Why there is a 0% possibility Isaiah 53 is about Israel
The book of Isaiah, particularly because of the 53rd chapter is called the fifth gospel because we have Christian theology embedded in it hundreds of years before Jesus Christ or the Apostle Paul came in to the picture. However, our Jewish friends in response, tend to say Isaiah 53 is not about the Messiah but rather about Israel. If you read this article to the end, I can guarantee that as the title of the article says, you will see there is absolutely no chance in hell this is about Israel.
Before we dive in, if we zoom out to the big picture, Isaiah 53 is one of the “Servant songs” of Isaiah. The other chapters dealing with the Servant are chapters 42, 49, 50 and 52. We will look at chapter 49.
“And He said to me, ‘You are My servant, O Israel,
In whom I will be glorified.’
Then I said, ‘I have labored in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and in vain;
Yet surely my just reward is with the Lord,
And my work with my God.’ ”
“And now the Lord says,
Who formed Me from the womb to be His Servant,
To bring Jacob back to Him,
So that Israel is gathered to Him
(For I shall be glorious in the eyes of the Lord,
And My God shall be My strength),
Indeed He says,
‘It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant
To raise up the tribes of Jacob,
And to restore the preserved ones of Israel;
I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles,
That You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”
(Isaiah 49:2–6)
The chapter does tell us that the Servant is Israel, but wait a minute, it proceeds to tell us that this Servant will also gather Israel together, raise up the tribes in Israel and restore the remnant of Israel. Whoever this servant is, he brings deliverance and redemption to Israel and if he brings deliverance to Israel, he cannot be Israel.
Now let us zoom back in to Isaiah 53 proper,
“For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.”
(Isaiah 53:2–3)
First, note the use of personal pronouns in this chapter and the description of this person as “a man”. “He” not “it” or “they”. The servant is specifically described as “A man” who is despised and rejected by other men. This would also align with the other servant song we cited in Isaiah 49 where the servant is formed in the womb of his mother. It speaks of a man not a nation.
“But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
(Isaiah 53:5–6)
Secondly, the servant suffers on behalf of others. He also suffers specifically as an atonement for sin, hence it says the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. And again, it says further down,
“…When You make His soul an offering for sin…”
(Isaiah 53:10)
The orthodox Jew will argue that Israel has been suffering all its life as a nation, but there are three key reasons why that will simply not pass mustard to meet the requirements of this chapter.
- Israel has mostly suffered BECAUSE OF the nations not ON BEHALF OF the nations. There is nothing in the suffering of Israel that atones for the sins of the nations persecuting them.
- Isaiah 53 is about an innocent person suffering hence it says in verse 9, “Because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth”. The history of Israel in the Old Testament is that it almost always suffers as a result of its own sins. God in the Torah warned the Israelites that if they sin and forsake His commandments (Deuteronomy 28), they will be punished by being sent into captivity and when they forsook their covenant with God and did not heed God’s warning through the voice of the prophets, they were indeed punished by the hands of Babylon and Persia and then Rome. Even when they suffered in 70AD at the hands of Rome, this was the judgment Jesus Himself prophesied when they rejected Him. Specifically in the book of Isaiah, Isaiah himself acknowledges in the opening chapter of his book (Chapter 1) that Israel is suffering because of its own sins. It would be strange for the same Isaiah to then portray Israel as an innocent party suffering for the sins of others. So Israel’s suffering has not been as an innocent party and thus would not fit the narrative of Isaiah 53.
- The person suffering in Isaiah 53 is quiet in the midst of His suffering. “He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth;
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.” (verse 7). Israel has always been very loud about its suffering (and rightfully so!). Bookshops are full of books on the holocaust and the historic persecution of the Jewish people. Israel today has slogans like “Never again!” and such. This of course is the right thing to do…but these reactions show that Israel is not the sufferer of Isaiah 53. The person suffering here suffers a grave miscarriage of justice without making noise about it.
“He was taken from prison and from judgment,
And who will declare His generation?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.”
(Isaiah 53:8)
Third, the person suffering in Isaiah 53 went through a legal trial, “from prison and from judgment” and was sentenced to death and then actually executed. When has Israel as a nation been sentenced to death by means of a legal trial? Again notice that in the above verse, the person suffering is suffering for the people of Israel as well! In the book of Isaiah, “My people” is an exclusive reference to Israel. The opening of Isaiah makes this clear,
“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!
For the Lord has spoken:
“I have nourished and brought up children,
And they have rebelled against Me;
The ox knows its owner
And the donkey its master’s crib;
But Israel does not know,
My people do not consider.”
(Isaiah 1:1–4)
So not only this person undergo trial and get sentenced to death and actually die, as it is written,
“Because He poured out His soul unto death”
(Isaiah 53:12)
He also undergoes this suffering on behalf of God’s people, Israel. If this person suffers for Israel, much like he brings redemption to Israel in chapter 49, the verse cannot be talking about Israel.
“…By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,
For He shall bear their iniquities.”
(Isaiah 53:11)
Fourth, if Isaiah 53 is about Israel, how in the world does knowledge of Israel or about Israel justify anybody? How does being acquanited with Israel make a person righteous? How does the knowledge of Israel’s sufferings bear the iniquities of the person knowing Israel?
Now having read the verses and examined why Israel simply does not fit the description, let us zoom out to the history of how the chapter has been interpreted.
It will surprise you to know that the first person to interpret Isaiah 53 as referring to Israel was Rashi (A well known Jewish Rabbi) who lived in the 11th century! The uncontroversial interpretation of Isaiah 53 before Rashi was that it is about the Messiah!
According to Targum Jonathan — A very early Jewish work, 1st-2nd century AD, attributed to the respected Jewish scholar Jonathan Ben Uzziel — Isaiah 52:13 (Which is the prologue to Isaiah 53) reads,
“Behold, my servant the messiah shall prosper, he shall be exalted and extolled, and he shall be very strong…”
Rabbi Don Yitchak Abarbanel in the 16th century, who was opposed to the idea that Isaiah 53 refers to the Messiah because Christians were using it to refer to Christ, nevertheless makes this huge admission,
“The first question is to ascertain to whom (it) refers; for the learned among the Nazarenes (Christians) 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. But Yonathan Ben Uzziel inteprets it in the Thargum of the future Messiah; and this is also the opinion of our own learned men in the majority of their Midrashim…”
According to Tractate Sanhedrin 98b of the Babylonian Talmud ,
“Apropos the Messiah, the Gemara asks: What is his name?…And the Rabbis say: The leper of the house of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi is his name, as it is stated: “Indeed our illnesses he did bear and our pains he endured; yet we did esteem him injured, stricken by God, and afflicted (Isaiah 53:4)”
According to Yefet Ben Ali, one of the foremost 10th century AD commentators on the Hebrew Bible,
“As to myself, I am inclined, with Benjamin of Nehawend, to regard it as alluding to the Messiah…in the first instance, the Messiah will only reach his highest degree of honor after long and severe trials; and secondly, that these trials will be sent upon him as a kind of sign, so that if he finds himself under the yoke of misfortunes while remaining pious in his actions, he may know that he is the designated one…The expression “my servant” is applied to the Messiah as it is applied to his ancestor in the verse, “I have sworn to David my servant”.
(Commentary on Isaiah 53)
According to the great Moses Ben Maimon (Maimonedes) from the 11th century,
“What is to be the manner of the Messiah’s advent…there shall rise up one of whom none have known before, and the signs and wonders which they shall see performed by him will be proofs of his true origin…And Isaiah speaks…of the time when he will appear, without his father or mother or family being known “He came up as a sucker before him and as a root out of the dry earth, etc.”[Isaiah 53:2]…”
(Parenthesis mine)
According to Rabbi Moshe Kohen Ibn Crispin of Cordova and Toledo, writing in the 14th century,
“…I am pleased to interpret it (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), in accordance with the teaching of our Rabbis, of the King Messiah, and will be careful, so far as I am able, to adhere to the literal sense; thus possibly, I shall be free from the forced and far-fetched interpretations of which others have been guilty”
(Parenthesis mine)
According to Rabbi Saadyah Ibn Danan of Grenada kicking against views that do not interpret Isaiah 53 as Messianic in the 16th century,
“One of these, Rabbi Joseph ben Kaspi, was led so far as to say that those who expounded it of the Messiah, who is shortly to be revealed, gave occasion to the heretics to interpret it of Jesus. May God, however forgive him for not having spoken the truth! Our Rabbis, the doctors of the Talmud, deliver their opinions by the power of prophecy, possessing a tradition concerning the principles of interpretation…alluded covertly to the King Messiah”
Another 16th century Rabbi Eliyyah de Vidas, writes,
“‘But he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities” [Isaiah 53:5], the meaning of which 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”
According to Rabbi Moshe le Sheich from the same time period,
“…our Rabbis with one voice accept and affirm the opinion the prophet is speaking of King Messiah, and we shall ourselves also adhere to the same view”
Finally, not because the sources are exhausted but because we must stop somewhere, the 17th century Rabbi Naphtali ben Asher Altschuler writes concerning Isaiah 53,
“I will now proceed to explain these verses of our own Messiah, who, God willing will come speedily in our days! I am surprised that Rashi and Rabbi David Kimchi have not with the Targum, applied them to the Messiah likewise”
So what have we learnt? The view that Isaiah 53 is about Israel is a rogue view among the Rabbis. The overwhelming ancient and well attested view is that it is about the Messiah. Until Rashi in the 11th century, nobody held a contrary view. Even after Rashi, the rabbis continued to hold the orthodox view and there was surprise that Rashi had not followed the orthodox view as per the Targums and the ancient rabbis. However as Christians more and more used Isaiah 53 as a polemic to show Jesus is really the Messiah it speaks of, the rogue view of Rashi became more and more appealing and it has now become the orthodox Jewish talking point today. From the beginning however, it was not so.
In conclusion, Isaiah 53 cannot be about Israel because Israel itself is a beneficiary of what the suffering servant will do, Israel, according to Isaiah, suffers for its sins while the servant suffers for no sins of his own, there is no atoning value in the suffering in Israel and until the 11th century, every rabbi took it for granted that the chapter refers to the Messiah, a fact the Talmud itself attests to.
With these few points of mine, I hope I have been able to convince you you that there is literally no chance Isaiah 53 is about Israel!
