26. The History of Jewish Interpretation of Isaiah 53

The Christian Statement

The history of Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53 is one of the most revealing stories in the history of biblical scholarship. Understanding it equips the disciple to engage the "this passage is about Israel" objection with historical precision rather than theological assertion.

Pre-Christian Jewish interpretation was overwhelmingly Messianic. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) contains a remarkable passage: when Rabbi asked about the Messiah's name, the rabbis answered with an image from Isaiah 53 — "The Leper Scholar," based on the description in 53:4 of one who "took up our pain and bore our suffering," which was translated in the Aramaic Targum as disease-bearing. The Midrash on Ruth (Midrash Rabbah, Ruth 5:6) applies the servant's suffering to the Messiah. Jonathan ben Uzziel's Targum on the Prophets identifies the servant of Isaiah 53 as the Messiah, though it shifts the suffering away from him onto Israel's enemies.

The shift to the corporate interpretation — the suffering servant as Israel rather than the Messiah — is documented primarily from the medieval period, beginning in the 11th–12th centuries. The shift is not from a superior reading of the text to an inferior one. It is, as documented by Michael Brown and others, largely a response to Christian use of the passage in Jewish-Christian polemic. The corporate interpretation was developed as a counter-reading to the Christian Messianic reading.

This historical context does not settle the interpretive question. But it does mean that the disciple can honestly say: "The Messianic reading of Isaiah 53 is not a Christian imposition on a Jewish text. It is the reading that Jewish scholars themselves held before the Christian era, and that some still hold today."

SOURCE: Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volume 3, Chapter 4. Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts (Wayne State University Press, 1979) — a Jewish scholar's collection of Messianic texts from rabbinic literature, many of which apply Isaiah 53 to the Messiah.