Isaiah 53 and the Rabbis

When the synagogue opens Isaiah 53, who does it see? Not one answer. For roughly two thousand years, two readings have run side by side inside Judaism itself: the Servant as the Messiah, and the Servant as Israel, the people, suffering in exile. Both are ancient. Both are held by honored teachers. This page tells that story straight, dates its witnesses, and lets each voice speak in its own words. It is reception history, not a verdict, and it never stamps one.

A popular version of this story says the rabbis all read the Messiah here until Rashi changed it in the eleventh century. That is not accurate. The national reading was already old when Origen met it in a Jewish debate around AD 248, roughly 850 years before Rashi. The messianic reading, in turn, kept being taught by major rabbis long after Rashi. Honesty about both is this page's spine.

The messianic reading did not end with the Targum. It runs through the Babylonian Talmud, the midrash, the liturgy, and into rabbis writing centuries after Rashi, each naming the King Messiah in this chapter.

The synagogue also prayed this chapter. A piyyut, a liturgical poem, in the Order of Prayer for the Day of Atonement according to the older German (Ashkenazi) rite prays Isaiah 53’s own language of the Messiah:

The reading kept being held long after Rashi. Moshe Kohen ibn Crispin, a rabbi of Cordova and later Toledo, wrote in the fourteenth century, after both Rashi and Ibn Ezra. Surveying the commentators who read the passage of Israel, it seemed to him that the literal sense had been left behind, and he declared his own course:

Two centuries later, Moshe Alshich of Safed wrote the reading just as plainly:

Two honesty notes belong with that line. “With one voice” is Alshich’s own characterization of the tradition he chooses to follow; it is not a census, since Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Radak before him all read the passage of Israel, and Alshich knew the commentators disagreed. And Jewish readers today note that his commentary is homiletical in method. Quoted exactly, dated, and placed, his words stand as one honored voice among several, not the last word on the tradition.

Ramban, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman of Girona (1194-1270), is one of the greatest medieval Torah commentators. In July 1263, at a royal disputation in Barcelona before King James I of Aragon, against Friar Paul Christiani, he held that the true sense of the passage is Israel, whom the prophets regularly call “Israel my servant” and “Jacob my servant.” When the friar pressed an aggadic passage that read the chapter of the Messiah, Ramban answered that midrash means sermons, homiletical teaching a Jew is not bound to as doctrine, no more than a bishop’s sermon written down by a hearer.

Yet Ramban also wrote a full exposition of Isaiah 53 that runs the whole passage of the Messiah, because the honored Midrash reads it that way:

Even so, he set a boundary the Barcelona friar could not answer:

Ramban is the clearest witness that a great rabbi could hold both facts at once: the messianic readings exist within the tradition and may be expounded in full, and the plain sense, for him, is Israel.

An Ethiopian court official was reading this very chapter aloud in his chariot when he asked a deacon named Philip the same question every reader of Isaiah 53 eventually asks:

The reading has been the church’s own from its earliest writers, in their own words:

The case that this chapter is Jesus of Nazareth, from the New Testament’s own use of it, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and its place within the fourth Servant Song, is made in full at The Suffering Servant.