The suffering servant is Israel

Isaiah 49 is the strongest text for the national reading, so start there. In verse 3 God tells the servant, “You are My servant, Israel.” Two verses later the servant describes his task: the LORD formed him in the womb to bring Jacob back to God, so that Israel may be restored to him. Then God adds that this is too small a thing; the servant will also be a light of nations (49:5-6).

The servant bears Israel’s name and has a mission to Israel. A nation can hardly restore itself to God in that way. Some Jewish interpreters answer that the servant here is the righteous remnant, who will bring the rest of the people back, or the prophet himself. Either answer concedes that within Israel there is a servant who acts on behalf of Israel.

Isaiah also shows two servants side by side. In 42:19 the servant is blind and deaf, and the passage that follows explains that Israel was handed to plunderers because it sinned and would not walk in God’s ways (42:24). In 50:5-6 the servant says he did not rebel or turn back, and gave his back to those who struck him. One servant is the nation, failing. The other obeys, and suffers for it. Isaiah 53 continues the second.

In Isaiah 53:8 the speaker says the servant was “cut off from the land of the living” because of the sin of “my people.” Who are “my people”?

In the national reading, the speakers are the nations, and each king means his own people. That is possible. In Isaiah, “My people” is the name God and the prophet use for Israel. The book’s consolation opens “Comfort, oh comfort My people” (40:1). A few verses before this song begins, God recalls that his people went down to Egypt long ago and asks what has become of “My people” now (52:4-5). Read in that setting, the servant is struck for the sin of Israel, which makes him someone other than Israel.

The confession in 53:6, “All we like sheep did go astray” (JPS 1917), also sounds like Isaiah’s own language for his people, who are elsewhere called sinful and straying. The poem’s “we” may be the prophet and Israel, looking at one who suffered for them.

The Jewish Publication Society translation of 53:5 reads “But he was wounded because of our sins, Crushed because of our iniquities.” Whoever is speaking, the servant bears what others deserve.

The poem stresses the servant’s innocence. His grave was set among the wicked, “Though he had done no injustice And had spoken no falsehood” (53:9, JPS). He was oppressed and did not open his mouth, like a sheep led to slaughter (53:7). He makes himself an offering for guilt, an asham (53:10). He bears the guilt of the many and intercedes for sinners (53:12).

Isaiah describes the nation differently. The book opens by calling Israel a sinful nation, a people “laden with iniquity” (1:4). It explains the exile as punishment for Israel’s own sin: Jerusalem has received double for all her sins (40:2). Late in the book, the faithful pray, “we have all become like an unclean thing” (64:5; 64:6 in Christian Bibles).

The usual answer is that the servant is the righteous of Israel, who suffered more than they deserved. That softens the problem, and many have found it convincing. It does not remove it. Isaiah’s own righteous include themselves in the confession of sin, while the servant of chapter 53 is described as without injustice or deceit, and as suffering willingly for others. Israel’s suffering among the nations has been real and often unjust. Isaiah does not describe that suffering as sinless, or as an offering for the sins of others.

The song does not stop at suffering. The servant is taken away by oppressive judgment, cut off from the land of the living, and assigned a grave (53:8-9). That is death, plainly stated. Then the poem turns: he will “see offspring and have long life,” the LORD’s purpose will prosper through him, and God gives him “the many as his portion” (53:10-12).

The national reading has an answer here too. The prophets use death for exile and life for return; in Ezekiel 37, Israel’s dry bones live again. That is a real parallel. The two passages differ in what matters most. Ezekiel’s bones are a people restored after a punishment they deserved. Isaiah’s servant is innocent, dies for the sins of others, and is rewarded for it.

A righteous individual who suffers for others, dies, and is then given life and a people of his own is the pattern Jesus’ first followers claimed for him. In Acts 8, Philip meets a man reading this chapter who asks, “who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” (Acts 8:34). It is a good question, and the early Jewish followers of Jesus answered it with his name.

It is sometimes said that no Jew read Isaiah 53 of the Messiah until Christians forced the reading. The record is more mixed. The Aramaic Targum of Isaiah opens the song at 52:13 with “My servant the Messiah,” though it then assigns most of the suffering to others. In the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b), the sages apply Isaiah 53:4, where the servant bears the sicknesses of others, to the Messiah. The national reading is also old; around 248, the Christian writer Origen records Jews telling him the passage speaks of the whole people. It became the standard reading through medieval commentators such as Rashi. Both readings, national and messianic, have Jewish roots.

So the servant can be the Messiah; Jews before and after Jesus thought so. What remains is how the servant’s suffering works and who he is.

The chapter does not name him. Christians believe it describes Jesus: a righteous man condemned by an unjust judgment, killed, buried in a rich man’s tomb according to the Gospels, and, his followers said, raised. That last claim carries the weight. If Jesus was not raised, the poem’s ending does not fit him. The evidence for it is set out in the witnesses to the resurrection.