But
there is no basis for this
assertion, for first, if a plurality of persons were
intended, it is the plural
suffix which would be required, and this is
here expressed by the
singular. “There is no ground,”
as Pusey
correctly observes, “to lay any
emphasis on the plural in …, methim ‘death,’
than …, chayyim ‘life’
(in the preceding
verse), which is also in the plural - the singular for
‘life’
not being used in
Hebrew. Many
nouns in Hebrew are used in
the plural where we Westerns could hardly account for
it. The plural is used of
a
condition
as a period of
life, or a condition of body. There is then no reason
why ‘deaths,’ if there is
any stress on the plural, should not mean ‘the state
of death,’ as …, chayyim
(the plural for ‘life,’ the state
of life).”
In Ezek. 28:
10 “deaths”
is certainly used “for
the death of one.” Delitzsch says
the plural is used of a
violent death, the very
pain of
which makes it like dying again and again.
Modern scholars have sought to explain the word …
'ashir,
as being a synonymous parallel to …, r’sh’im (“wicked”),
in the previous clause.
This explanation is, as far as I can trace
it, first mentioned by Rabbi
Sh’lomoh ben
Melekh
of Fez in his Mikhlol Yophi
(about
1500 A.D.), where he says, “’Ashir
(rich)
is [Page 114] considered by Rabbi
Yonah to be equivalent
to rasha', “wicked’”; but he himself adds that “it
is not allowable to abandon the usual signification ‘rich’ merely on
account of the parallel
clause.”
This explanation, which Franz
Delitzsch properly says, is “untenable,”
has
unfortunately been adopted by Luther,
Calvin, and Gesenius,
who regard the word “rich”
here as suggesting the necessary idea of “one
who
sets his heart
upon his wealth, or puts his trust in
it,” or makes an unlawful use of it.
But this is so arbitrary that some of the later
writers abandon the
Hebrew usage altogether, and profess to derive the sense
“wicked” from an Arabic
root. But
this, as Dr. Alexander truly says, “is doubly untenable;
first, because the Hebrew
usage cannot be put aside for an Arabic analogy
without extreme necessity,
which does not here exist; and secondly, because the
best authorities (as
Delitzsch also shows) find no
such meaning in the
particular Arabic word itself.*
*
Ewald,
Hoffmann,
Bottcher,
etc., have tried their hands at altering the original
word so as to produce a
synonymous parallelism to “wicked,”
but this is
a violent method of handling the sacred text, especially
when there is
absolutely no necessity for it.
It may seem surprising that this forced imposition
of a new and foreign meaning on a word so familiar
should be thus insisted on.
Luther and Calvin, no doubt, simply followed the
rabbinical tradition; but the
later writers have a deeper motive for pursuing a course
which, in other circumstances,
they would boldly charge [Page
115]
upon the Reformer’s
ignorance of Hebrew.
That motive is the
wish to do away with the remarkable coincidence between
the circumstances of
our Saviour’s burial and the language of this verse, as
it has been commonly
understood since Capellus” (Alexander).
And this “remarkable coincidence”
is truly wonderful, for, in the words of Delitzsch,
“if we reflect that the Jewish
rulers would have given
to Jesus the same dishonourable burial as to the two
thieves, but that the
Roman authorities handed over the body to Joseph the
Arimathaean, a ‘rich
man’ (Matt. 27: 57), who placed it in the
sepulchre in his own garden, we see an agreement at
once between the gospel
history and the prophetic words, which could only be
the work of the God of
both the prophecy and its fulfilment, inasmuch as no
suspicion could possibly
arise of there having been any human design of
bringing the former into
conformity with the latter.”
And the reason assigned for this honourable burial, which was
so different from what had been planned, or it “appointed”
for Him by His enemies, is that - “He
hath done no
violence, neither was deceit found in His mouth”
- which is
yet another reiteration of the
absolute innocence of His outward actions and of the
inward purity and
gentleness of His character.
It was vicarious
sufferings that He endured; it was a death of
atonement
for others that He died; but
immediately those sufferings were ended and that death
accomplished, His
humiliation was ended,
and no
further indignity to His [Page
116]
blessed person could be
permitted. And
so, already, in His
burial, He was “separated from
sinners,” and was
laid in the tomb of the “rich
man of Arimathaea,
wherein never man before was
laid.”*
*
Luke 23: 53.
*
*
*
[Page 117]
CHAPTER III
THE RESURRECTION AND FUTURE GLORY OF
THE SERVANT OF JEHOVAH
With
the 10th
verse begins the account of the Messiah’s
exaltation and glory.
But first it is once more reiterated and
emphasized that they were not mere chance experiences
which the Servant of
Jehovah passed through.
Nor was it
merely that wicked men were
allowed to work out the
evil of their hearts in the sufferings and humiliations
which they were
permitted to heap upon Him, and thus make manifest by
their treatment of “the Holy One”
their enmity towards God.
No: “the supreme causa
efficiens,” as Delitzsch expresses
it, was God, “who made the sin
of men subservient to
His pleasure, His will, and predetermined counsel.”
“Yet
it pleased
Jehovah to bruise
(…,
dako, literally
to crush)
Him;
He hath put Him to grief.”*
*
… he'cheli, as is generally admitted by scholars, is the hiphil
of …, chalah. Both the
verbs “to
bruise,” or “crush,”
and “to put to grief,”
or “afflict
with sickness,” go back to verses
4
and 5: “He
hath
borne our griefs,” or “sicknesses,”
and “He was bruised,” or
“crushed,”
“for our iniquities.”
[Page 118]
This is the confession of the penitents whose eyes are now
opened to see the true meaning of it all.
He who “had done no
violence nor was deceit
found in His mouth,” “whose
actions were
invariably prompted by pure love, and whose speech
consisted of unclouded
sincerity and truth,” was yet “crushed”
and put to grief by Jehovah.
“Here is not only the
mystery of suffering innocence; but of
innocence suffering at the hands of righteousness and
perfect love.”
Yes, mystery of mysteries; and apart from the
explanation He Himself gives of it, it is the most
inexplicable thing in God’s
moral government. But
it is fully
explained, not only in all that preceded in this
chapter, but by the great
purpose of redemption formed by the triune God before
the world was founded,
and which is progressively unfolded in the pages of the
Old and New Testaments.
In this light of God’s own revelation the sufferings of the
Messiah in which the good pleasure of God’s will was
accomplished, become a
mystery of light in which there is no darkness at all. We see that
this pleasure of Jehovah in the
sufferings of the Righteous One, to use the words of
another, “does not proceed from
caprice, but that He acted righteously
as well as sovereignly in what He did.
“Not only did the Lord bruise Him,
but it was the ‘good
pleasure of His will’
to do so. He who has no pleasure in the death of the
wicked was pleased to put His righteous Servant to
grief - not, of
course, [Page 119] because the death-agony was a pleasure to look upon, but as
means to the fulfilment of a great purpose.
“Even a noble-minded man finds
pleasure in contemplating heroic and self-sacrificing
love in others, to
accomplish glorious ends.
We look back,
for example, on our martyrs, who suffered cruel death
for the Gospel’s sake; we
forget the physical torture they endured; or rather it
ceases to be a horror in
our eyes, and becomes a glory; we read of their
sufferings with uplifted and
joyful hearts, thanking God who gave such grace to
men. And
even so, we cannot help thinking, the
Lord, whose pity is like unto a father’s pity, had
pleasure in the
self-sacrifice of His Servant; yea, had pleasure in
the very appointment which
issued in the self-sacrifice. And if we add to this -
as exhibited in what
follows - the results which the sufferings achieved,
in their nature,
blissfulness, magnitude, and perpetuity, we shall
understand how it comes to be
said, ‘Yet it pleased
the Lord to bruise Him: He did put Him to
grief.’”*
* Culross.
These blessed results the spirit of prophecy in the mouth of
the penitent confessors now proceeds to enumerate, after
emphasizing yet again
that they are all conditioned on His sufferings and
death.
“If (or when), His soul shall make an offering
for sin.”
The word …, tasim (“shall
make”), is either second person masculine, in
which case the rendering would be as in the Authorized
and Revised Versions, “When Thou
(i.e. God) shalt
make His soul an offering for sin”; [Page 120] or third person
feminine, “When His soul shall
make an offering,” which is the
rendering accepted in the margin and by most modern
scholars. The
latter translation is preferable, as
Jehovah is nowhere else addressed in this chapter. In either case
the Servant of Jehovah gives
His life as an offering for the sin of others and takes
on Himself the penalty
which their guilt had incurred. “Language
could not
more simply and unequivocally declare the significance
of His death.”
The word rendered “offering for sin”
…, asham,
really means “trespass,”
but just as the word …, chattath, which is used for “sin
offering,” “denotes
first; the sin,
then the punishment of the sin, and the expiation of
the sin, and hence the
sacrifice which cancels the sin; so asham signifies
first the guilt or debt, then the compensation or
penance, and hence the
sacrifice which discharges the debt or guilt and sets
the man free.”
There was much in common between the trespass offering
and the “sin offering.”
Both are called kodesh-kadashim, “most
holy,”* and
as regards the manner in which the
sacrifice was to be slain, and as to which portions were
to be burnt on the
altar, and what parts assigned to the priests, there was
“one law for them both.”**
* Lev. 6:
17; 14:
13. *** Lev. 7:
7.
Yet there were differences between the chaitath (sin offering) and asham (trespass
offering), and in their moral and typical significance
each one of the
sacrifices set forth a distinctive aspect of the great
work of [Page 121] atonement which was to be accomplished by the Messiah* and the blessed
results accruing therefrom to sinful men.
On the whole, it is correct to say with Dr. Culross, that while the sin
offering
looked to the sinful state of the offerer, the trespass
offering was appointed
to meet actual transgressions, the
fruit
of the sinful state. The sin offering set forth
propitiation, the
trespass offering set forth satisfaction.
It was brought by the transgressor “to
make
amends for the harm that he hath done.”
“It symbolized rights
violated and compensation
rendered, debt contracted and satisfaction made.” But whether it
be a sin offering or a
trespass offering it had to be slain, and its blood shed before it could become a sacrifice.
*
“Every species of sacrifice had its
own primary idea.
The fundamental idea
of the ‘olah
(burnt offering) was oblatio, or
the offering of worship, that of the sh'lamin
(peace offering) conciliatio, or the
knitting of fellowship; that of
the minchah (meat offering) donatio,
or sanctifying consecration; that of
the ehattath (sin offering) expiatio,
or atonement; that of the asham (trespass
offering)
mulkta (satisfactio), or a
compensatory payment.
The self-sacrifice of the Servant of Jehovah
may be presented under all these points of view. It is the
complete antitype, the truth, the
object, and the end of all the
sacrifices”
(Franz Delitzsch).
1. The
first of the blessed results of
Messiah’s vicarious sufferings and atoning death which
are enumerated in this 10th
verse is expressed in the two
Hebrew words, …, yi’eh zera',
“He shall see His (or more literally a) seed
(or posterity).” Jewish
controversialists, supported by some
Gentile rationalistic writers, have based a quibble on
this clause. Taking
zera', “seed,”
in
its literal sense as denoting natural offspring, they
have [Page 122] argued that this prophecy cannot apply to Jesus of Nazareth, who had no
natural progeny, overlooking the fact that this “seed”
(like the other fruits of His atoning Passion set forth
in the last three
verses of the prophecy) follows His death, on which it
is conditioned, and
therefore cannot be taken in a literal sense.*
No; the Messiah’s “seed,”
of which the
spirit of prophecy speaks here, is the glorious
spiritual progeny which He has
begotten with “the travail of
His soul,” and the
new family which He came to found, and which sprang, so
to say, at His
resurrection out of His empty tomb, is the new “seed
of
Israel,” or the Household of Faith.
This spiritual “seed”
- the “bringing of many sons
unto glory”,** - was the chief
joy which was set before Him, for the sake of which He
endured the cross,
despising the shame.
Except a grain of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone;
but if it die, it beareth
much fruit; and the Church of Christ, consisting of the
multitude of the
redeemed out of all nations, Jew and Gentile - which was
born when He died, and
which looks back to Him as the source of its life and
the origin of its being -
is the continuous living witness to this truth.
*…,
zera’,
is again and again used in the Hebrew Scriptures in a
figurative sense of
spiritual seed. It
is used also in this
sense of spiritual “seed,”
or disciples, in
post-Biblical Rabbinical
writings. ** Heb. 2: 10.
The parallel
scripture to Isa.
53. is Ps.
72.
There also the sufferings of the Messiah are
minutely foretold in
advance as well as the glory which should follow.
[Page
123]
And among the blessed results which
are there set forth as following from His death is, “A seed (zera’) shall serve Him”;*
which shows that it is not a literal
but a spiritual seed, namely, His disciples, or
followers, who also “serve”
Him.
*
Ps. 22: 30.
2.
“He shall prolong His
days.” How
wonderful, how seemingly
paradoxical! He
“pours out His soul unto death,” as a trespass offering; He is “cut off from the land of the living”;
is dead and
buried, and yet He shall live and have continuance of
days!
How is it possible? The
answer
to this question is that the Messiah was not only to die
for our sins
but must rise again from the dead “according
to the
Scriptures.”
And in the light of
the glorious fulfilment all these seeming paradoxes in
the Old Testament in
reference to the person and mission of the Messiah are
cleared up.
Our Lord Jesus, who was delivered up for our offences, was
raised again for our justification, and ascended into
heaven, where He now
sitteth at the right hand of God, whence His word of
encouragement and
assurance comes to His disciples: “Fear
not,
I
am the First
and the Last, and the Living One; and I became dead, and behold I am
alive for evermore, and have the keys of death and
of Hades.”*
* Rev. 1:
17, 18.
This prediction that Messiah shall “prolong
His
days” after having died, is in accord also with
what we read in
other Scriptures, as for instance Ps.
16: 10:
“Thou wilt not leave my soul in (or to) Sheol; neither [Page 124]
wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy
One to see corruption”; and Ps.
21:
“He
asked life
of Thee, Thou gavest it Him,* even length of days for ever and ever,” which Jonathan in his Targum,
and Kimchi in his Commentary,
themselves explain that the expression orekh yamim, “length
of days,” refers to “the
life of the world to come,” and
so in fact it must be, since it is for [the “Age” yet to come; then, afterwards,
in “a new heaven and a new
earth”*for] ever and ever.
[* By
comparing Scripture, with other Scriptures, we see how a
comma (as used in a
prophetic statement here), can separate
the following clause in the
text; and by itself, represent a period of “a thousand
years”! Compare
-
Jer. 32: 37-42; Isa. 43:
19-21;
Rom. 8:
19-21; Lk. 20:
35; Acts.
7:
4, 5; 2
Pet. 3: 8; Rev.
20: 4
- with 1 Thess.
15: 24;
2 Pet. 3:
12, 13;
Rev. 21:
1, etc.]
3.
“And the pleasure of
Jehovah shall prosper in His hand,”
i.e. God’s will shall be fully
accomplished by Him: the mission on which He is sent He
shall triumphantly
carry through. But
if we want to know
more particularly what this “pleasure”
of
Jehovah is, which is thus to be brought to prosperous
issue “in His hand,” we
find the answer in the commission
entrusted to the perfect Servant of Jehovah as set forth
in this second part of
Isaiah. Let
me quote only two or three
passages from preceding chapters.
Behold My Servant, whom I uphold; My chosen, in whom My soul delighteth: I have put My
Spirit upon Him, He shall bring forth judgment
(or
“justice”) to the nations. ... I
Jehovah have called Thee in righteousness,
and will hold Thy right hand, and will keep Thee
and give Thee for a covenant of the people,
for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind
eyes, to bring
out the prisoners from the dungeon, and
them
that sit in darkness out of the Prison house.”
“And now, saith
Jehovah that formed me from the womb to be His
Servant, to bring Jacob again to Him, and that
Israel be gathered unto Him: :.. yea,
He
saith, It is too light a thing that
Thou shouldest be [page 125] My Servant to raise up
the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of
*
Isa. 42:
1-7;
49: 5,
6.
This then, in brief, is the pleasure of Jehovah which shall
prosper in His hand, or be brought to a triumphant
accomplishment through His
mediation, namely, the re-gathering of Israel, the
bringing back of Jacob, not only to his land but into new covenant relationship with God, of
which He Himself will be
the bond; the illumination of the Gentile world with
the light of the knowledge
of the true and living God; the
establishing
of judgment and justice in the earth; the deliverance of men from spiritual blindness and the bondage of sin,
and the
bringing near of God’s salvation
to all men throughout the whole world, even
“unto the
end of the earth.”
And to this we must add words from the New Testament which open up yet more illimitable
vistas of this “good pleasure”
of Jehovah which is to be realized in
and through the mediation of the Messiah. “For
it was the good
pleasure of the Father,”
writes
the Apostle Paul, “that in Him should all the fulness dwell; and through Him to reconcile
all things unto Himself, having made peace
through the blood of the cross ...
whether
things upon the earth or things in heaven.” And again, “Making
known unto us the mystery of His will according to
His
good pleasure, which He purposed in Him unto a
dispensation of the fulness
of times, to sum up all things [Page 126] in Christ, the things in the heavens,
and the things upon the earth ... according
to the purpose of Him who
worketh all things after the counsel of His will.”*
* Col.
1: 19,
20; Eph.
1: 9-11.
“Glorious consummation of
redemption,” exclaims one, “which
is also the manifestation in its fulness of the
Divine
Love!”
*
*
*
[Page 127]
CHAPTER IV
JEHOVAH’S FINAL WORD CONCERNING HIS SERVANT - THE GLORIOUS AWARD FOR HIS
SUFFERINGS.
In
the last two verses “the
prophecy leaves the stand-point of
* Delitzsch.
“He shall see of the travail of His soul” (or, more
literally, “because,” or,
“in consequence
of the toil or labour of His soul), He
shall see
and be satisfied.”
This “travail of soul”
includes, as has been well observed,
“all the toil, suffering, and
sorrow through which He
came, and has been outlined, if not unfolded, in the
previous part of the
prophecy. It
culminated when He was cut
off out of the land of the living, and His soul was
made an offering for sin,
accomplishing [Page
128]
what the Levitical
sacrifices only symbolized.
No
accumulation of mere bodily sufferings could satisfy
these expressions.
The ‘travail’ is that of the soul; it has its seat within, and
is such as might find voice in those words reported from
*
Culross.
But what is it that He shall see, i.e. look upon with delight, and be abundantly satisfied?*
For answer we have, I believe, to go back to
the verse which immediately precedes as well as to what
follows.
* The
verb …, yisba’ =
from. …, sabha’, means
not only to be contented, but to be filled, or
abundantly supplied.
It stands for the fullest realization of
expectation, or gratification of any particular desire.
Abarbonel,
followed by some Christian commentators, paraphrases, “He
shall see, i.e.
His seed; He shall be
satisfied, i.e.
with length of days.”
That is true, but it goes beyond and includes
the full and final accomplishment of all “the
pleasure of
Jehovah.”
In part this is already
being realized. He
who for us men and
our salvation endured agony and shame, and poured out
His soul unto death, is
now seated at the right hand of God, being endowed as
the Son of Man with “length of
days for ever and ever,” and everywhere He
beholds with joy “a seed that
serveth Him.”
[Page 129]
Then, apart also from the multitude which no man can number,
who have been redeemed by His precious blood and who out
of love for Him have
sought to do the will of His Father in heaven, the indirect influences of
His gospel in almost all parts of the earth have been
great and wonderful.
But this is not all for which Christ suffered
and died. This
is not all the “pleasure of
Jehovah,” which He came to
accomplish. It
is only when Redemption
is fully completed that “He
shall see” a
glorious completed church “without
spot or wrinkle”;
a restored and converted Israel which shall bear
upon itself the inscription “Holiness
unto Jehovah,”
and be “the priests of Jehovah”
and the willing
“ministers” or God in
diffusing the blessings of
their Messiah’s gospel among all nations; a
world which shall be “filled with the knowledge of God as the waters
cover the sea”; and [afterward] a new heaven and a new earth wherein shall dwell
righteousness
for evermore.
Yes, He shall see all this as the outcome of the
travail of His soul, and
be satisfied.
One of the most blessed results of the “travail
of His soul,” and that which at the same time
forms no little part of the “satisfaction”
for
all the sufferings which He endured, is the prerogative
with which He is
endowed of removing guilt and imparting righteousness to
those who, through
faith in Him, seek communion with God.
“By His knowledge shall My
righteous Servant justify many,” or, to give a more literal rendering of the words
[Page 130] in the order in
which they stand in the Hebrew, “By
His knowledge
shall make righteous
(or,
bring righteousness) the
Righteous One (My
Servant)
many.”
It cannot be positively stated whether …, beda'to (by His
knowledge), is to be understood
in a subjective sense of the Servant of Jehovah, i.e. “according to His knowledge,”
or objectively, “by the
knowledge of Him.”
Grammatically it might be rendered either way, but it is
correct to say with Delitzsch
(who himself favours the
subjective view) that nearly all the commentators who
understand by the Servant
of Jehovah the divine Redeemer, give preference to the
latter of the two
explanations, namely, by the knowledge
of Him on the part of
others. And
this, it seems to me, is the more
satisfactory view.
The kind of “knowledge”
expressed in the word is not only that
which has reference to understanding with the mind, but
a practical,
experimental knowledge* - a spiritual heart acquaintance with Him, a personal appropriation by a living faith
of His redeeming work for sinners - such a “knowledge,”
for
instance, as is implied in the words of Christ, “This
is
life eternal, that
they might know
Thee the
only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom Thou didst
send,” or, in
the prayer of the Apostle, “That
I might know Him
and the power
of
His resurrection.”
*…, yada, stands in the Bible for experimental knowledge.
The construction of the phrase …, Tsaddiq abhdi,
is
unusual, and is intended to emphasize the unique
character of the Servant of
Jehovah and to explain [Page
131]
in part how it is that He is the
bringer of righteousness to others.
“It is in the Hebrew language as a rule, that the adjective
should be placed after the substantive to which it belongs.
But in the passage before us that rule is
transgressed. ‘Righteous’
is not placed after ‘Servant,’
but stands before
it, and that without the article.
The
omission of the article before words which are,
nevertheless, definite,
indicates both in Hebrew and Greek that the person or
thing denoted is to be
regarded as standing in a sphere of its own - singular,
isolated, or
pre-eminent. So
it is here. We
must translate ‘One
that is righteous,’ or ‘the
Righteous One.’
The omission of the article indicates that
the person thus spoken of held in earth a position of
righteousness that was
singular and isolated, and that there was none like it. The peculiar
position of the word ‘righteous’
preceding, and not following its
substantive, is intended to give especial prominence to
the thought it
expresses. Our
minds are intended to
rest on the righteousness of the Righteous One as the
procuring cause of the
blessing spoken of in this verse.
In
virtue of having been the Righteous One, He becomes the
causer,
or bringer of righteousness to His believing people.
“Yet whilst prominence is thus given
to the great fact of His righteousness, it is
important also to observe that
the words ‘My Servant’ are added.
...
“It is not in virtue of that
essential righteousness that pertains to Him as God -
one with the Father and
the [Page
132]
Holy Ghost - that He
brings to us righteousness.
The
righteousness by which we are constituted righteous is a service,
an obedience
which He became man in order to render,
and which He commenced and finished in the earth. It commenced when He
said,
“Lo, I
come to do Thy will,
0
God.” It terminated
when He had become obedient
unto death, even the death of the cross, and said, “It is
finished.”
It is true, indeed, that
unless He had been one to whom righteousness essentially
belonged, He could not
have wrought out the righteousness which He did work out
as the Servant. The
service of that Servant had in it a
superhuman excellency, for that Servant was Immanuel -
God manifest in the
flesh.”*
*
B. W.
The word …, yats'dik, followed
as it is by the preposition …, le,
ought, as I have already
suggested, to be rendered “shall
cause, or bring
righteousness.”
The …, rabbim
(“many”), to whom He
thus brings righteousness, or
constitutes righteous, is the mass of mankind, or all -
not only in Israel, but
amongst the nations also - who shall respond to His
call, and by a living faith
enter into an acquaintance with Him.
It
is probable that this passage was in the mind of our
Saviour when, on the night
of His betrayal, He took the cup and said to His
disciples, “This is my blood of
the New Covenant which is poured out for
many”*, and it is almost certain that it was in the mind of
the
Apostle Paul when writing Romans
5: 12-21, [Page 133] which is an inspired unfolding and application of the same doctrine of
substitution which is set forth in this great Old
Testament prophecy.
After writing of the consequence of Adam’s
transgression to the whole of mankind, he says: “But not
as the trespass,
so
also is the free
gift.
For if by the trespass of the
one the many be
dead, much more did the grace of God, and the gift by the grace of the one man,
Jesus
Christ,
abound
unto many.
... For
as
through the one man’s disobedience the many were
made sinners, even so through the
obedience of the One shall the many (…), be
made righteous.”
To repeat,
it is the righteousness of
faith which is the consequence of justification on the
ground of the atoning
work of the Messiah which is set forth in this passage,
yet those are not
altogether wrong who maintain that it includes also that “righteousness of life which springs
by an inward necessity out of those sanctifying powers
that are bound up with
the atoning work which we have made our own.”**
For though this is not the ground of
our acceptance before God, it is yet important to
remember that the doctrine of
justification does not stand alone in the Bible, and
that God does not
constitute any one righteous to whom He does not also
impart the power to be
righteous. We
are justified that we may also be
sanctified and glorified, and the outward seal of the
true followers of Christ
is that they “depart from
iniquity” and “walk not
after the flesh, but
after the Spirit.”
But to return to our
immediate context.
“Because our [Page 134] righteousness has its roots in the forgiveness of
sins as an absolutely unmerited gift of grace without
works, the prophecy returns
once more from the justifying work of the Servant of
Jehovah to His
sin-expunging work as the basis of all righteousness.”
*
Matt. 26: 28. ** Delitzsch.
“And their iniquities He shall bear.”
The
introduction of the pronoun, as Dr.
Alexander observes, makes a virtual antithesis
suggesting the idea of
exchange or mutual substitution.
They
shall
receive His righteousness, and He shall bear the heavy burden*
of their iniquities.
“From this doctrine
the heart that is self-righteous, hard, and proud may
turn scornfully away - as
Naaman did when told to dip seven times in Jordan; but
to the man who knows
himself to be a ruined and helpless sinner, and who
has been made to sigh for
reconcilement and peace with God, the news of grace to
the ill-deserving
manifested in righteousness will be welcome beyond all
thought, and mighty to
produce newness of life.”**
* The
thought expressed in …, yisbol - “shall bear”- is
that of pressure as of a heavy burden.
It is the future of the same verb as is rendered
“carried” in ver. 4. ** Culross.
Before we pass on to the last verse let me quote also a note
by Delitzsch
on this last clause: “This yisbol (He shall bear),”
he says, “which stands
along with future verbs, and being also future itself,
refers to something to
be done by the Servant of Jehovah after the completion
of the work to which He
is called in this life, and denotes the [Page 135] continued
operation of
His ‘bearing,’ or ‘carrying’ (ver.
4)
through His own active mediation.
His continued lading of our trespasses upon
Himself is merely the constant pressure and
presentation of His atonement which
has been offered once for all.
The dead
yet living One, because of His one self-sacrifice, is
an eternal Priest, who
now lives to distribute the blessings that He has
acquired.”
The last verse takes us back, as it were, to the very
beginning of this prophecy (chap. 52: 13-15), and sets forth again
the personal exaltation
of the One who has been despised and rejected of men,
and the victor’s prize,
which He shall receive on His triumphant emergence from
the conflict with the
powers of darkness.
“Therefore will I divide
(or
‘allot’) to Him a portion among (or
‘in’)
the
many
(or ‘great’), and
with the strong shall He divide the spoil.”* The award is bestowed upon Him by Jehovah’s own hand - “I
will divide
Him a
portion” - and the prize is glorious beyond
conception, for the rabbim, “many,”
who form His portion include not only “His
own” nation, whom He saves and blesses, and who
shall
yet render Him such [Page 136] loyal
devotion and service as the world has not known, but
extends beyond the bounds
of
*
The Septuagint and
Vulgate,
followed by the Fathers and
many modern commentators, render …,
(barabbim), among the many, and …, (eth-aezumim), with
the strong,
as accusatives, and explain “the
great” and “the strong”
as constituting the spoil given to the
Servant of Jehovah.
But the more natural
construction of the words is that given in the English
versions. …, (be)
occurs nowhere else as a connective of this verb with
its object, and the
particle, …, (eth), must mean with, as it is indeed
rendered in this same verse,
where it occurs again, as well as in the
ninth
verse.
“What is meant by His having His
portion among the rabbim (the ‘many,’
or ‘great’)”
observes Delitzsch,
“is clearly seen from such
passages as chaps. 52: 15 and 49: 7, according to which the
great ones of the earth will be brought to do homage
to Him, or, at all events,
to submit to Him.” But
this is only a mere outline.
For the full extent of His “portion”
as the Son of David and Son of Man, who, in
order to carry out the pleasure of Jehovah in the
redemption of the world, took
upon Himself the form of a servant, we have to go to a
Scripture like the 2nd Psalm:
“Ask of
Me, and I will give
Thee the heathen for Thine
inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the
earth for Thy possession”;
or Psalm 72.:
“He
shall have
dominion also from sea to sea.
And
from the River unto the
ends of the earth.
They
that dwell in the
wilderness shall bow before Him;
And
His enemies shall lick
the dust.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Yea, all
kings
shall fall down before Him:
All
nations shall serve Him.”
But
while His
portion is “divided” or
allotted to Him of God,
He Himself “divides spoil”
“with” or “among”
the
strong. These …,
(atsuniim,
“strong”
or “mighty ones”) are
those who flock to His banner [Page 137] and go forth with Him to the conflict against the powers of darkness. They are those
of whom we read in the third
verse of the 110th
Psalm: “Thy people
offer themselves willingly (or ‘are
all willingness,’ or ‘thorough devotion’) in the day of Thy power.” They are those
whom
the beloved John beheld in vision as “the
armies of
heaven,” following in His train as He rides
forth in glorious majesty,
conquering and to conquer, “riding
upon white horses,
clothed in fine linen, white
and pure.”*
*
Rev. 19: 14.
With these He condescends to share His triumph and to divide
the spoil taken from the enemy by making them partners
with Himself in His [millennial] kingdom and glory, even as they were sharers in His
sufferings.
And
truly He and
no one else is worthy to be
thus exalted, and deserves
the glorious award which God bestows upon Him.
This is emphasized in the recapitulation of His
peerless merit in the
last words of this wonderful prophecy.
“Because He poured out His soul unto death, and was numbered with the
transgressors.
And He (Himself)
bore the
sin of many. And He made intercession for the
transgressors.”
The phrase …, tahath asher, expresses more distinctly than the English rendering “because”
the idea of compensation or reward.
It has been translated by some “instead
of,” or “in return for
that,
i.e. the glorious portion or allotment
which is divided to Him by the Father is ‘in
return’
for the great Redemption [Page
138] which
He has accomplished with His own
life’s blood. The
word …, he'erah (rendered
‘poured out’), means ‘to
strip,’ ‘lay bare,’
‘empty,’ or to ‘pour
clean
out,’ even to the very last remnant.*
And
it was “His soul,” which
stands here for His
life-blood,
which He thus completely emptied out “unto
death.”
*
Delitzsch.
And although all this was in accord with the pre-determinate
counsel of God, He did it voluntarily, for this also is
implied in the original
verb, which accords again with His own word, which has
already been quoted: “Therefore
doth My Father love Me,
because I lay down My life.
... No
man
taketh it from Me,
but I lay it down Myself.” And
not only did He thus voluntarily pour out His soul unto
death as an atonement
for sinners, but “He was numbered” (or, as Delitzsch,
Hengstenberg, and others more properly translate the reflexive verb
…, nim'nah, He suffered Himself, i.e.
voluntarily,
to be numbered, or “reckoned”)
“with transgressors,”
…, posh'im
- that is, not only ordinary sinners, such as all men
are, but criminals - open
transgressors of the laws of God and of man, with whom
to be associated would
be a great humiliation for ordinary men, and how much
more to the “Holy One.” To
the believer it is precious and interesting to remember
that this clause formed
one of the direct quotations from this chapter made by
our Lord Jesus Himself
just before His betrayal and crucifixion.
“This which is written,”
He said, “must be fulfilled in
Me, And
He was [Page 139]
reckoned among
transgressors.”* It was, indeed, as another writer observes, “one
of those remarkable coincidences which were brought
about by
* Luke
22:
37.
** J. A.
Alexander.
He suffered Himself also to be reckoned with transgressors “in the judgment of His countrymen,
and in the unjust
judgment (or ‘sentence’) by which He was delivered up
to death as a wicked
apostate and transgressor of the law.”* “And
He”-
the pronoun is emphatic - “He
Himself bare the sin of many”
- blessed words which are again and
again joyously echoed in the New Testament, as, for
instance, in 1 Pet.
2: 24:
“Who His own self
bare”
(or “carried up”)
our sins in His own body upon
the tree,
that
we, having died unto sin,
might live unto righteousness”; and Heb.
9: 26-28, where there is also
an underlying allusion to
the great Old Testament prophecy: “But
now once at the
end of the ages hath He been manifested to put
away sin by the sacrifice of
Himself. And inasmuch as it is appointed
unto men once to die,
and
after death
the judgment: so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of
many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for Him unto salvation.”
* Delitzsch.
[Page 140]
Yes, He Himself, the Holy One, who knew no sin, bare our sin
right “up to the tree,”
and “was made sin for us,”
enduring the penalty due to it
on our behalf, that we might for ever be freed from the
accursed load and “become the
righteousness of God in Him.”
The whole prophetic picture of the sufferings of the Messiah
and of the glory that should follow closes with a brief
but pregnant reference
to His priestly function:
“And He made (or ‘maketh’) intercession
for
the transgressors.”
The verb …, yaph’gia'
(“made
intercession”), is an instance of the imperfect
or indefinite future,
and expresses a work begun, but not yet ended.
Its most striking fulfilment, as Delitzsch
observes, was the prayer of the crucified
Saviour, “Father, forgive them, for
they know
not
what they do.”
But this work of
intercession which He began on the cross He still
continues at the right hand
of God, where He
is now seated, a Prince
and a Saviour, to give repentance unto
[Page 141]
But remember, dear Christian reader, that He who is now our
Advocate (or blessed Paraclete) with the Father, by whose unceasing priestly ministry in the
heavenly sanctuary our life of fellowship with God is
maintained, bears also “His own” nation
“I have set watchmen upon thy walls,
0
[*NOTE. All apostates and
Anti-millennialists
within Christendom, take
note of this truth:-
If there will be No salvation
for
the nation of
*
*
*
[Page 142 blank: Page 143]
APPENDIX
THE SUFFERING
MESSIAH OF
THE SYNAGOGUE*
*After
the MS. of this little work was
already completed I asked my friend and fellow-worker in
the Hebrew Christian
Testimony to Israel, Mr.
J. I. Landsman,
to copy for me a few of the most striking passages from
the Talmud
and Midrashim
which speak of a
suffering Messiah, thinking it might interest Christian
readers if they were
added as an appendix.
Mr. Landsman has kindly done more than I asked, for some of
the passages are, as will be observed, already either
quoted or alluded to in
the first part of this book.
I think it well, however, to give the whole of his collection
here, as these extracts (most of which he has translated
from the original
sources) represent in orderly form the different
sections of Rabbinic
literature, and follow in chronological sequence.
THE TARGUM
The
oldest testimony we possess that Isa. 53.
was by the Synagogue
applied to the Messiah is found in the Targum on the
Prophets ascribed to Jonathan
ben Uzziel
(first century, A.D.).
Although the Targum in the form we now
possess it has been edited in
“Behold my servant, the Messiah,
shall prosper; He shall be high, and increase, and be
exceedingly strong.”
This is almost a literal translation.
But in what follows the Targum, though
ascribing to the Messiah a central place in Israel’s
redemption, contrives by a
method singularly strange to us to make Israel the real
sufferer, naturally at
the hands of the Gentiles, but for her own sins, the
modern Jewish idea of
Israel suffering for the sins of the nations being
entirely foreign to the
Targum. In
this way the Targum succeeds
in purging the Messiah from any taint of personal
suffering and humiliation. Verses 3
and 4 are therefore
thus paraphrased:
3. “Then He will become despised (i.e.
by the nations), and will cut
off the glory of all the
kingdoms; they (Israel)
will be prostrate and mourning,
like a man of pains and like one destined to sickness;
and as though the
presence of the Shekhinah
had been withdrawn from us,
they will be despised, and esteemed not.
4. “Then for our sins He will pray,
and our iniquities will for His sake be forgiven,
although we were accounted
stricken, smitten from before the Lord, and afflicted.”
The Targum
pictures the Messiah as a
man of an [Page 145] imposing, holy and awe-inspiring appearance (ver. 2). He
makes intercession for the sins of His people, and they
are forgiven for His
sake (vers.
4, 6,
11, 12). His prayers
are answered, and before opening
His mouth He is accepted (v.
7).
He is a
great teacher. By
His wisdom He holds
the guilty free from guilt, makes the rebellious subject
to the Law (vers.
11, 12);
by His
instruction peace increases upon His people, and on
account of its devotion to
His words it obtains forgiveness of sin (ver. 5). From
subjection to the nations, from
chastisement and punishment, He delivers the souls of
His people (vers.
8, 11),
builds
the
With the advent of the Messiah a glorious time dawns for
Thus the Targum succeeded in reading into this chapter the
whole Jewish Messianic hope, in which there was no place
for a suffering
Messiah. The
words, “because He delivered up
His soul to death,” in verse
12, do not mean that the Messiah actually
died, but rather, that He for the sake of His people,
like Moses of old, was
ready to give His life.
But the Targum, in spite of the high esteem in which it was
held, found no imitators.
Its method was
too drastic, and the violence done to the sacred text
too apparent to be
imitated. We
find, therefore, in early
Rabbinic literature not a few passages which speak of a
suffering Messiah; but
they all belong to the time after the
Mishna was edited, i.e.
after 200 A.D.
THE TALMUD
1. THE NAME OF THE MESSIAH
In the Bab. Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b, we read: “The Messiah - what is His name? ...
The Rabbis say, The
leprous one of the house of Rabbi
is His name, as it is said, ‘Surely
He hath
borne our griefs ... yet we did esteem Him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted.’”
The name, “The leprous one of
the house of Rabbi,”
[Page 147] is very obscure. Dr. Pusey* has
called attention to the
better reading of this passage found in the Pugio
Fidei by Raymundus Martini,
where it reads: “The Rabbis
say, The leprous one is
His name; those of the house of Rabbi say, The sick
one is His name,”
etc. In Isa.
53:
4 the word “stricken”
[nagua] is taken by the Rabbis as meaning stricken with
leprosy, hence they give the name, “The
leprous one.”
The house of Rabbi (i.e. R. Jehuda the saint, the editor of the
Mishna)
based
their name, “The sick one,”
on the words “our griefs,”
lit. our diseases, having in mind their
teacher, R. Jehuda,
who had voluntarily taken upon himself bodily sufferings
for thirteen years for
the sake of the whole people, for during this period no
pregnant woman died,
nor did any miscarriage take place.*
*
Cf. The 53rd chapter of Isaiah,
according to the Jewish interpreters, vol.
ii. Translations, P. 34. The Jewish
scholar,
A. Epstein,
in his M’kadmonioth
Ha-yehudim,
p. 109, defends
Martini’s
reading. **
Cf. Jer. Talmud, Kil’ayim
32b and Kethuboth 35a.
2.
B.
Sanhedr. 93b:
“It is
written (in Isa. 11: 3), And
His delight (haricho) shall be in the fear of the Lord.
R. Alexandri said, This
indicates
that He (God) will load Him (i.e.
the Messiah) with commandments
and sufferings as with millstones (rechayim).”
It
is not said here for what purpose the many sufferings
will be laid on the Messiah,
but the idea of a suffering Messiah is here expressed,
although it has no
connection with the Scripture quoted.
[Page 148]
3.
B.
Sanhedr. 98a.
Here we read: “R. Joshua, the son
of Levi (third cent. A.D.), met Elijah standing at the
door of the
To understand this legend one must remember that, according to
the Rabbis, Messiah was born on the very day
[Page 149]
THE MIDRASHIM
4. In
Ruth
Rabba 5, 6 (on ch. 2: 14)
we read: “ ‘Come
hither’ - this refers
to the
King Messiah. ‘Come hither,’
draw near to
the kingdom; ‘and eat
of the bread,’ that
is, the bread of the kingdom; ‘and
dip thy morsel in the vinegar,’
this refers to the sufferings, as it is said, ‘But He was wounded for our
transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.’”
5.
Midrash
Tehillim on Ps.
2.,
and Midrash
Samuel ch.
19. (with the readings of the Yalkut,
ii.
620): “R. Huna
in
the name of R. Acha says:
The sufferings are divided
into three parts: one for David and the fathers, one
for our own generation,
and one for the King Messiah, and this is what is
written, ‘He was
wounded for our transgressions,’
etc. And
when the
hour comes, says the Holy One - blessed be He! - to
them: I must create Him a new creation, as even it is
said, ‘This day have I
begotten thee.’
This is the hour when He is made a new
creation.” - So many and great are Messiah’s
sufferings and afflictions
that God must create for Him a new body.
It is not said in what way, perhaps by raising
Him from the dead.
Psalm 2: 7 is here used almost in
the same way as it is
used by the Apostle Paul in Acts
13: 33.
6. Pesiktha Rabbathi,
chs.
33.-
38.* Nowhere in
Rabbinic literature are the sufferings of the Messiah so
graphically described
and so expressly stated that [Page
150]
He is suffering for the sins of His
people as in this Midrash.
Apart from
this, we have here a vague conception of the
pre-existence of the Messiah, for
the transaction between God and Messiah takes place at
the beginning of
creation, when man was not yet created.
* Friedmann’s edition,
Chapter
36. is based on Isa. 40:
1, 2.
Ps. 36:
10 is
quoted, and the question is asked, “What
mean the words, In thy
light we
see light?”
“Which light is the congregation of
Messiah’s Willingness to suffer for His People
“And the Holy One began to make an
agreement with Him, saying, Those who are hidden with
Thee - their sins will
cause Thee to be put under an iron yoke, and they will
make Thee like this calf
whose eyes are dim, and they will choke Thy spirit
under the yoke, and on
account of their sins
Thy tongue shall cleave to Thy mouth. Art Thou
willing to do this?
Said Messiah before the Holy One: Perhaps
this anguish will last many years?
And
the Holy One said to Him: By Thy life, and by the life
of My
head, one week only have I decreed for Thee; but if
Thy soul is grieved I shall
destroy them even now.
But He said to
Him: Lord of all the worlds, with the gladness of My
soul and the joy of My
heart I take it upon Me, on condition that not one of
Israel shall perish, and
not only those alone should be saved who are in My
days, but also those who are
hid in the dust; and not only should the dead be saved
who are in My days, but
also those who have died from the days of the first
Adam till now; and not only
those, but also those who have been prematurely born. And
not only those, but
also those whom Thou hast intended to create, but
who have not yet been
created.
Thus I agree, and thus I
take all upon Me.
In that hour the Holy One - blessed be He! - orders
for Him four creatures to carry the throne of glory
of the Messiah.”
The
Sufferings of the Messiah
“In the week when the Son of David
comes, they bring beams of iron and put them (like a
yoke) on His neck, until His
stature is bent down.
But He cries and
weeps, and His voice ascends on high, and He says
before Him: Lord of the
world, what is My strength, the strength of My spirit,
of My soul and of My
members? Am
I not flesh and blood?
In view of that hour David wept, saying: ‘My strength is dried up like a
potsherd.’* In that hour the Holy One - blessed be He!
- says to Him: Ephraim,** My
righteous Messiah, Thou hast already taken this upon
Thee
from the six days of creation, now Thy anguish shall
be like My anguish, for
from the time that Nebuchadnezzar, the wicked one, has
come and destroyed My
house, and burned My Sanctuary, and sent My children
into exile among the
nations of the world, by Thy life and the life of My
[Page 153] head, I have not sat down upon My throne.
And if Thou wilt not believe Me,
see the dew which is on My head, as it is said: ‘My head is filled with dew.’*** In
that hour the Messiah
answers Him: Lord of the world, now I am quited,
for
it
is enough for the servant that He is as His Master.”****
* Ps. 22:
16.
Here the Editor has a note in which he calls
attention to the fact that
this psalm deals with the exile of the congregation of
Israel, the sufferings
of the Messiah and the future redemption, and that only
on account of “the seditious
talk of the heretics” (i.e. the
Christians) the Rabbis explained it as referring to
Esther. ** The Messiah is in these chapters called Ephraim, but not the Messiah, the
son of Joseph, is here meant, as Dr.
Edersheim thinks, but the Son of David, as can be
seen from the words with
which the passage begins (viz., “In
the week when the
Son of David comes”). I believe that they
called the Messiah Ephraim on
account of Jer.
31: 20, which
passage they applied to the
Messiah. *** Cant. V. 2. **** pp. 161, 162.
Chapter
37. describes Messiah’s triumph
and the glory which He receives as a due reward for His
humiliation and
sufferings on behalf of
“The fathers of the world (the
patriarchs) will rise again in the month of Nisan and
will say to Him: Ephraim,
our righteous Messiah, though we are Thy fathers, yet
Thou art greater than we,
because Thou hast borne the sins of our sons, and hard
and evil measure has
passed upon Thee, such as has not been passed either
upon those before or upon
those after. And
Thou hast been for
laughter and derision to the nations for the sake of
Israel, and Thou hast
dwelt in darkness and in gloominess, and Thine eyes
have not seen light, and
Thy skin was cleaving to Thy bones, and Thy body was
as dry as wood, and Thine
eyes were darkened through fasting, and Thy strength
was dried up like a
potsherd. And all this
on account of the sins of our children.
Is it Thy pleasure that our sons should enjoy
the good things which the
Holy One - blessed be He!
- has poured out so
abundantly upon
*
This would indicate that He also suffered at the hand of His
own people.
“Says
He to
them: Fathers of the world, whatever I have done I
have only done for your
sakes, and for the sake of your children, for the sake
of your honour and that
of your children, that they may enjoy the goodness
which the Holy One - blessed
be He! - has poured out over
Messiah’s Glory
“R. Simeon, the son of Pasi,
said: In that hour the Holy One - blessed be He! -
exalts the Messiah to the heaven of heavens, and
spreads over Him the splendour
of His glory. ... And at once He makes for the
Messiah seven canopies of
precious stones and pearls.
And from
each canopy issue four streams of wine, honey, milk,
and pure balsam.
And the Holy One - blessed be He! - embraces
Him in the presence of all the righteous ones and
conducts Him into the
Sanctuary,* and all the righteous ones see Him.
And the Holy One [Page 155] says
unto
them: Ye righteous ones of the world, Ephraim, the
Messiah of My righteousness,
has not yet received even the half for all He had
suffered. But
I have still one reward with Me
which I will give unto Him, which no eye hath ever
seen. In
that hour the Holy One commands
the North wind and the South wind, saying unto them:
‘Come ye, and do honour
and lie down before Ephraim, My righteous Messiah,
fully loaded with all the
perfumes from the Garden of Eden,’ as it is said:
‘Awake, 0 North wind; and
come, thou South, blow upon My garden, that the spices
thereof may flow
out. Let
My Beloved come into His
garden, and eat His precious fruits.”**
*
The word “chuppah,” canopy,
means here the “seat of the
Divine Majesty, Sanctuary.”
See Jastrow,
Talmudical Diciionary,
i.
437.
**
Cant. iv. 16,
pp.
162b, 163a.
A MESSIANIC
HYMN
“As a bridegroom decketh himself with a garland.”*
* Isa. 61:
10.
“This teaches us that the Holy One
shall clothe Ephraim, our righteous Messiah, with a
garment, the splendour of
which will be seen from one end of the world to the
other end. And
“Blessed is the hour when the Messiah
was created!
Blessed the womb out of which He has come!
Blessed
the generation
whose eyes behold Him!
Blessed
the eye that was
waiting for Him!
For
the opening of His lips
is blessing and peace;
His
whisper - a spiritual
delight.
The
thoughts of His heart
are confidence and cheerfulness;
The
speech of His tongue is
pardon and forgiveness unto
His
prayer is the
sweet incense of offerings
His
petitions are purity
and holiness:
Blessed
are His fathers who
obtained the eternal good hidden for ever!”*
* p.
164a.
See also Pesiktha
d’rab Cahana,
ed. Buber, p. 149, where
the same hymn is quoted.
There, however, the last line reads: “Blessed
is
THE LITURGY
The
following remarkable hymn, by the famous hymn-writer, Eleazar ben Qualir,
who, according to the Jewish historian, Zuriz, lived in the ninth century A.D., is taken from the
Service for the Day of Atonement.* In it are gathered up the teachings of the Synagogue
about a suffering Messiah.
*
Cf. The Festival Prayers, with David Levi’s English translation, vol. iii. P.
33. The
translation has been
revised by me.
“Before
the
world was yet created,
His
dwelling-place and Yinnon*
God prepared.
The
Mount of His house,
lofty from the beginning,
He
established, ere people
and language existed.
It
was His pleasure that
there His Shekhina should
dwell,
To
guide those gone astray
into the path of rectitude.
Though
their sins were red
like scarlet,
They
were preceded by ‘Wash
you,
make you
clean.’
If
His anger was kindled
against His people,
Yet
the Holy One poured not
out all His wrath.
We
are ever threatened by
destruction because of our evil deeds,
And
God does not draw nigh
us - He, our only refuge.
Our
righteous Messiah has
departed from us,
We
are horror-stricken, and
have none to justify us.
[Page 157]
Our iniquities and the yoke of our transgressions
He
carries who is wounded
because of our transgressions.
He
bears on His shoulder
the burden of our sins,
To find pardon for all our iniquities.
By
His stripes we
shall be healed‑
0
Eternal One, it is time
that thou shouldst create Him anew 1
0 bring Him up from the terrestrial sphere,
Raise
Him up from the
To
announce salvation to us
from
Once
again through the hand
of Yinnon.”
*
“Vinnon”
is, according to Bab.
Sanhedrin 98b, one of Messiah’s
names according to Ps.
72: 17,
which
the Talmud renders, “Before the
Sun, Yinnon (Heb., shall
flourish) was His name,” the
name indicating
the pre-existence of
the Messiah.
**
Seir stands here for
**
THE ZOHAR
(VOL. II. 212a)
“The souls which are in the garden
of Eden below go to and fro every new moon and
Sabbath, in order to ascend to the place that is
called the Walls of
“There is in the garden of Eden a
palace called the palace of the sons of sickness: this
palace the Messiah then
enters, and summons every sickness, every pain, and
every chastisement of
*
The Zohar, the Bible of the
Mystics,
contains another tradition about the concealed existence
of the Messiah preceding
His Advent. He
lives in Paradise, in a
place called The Bird’s Nest (Kin Tsippor),
from
whence He will appear to save