Isaiah53chapter 53

Isaiah 53:1-3

Who hath believed our report: The fourth servant song began at 52:13, and its central movement opens with a question the New Testament quotes twice, at John 12:38 of Israel's unbelief and at Romans 10:16 of the gospel's: who has believed our message? What follows is a portrait of a man nobody wanted to look at, a shoot out of dry ground with no beauty to draw anyone, despised and rejected, and well acquainted with grief. The speakers are a group admitting they had written him off, and they say it looking back, because the whole chapter describes a suffering still to come in the past tense, which Delitzsch calls the prophetic perfect.

Isaiah 53:4-6

Surely he hath borne our griefs: The substitution is stated in a drumbeat of exchanged pronouns: he bore OUR griefs and carried OUR sorrows while WE esteemed HIM smitten of God; he was wounded for OUR transgressions and bruised for OUR iniquities, and the chastisement of OUR peace was upon HIM. Matthew quotes verse 4 of the healing ministry (Matt 8:17) and Peter quotes verse 5 of the cross, by whose stripes ye were healed (1 Pet 2:24), the two quotations carrying the two halves of the verse's reach. Verse 6 closes the confession with the flock scattered every one to his own way and the iniquity of us all made to meet on him, the Hebrew figure the commentators render as converging on one point.

Isaiah 53:7-8

as a lamb to the slaughter: He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb: the silence under oppression that the Gospels record at the trials, and the exact passage the Ethiopian eunuch was reading in his chariot at Acts 8:32, whose question, of whom speaketh the prophet this?, the canon itself answers when Philip began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. Taken from prison and from judgment, cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people was he stricken: the death is judicial, premature, and vicarious in one verse, and who shall declare his generation carries readings the commentators set out (his posterity, his contemporaries' complicity, the mystery of his origin) without settling.

Isaiah 53:9

with the rich in his death: He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death: appointed a criminal's burial and given a rich man's, a doubling that sat unexplained for seven centuries until a rich man of Arimathaea begged the body (Matt 27:57-60), which the commentators present as among the chapter's most exact details. The ground given is his innocence, because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth, the clause Peter applies word for word at 1 Pet 2:22. Gill and Barnes carry the philology of the plural deaths in the Hebrew and the readings attached to it, named without a verdict.

Isaiah 53:10-11

it pleased the Lord to bruise him: The chapter's deepest sentence: it pleased the Lord to bruise him, the suffering not an accident intercepted but an offering appointed, when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, the asham of Leviticus 5, the trespass offering's own word, which Delitzsch presses as the vocabulary of the altar. Then the future on the far side of death, stated as flatly as the death was: he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand, which the older writers read as resurrection in the prophet's mouth, a dead man seeing offspring and lengthening days. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities: justification and sin-bearing joined in one clause, the sentence Paul's doctrine is built from, as the commentators state it.

Isaiah 53:12

numbered with the transgressors: The song ends in a victor's division of spoil earned by a death: because he hath poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, the clause the Lord quoted of himself on the night of the arrest, this that is written must yet be accomplished in me (Luke 22:37). He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors: the chapter's last word is the servant praying for the men in whose number he was counted, which the Gospels record from the cross. The Targum of Jonathan reads the servant of 52:13 as Messiah and assigns these sufferings elsewhere, and Rashi and the medieval commentators read the servant as the people of Israel suffering among the nations.