Hi all,
Your friendly local atheist back with another question. So chatting after hockey about life's big questions one of the guys said thst he was a Christian and when I asked what convinces him that Christianity is true his first thought was all the fulfilled prophecy. When I asked him for the very best one he cited Isaiah 53 (meaning the end of 52 through 53).
So I went back and read it myself and did a cursory internet search and it seems to me like the traditional Jewish interpretation makes the most sense, that the suffering servant is the nation of israel...but maybe I am missing something (I usually am!)
If you are a believer that this passage is a clear prophecy about Jesus as Messiah please help me understand why.
Peace
I don't think there's a one-to-one mapping between Isaiah 53 and Jesus. Isaiah 40-66, also called "Deutero-Isaiah" or "2nd Isaiah" was probably written around the time of the return from exile or shortly after. Given that the chapters explicitly identify the servant as "Israel" numerous times (41:8, 44:1-2,...among others) , I would venture to guess that the servant is indeed Israel.
There is one complication though, and that's that the servant (ie, Israel) is often described as a failure (42:18-24; 43:22-28; 46:12-13; 48:1). And then there are other times where the servant seems to be individualized and possibly even have a mission
to Israel (42:6; 49:1-13; 50:4-11). There seems to be a constant tension in the text; a back and forth between a servant who has failed and a servant who will not only succeed, but restore the failed servant.
I think the text has two servants. One is Israel who has failed and whose failure was realized in the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles. Then there's another, ideal Israel, who is to restore the failed Israel and that restoration would be realized in the return from the exile. One servant failed, the other succeeds.
But this still won't answer the question as to whether or not the ideal servant is a metonymy for collective "Israel" or an individual who is representative of Israel. I think this idealized Israel is an individual, but I will try to explain.
We can see elsewhere in the OT where the king and Israel were spoken of as being the same - the king represented his people; the two were identified together. So there is nothing that would rule outright against an individual and the nation being identified together in the servant passages. Also, it could be that the servant in Isaiah is a collective Israel, but that would seem to mean that Israel had a mission to itself, which doesn't make sense to me leading me to think that the idealized servant/Israel was really an individual who represented the people.
One thought is that the ideal servant is Cyrus, since he's also explicitly mentioned by name as being God's chosen one, and this would fit well with the themes in the book of the defeat of Babylon and return from exile. But this wouldn't go well to explaining how the servant seemingly suffers, nor would it seem consistent with the idea that the servant was a representative of his people as Cyrus wasn't an Israelite.
I think another possibility is that the ideal servant is an individual - Zerubbabel. This would seem to fit well with some other things in Haggai and Zechariah where Zerubbabel and Joshua undertook the building of the temple. It even seems that Haggai (and probably Zechariah as well) was ready to make him king and Zerubbabel is further explicitly called God's "servant" (Hag 2:23; Zech 4:6-14). As to the suffering of the servant, the evidence is a little more flimsy since we don't have direct evidence of Zerubbabel's suffering. Instead, Zerubbabel just strangely disappears from history. At one moment, Haggai and Zechariah are seemingly ready to make him king, but instead he disappears completely from history.
I think his disappearance is no coincidence - I think something probably happened to Zerubbabel, though it's hard to specify exactly what that is. What we do know elsewhere from history is that in Zerubbabel's time, there were numerous revolts against Darius I of Persia. I'm speculating here, but it could be that at the instigation of Haggai and Zechariah (and maybe Joshua), Zerubbabel was enthroned as king of Israel in a restored monarchy. But this didn't sit well with Darius I who, dealing with rebellions, saw this is another attempt at revolt from his subjects (and perhaps it was, as Isiah 53 may suggest!), so he crushes it and executes Zerubbabel. This execution is what we see in the suffering servant passages of Deutero-Isaiah.
Zerubbabel, like the servant in Isaiah, had a mission to Israel. He was the one who was to lead them out of, and restore them from, exile. The suffering of the servant in Isaiah is Zerubbabel's suffering on behalf of Israel in an attempt to end the exile by finishing the temple and being crowned king in a restoration of the Davidic Dynasty. Their failure at restoration was probably seen as God's continued judgment on Israel's sins, of which Zerubbabel bore himself.
This may also explain why there seems to be two returns from exile: the first under Ezra and the second under Nehemiah. Ezra's return and subsequent temple building were followed by the brief enthronement of Zerubbabel and then a swift defeat by the Persians who viewed this as a revolt. Then, Nehemiah hears of the [new] destruction of Jerusalem (Neh 1:3) and leads the next return from exile.
But this is speculative since we have no solid historical record of what happened to Zerubbabel and the records we do have in Ezra and Nehemiah are more complicated than I've suggested here. But I think if there's a historical source for the suffering servant as an individual, Zerubbabel is a good candidate. One thing this wouldn't explain though is why in Isaiah 53 the servant seems to survive death (53:10-12).
In any case, this may be the passages where Jesus went to find his own mission. He would be the servant who carried out a mission to end the exile, restore Israel, and yet had to suffer to the point of death on their behalf.