2. He sprung up like a shoot before Him. This crucial prophecy carries over the representation of the Servant of the LORD in the third person that began with the last three verses of the previous chapter. Earlier, the Servant spoke of himself in the first person.

like a root from parched land. The objection that roots don’t grow in parched land fails to see the context of the poetry. The point is that the Servant managed to flourish and carry out his prophetic mission in the most unpromising circumstances, addressing a hostile audience in the bleak condition of exile.

3. Despised and shunned by people, / a man of sorrows and visited by illness. Famously, these words and what follows were embraced by Christian interpreters from the formative period of Christianity onward as a prophecy of the Passion narrative and the Crucifixion. The emphasis on the Servant’s bearing the sins of the people and becoming a kind of sacrificial lamb seemed especially relevant to the idea of Christ’s dying for the sins of humankind. Illness, however, is not part of the story of Jesus. Virtually no serious scholars today see this as a prediction of the Passion, but it certainly provided a theological template for interpreting the death of Jesus. Debate persists about the identity of the Servant. A recurrent Jewish view sees him as a representation of collective Israel, but the details of the passage argue for the biography of an individual, and already in the Middle Ages Abraham ibn Ezra proposed that the Servant was the prophet himself. The speaker, then, would be one of the prophet’s disciples, as Blenkinsopp suggests, eulogizing him after his death (see verse 8) on behalf of himself but also of a group of disciples (the “we” that is invoked here).

6. and the LORD brought down upon him / the crimes of all of us. This reiterated idea, which later would nourish the central Christian story, is the solution to a psychological dilemma on the part of the speaker. He sees the Servant as a devoted and true prophet of God, yet the Servant has suffered unspeakably—plagued with illness, somehow physically disfigured, reviled and rejected by society, and finally condemned to an early death. The explanation for all this unwarranted suffering is that the Servant has acted as a surrogate for the people, taken upon himself the burden of the people’s crimes. Thus, in a culture in which misfortune and sickness were usually seen as manifestations of divine punishment for wrongdoing (the view of Job’s comforters), the wrongdoing is transferred to the people, and the righteousness of the prophet is actually confirmed by his suffering.

8. By oppressive judgment he was taken off. Textual obscurities begin to proliferate. “By oppressive judgment” is a somewhat conjectural translation, although “was taken off” probably refers to death. The translation of the second verse of this line is also by no means certain.

bearing their blight. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “a blight for them,” and “bearing” has been added as an interpretive guess.

9. and with evildoers his death. The received text has “and with a rich man” (ʿashir), which makes no sense either thematically or as a poetic parallelism. The translation is based on an emendation to ʿosey raʿ. The word for “death” is an odd-looking plural form, but a proposed emendation from bemotow to bamotow is dubious because there is scant evidence that the latter term ever means “sepulchers,” as scholars have claimed. In any case, the point of the line is that he was given a disgraceful burial.

10. Would he lay down a guilt offering. Again, the Hebrew is crabbed and the translation conjectural. It is also puzzling that after the Servant has been reported dead and buried, and a surrogate for Israel’s sins, this conditional possibility of a long and happy life should be offered. Could this verse be a textual intrusion?

11. see light. There is no “light” in the Masoretic Text, but it appears both in the Qumran Isaiah and in the Septuagint.

be sated in his mind. The meaning of the two Hebrew words here is obscure.

My servant. The perspective now shifts, and it is God, not the disciple, who is speaking, but the idea that the Servant has borne the sins of the many is continued.

12. Therefore I will give him shares among the many. This is another somewhat perplexing declaration because the Servant is dead, and “he laid himself bare to death” appears to be a reiteration of that fact. Perhaps the reference is to a posthumous restoration of his reputation and to a posthumous acceptance of his prophecy by the many, though it is just conceivable that the words refer to reward in the afterlife. That was not an available alternative in previous biblical literature, but the beginnings of such an idea might be emerging at this late moment, as the polemic against it in Job and Qohelet appears to attest.