[T]he vocabulary of ‘leprosy’ is most likely present here, though it is conceivable that the author is using it in a metaphorical sense to describe the Servant’s condition.
Michael L. Barré, ‘Textual and Rhetorical-critical Observations on the Last Servant Song (Isaiah 52:13–53:12)’, CBQ 62 (2000)
It would be presumptuous at best, foolhardy at worst, to venture a new interpretation of the Servant Song in Isa 52:13–53:12. So I propose instead to do the next best thing—to revive an old one.
Alan Cooper, ‘The Suffering Servant and Job: A View from the Sixteenth Century’, ‘As Those Who are Taught’: The Reception of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL
Isaiah 53 is one of the most familiar prophetic passages in the Hebrew Bible. Many people may recognize it from reading the Hebrew Bible or from the repeated references to it in the New Testament (which we discuss in Chapter 3) or from its use in artistic classics such as Handel’s Messiah.1 Yet very few people recognize it as a biblical passage about a figure with disabilities. Generally speaking, familiarity with this passage does not come from its repeated use of imagery involving disability.
In Chapter 1, we defined disability as a social and political experience of impairment. In this chapter, we argue that Isaiah 53 depicts the servant as a figure with disabilities. Whether the servant represents a known or unknown historical or fictional figure is immaterial for our argument that he is a figure with disabilities in a poem. Nor does it matter for our purposes that we cannot diagnose his disability precisely. Scholars such as Bernhard Duhm have made strong cases for diagnosing him as having some type of skin anomaly. Yet, even if we find Duhm’s specific diagnosis unconvincing, we should not overlook the idea, as some scholars have, that the text describes an experience of disability. Focusing on social experience rather than medical diagnosis allows us to understand more clearly the experience that the passage describes and the nature of the servant’s so-called suffering.
We begin this chapter with a brief review of Duhm’s theory of the ‘servant songs’ and his identification of the servant as a person with a skin anomaly. Second, we discover that the various images of disability in Isaiah 53 emphasize the servant’s social experience rather than providing evidence for a medical diagnosis. Third, we examine reading strategies that have allowed scholars to interpret the servant as an otherwise able-bodied figure who either suffers an injury, dies, recovers from his disability or injury, or is imprisoned. Although we find very little support within our passage for any of these four options, by analysing such arguments we begin to uncover why interpreters understand the servant as an able-bodied sufferer. This chapter will set up this book’s larger point that, in effect, we have slowly removed the servant with disabilities from Isaiah 53 and replaced him with an able-bodied suffering servant.
In 1875, Duhm proposed a theory that Isaiah 53 belongs to a set of four texts within Isaiah that Duhm called the ‘servant songs’ (Isa 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12).2 Duhm argued that Isaiah 40–55 did not originally contain these four passages and that the text would read rather seamlessly if they were not included. Duhm identified the servant in Isaiah 53 as an otherwise anonymous ‘teacher of the law’ who had leprosy.3 The NRSV translates the Hebrew word sara‘at as ‘leprosy’ with the footnote that it is a ‘term for several skin diseases; precise meaning unknown’. The current scholarly consensus, however, cautions against identifying sara‘at with leprosy or Hansen’s Disease. Rather, sara‘at may refer to a range of skin lesions and anomalies in humans. According to Lev 13:47–58 and 14:34–45, sara‘at can also appear in fabrics and on walls of houses. Thus, we should not identify sara‘at simply as leprosy.4 Throughout this book, we refer to cases of sara‘at in humans as ‘skin anomalies’ instead of ‘leprosy’ or ‘skin diseases’. Following our definition of disability discussed in the previous chapter, skin anomalies could qualify as disabilities without implying that these conditions were necessarily contagious.
Instead of sara‘at, Isaiah 53 uses a more general Hebrew word for sickness or diseases (hlh). Yet our passage also describes the servant as ‘plagued’ in both vv. 4 and 8. The same word for ‘plagued’ appears in various noun and verb forms sixty-one times in Leviticus 13–14. Most of these uses in Leviticus refer to a skin anomaly of some sort. Although the word sara‘at does not appear in Isaiah 53, Duhm suggests that the images of the servant as ‘profaned’ and ‘crushed’ in 53:5, 10 were descriptions of the effects of his skin anomaly. To support this idea, he noted that the idiomatic use of the word ‘stricken’ (Isa 53:4, 8) refers to the effects of skin anomalies elsewhere in the Bible. For example, Lev 13:22 uses the same Hebrew word as Isa 53:8, ‘If an anomaly spreads in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean; it is diseased (literally: “stricken”).’ Moreover, the last half of 53:8 uses the words ‘excluded’ and ‘stricken’ to describe the servant’s experience. The only other place in the Hebrew Bible where these two words appear together is 2 Chr 26:20–21. This passage describes how the LORD ‘struck’ King Uzziah with a skin anomaly and how the king was ‘excluded’ from the community. ‘[King Uzziah] had a skin anomaly in his forehead. They hurried him out, and he himself hurried to get out, because the LORD had struck him. King Uzziah had a skin anomaly to the day of his death, and having a skin anomaly, he lived in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the LORD.’ For Duhm, the use of the same words to describe both the story of Uzziah’s skin anomaly and the experience of the servant provides further support to the idea that Isaiah 53 describes the experience of someone with a skin anomaly. According to Duhm, this unknown ‘teacher of the law’ was not killed by human hands. Rather, his skin anomaly caused his death.5
Many scholars have questioned whether Duhm’s four ‘servant songs’ ever existed independent of Isaiah 40–55 because these texts may not exhibit the same literary genre. Scholars also disagree over the number of servant songs present in Isaiah 40–66 or which verses belong to each individual servant song. For example, many scholars argue that Isa 61:1–4 represents a servant song (cf. Luke 4:18–19) or that the servant song in Isaiah 42 extends beyond v. 6 to include the references to a servant in 42:18–20. Furthermore, that the servant songs contain several similarities in vocabulary and imagery with several passages throughout the rest of Isaiah leads many scholars to doubt Duhm’s theory that the servant songs originated independent of their present context.6 Moreover, no scholarly consensus exists that the servant in Isaiah 53 is the same servant as in Duhm’s other three servant songs. In fact, since shortly after Duhm’s theory appeared, other scholars have suggested that Isaiah 53 came from a different source than the previous servant songs.7
For the purposes of this book, we will not interpret Isaiah 53 as one of the so-called ‘servant songs’. Instead, we interpret it simply as a poem describing a servant with disabilities. Our approach focuses on the descriptions of the servant found within Isaiah 53 rather than a reconstruction of his supposed experience by piecing it together from several of the servant songs or other biblical texts. The cogency of Duhm’s servant song theory does not concern us as much as his connection between the servant in Isaiah 53 and a figure with disabilities. Duhm’s servant songs theory has been incredibly influential within scholarly circles over the last century or so. Yet his identification of the servant as someone with a skin anomaly has enjoyed very little popularity.
Ironically, the theory that Isaiah 53 is one of several servant songs has contributed to the dismissal of Duhm’s argument that the servant had a skin anomaly. While Duhm used Isaiah 53 to identify the servant throughout the four servant songs as a figure with a skin anomaly, his servant song theory has allowed scholars to place the servant’s description in Isaiah 53 in the context of other servant song passages that discuss suffering but not disability. For example, Karl Budde agrees with Duhm that Isa 53:3–4 describe the servant as having a skin anomaly. Yet Budde downplays the importance of this description for interpreting the servant’s suffering because, as Duhm himself acknowledges, the servant discusses his suffering in Isa 50:6 without any reference to a skin anomaly.8 As we observe later in this chapter, the tendency to interpret the servant in Isaiah 53 against the backdrop of the other servant songs allows scholars to imagine that the servant in Isaiah 53 as injured (50:6) or imprisoned (42:7; 61:1; cf. 49:9) by humans rather than as having a disability. In contrast, while we cannot be certain of its diagnosis, good evidence exists to support the suggestion that Isaiah 53 describes the servant as having some type of disability.
Even though we cannot diagnose the servant’s condition precisely, Isaiah 53 makes it very clear that the LORD ‘struck’ the servant in v. 4. This verse reinforces the idea that the servant’s condition was brought on by God, not humans. This idea fits with certain ancient Near Eastern notions that disabilities and diseases were brought on by divinity. Ancient Near Eastern literature often views disease and disability as the product of divine causation, whereas in the modern industrial world we often look for medical and biological causes for diseases and disabilities located within the individual body. Rather than approaching disease and disability through a ‘medical’ model, ancient Near Eastern literature employs a ‘theological’ model, as we observed in Chapter 1.9 In v. 4, the people attribute the servant’s condition to the fact that he was ‘stricken, plagued by God, and afflicted’. According to v. 10, ‘The LORD was delighted to crush him, to make him diseased.’ Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, God ‘strikes’ Pharaoh’s house with plagues (Gen 12:17), the Philistines with tumours (1 Sam 5:9; 6:9), and King Uzziah with a skin anomaly (2 Kgs 15:5). Additionally, the satan ‘strikes’ Job with skin anomalies (Job 2:5). This notion that a divine being controls impairment and disease appears in the burning bush story as well. After God causes and then heals a skin anomaly on Moses’ hand, Moses complains that he has a speech impediment. In Exod 4:11, the LORD responds, ‘Who gives speech to humans? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD’? Against the backdrop of these other biblical texts, the physical conditions that Isaiah 53 describes as divinely caused afflictions seem to depict the servant as having a disease or disability of some sort. The ‘striking’ of the servant does not indicate that other humans injured or wounded him.
Outside the Hebrew Bible, many Mesopotamian texts concerning human illnesses present both chronic and temporary illnesses as under the direct control of a divine ‘sender/controller’.10 Mesopotamian texts refer to various diseases as ‘the touch’ (Akkadian: lapātu) of a god, in the sense of a divine being afflicting someone with a disease.11 Likewise, various illnesses result from ‘the hand’ of a particular deity according to certain biblical texts as well as Mesopotamian diagnostic texts.12 For example, the Akkadian text ‘The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’ (COS 1.153: 490–1) includes a lengthy but non-specific description of the narrator’s disease or illnesses. The narrator attributes his condition to some type of ghost or demon. Moreover, the narrator connects his condition with his social experience of isolation and rejection by others.13 When read in the context of biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts, Isaiah 53 appears to describe the servant as having an unspecified disability.
While we cannot claim for certain that the servant had a skin anomaly, Joseph Blenkinsopp comes to a reasonable conclusion when he writes, ‘That the servant had contracted leprosy was assumed by Jerome (Vulg. 53:4 leprosum) and taken up by Duhm… This is a hypothesis that is certainly plausible but can be neither proved nor disproved.’14 Since we cannot prove Duhm’s hypothesis that the servant had a skin anomaly, many scholars have not pursued the idea that the servant has a disability. This situation, however, may show the influence of the medical model by assuming that we must focus discussions of disability on diagnosis. Yet 53:3 uses plural forms for the words ‘sufferings’ and ‘diseases’ in the phrase ‘a man of sufferings and acquainted with diseases’. The use of plural forms suggests that our passage does not describe one disability precisely as if intended to aid in diagnostic attempts. Instead, as we find in our next section, Isaiah 53 focuses on how the servant’s physical condition relates to his social experience without providing a medical description of an anomalous body.
We begin this section by reviewing further connections between the descriptions of the servant and characters with skin anomalies elsewhere in biblical and other ancient Near Eastern literature. These connections do not necessarily support Duhm’s hypothesis that the servant had a skin anomaly. Instead, they suggest that Isaiah 53 focuses on the servant’s disability as a social experience regardless of how we diagnose his condition. After reviewing these connections, we turn to imagery in the passage that describes a disability without necessarily connecting it to a skin anomaly. To claim, as we do, that the servant has a disability is not a diagnosis but a comment on the description of his social experience of impairment. Moreover, to claim that he does not have a skin anomaly does not mean that he does not have a disability.
Skin anomalies as a social experience. Isaiah 53:3 states that the servant ‘was despised and withdrew from humanity; a man of sufferings and acquainted with diseases and like someone who hides his face from us’. This description leads some scholars to suggest that our passage describes an unfortunate social expectation of a person with a skin anomaly in ancient Near Eastern literature.15 John F. A. Sawyer writes, ‘The first part [of Isaiah 53] depicts the suffering as physical and social, like that of a leper, “despised and rejected by men”. The Hebrew word for “men” is an unusual form and connotes “men of standing” (cf. Prov. 8:4), stressing the social implications of the disease.’16 Regarding social implications, actions such as hiding one’s face from others correspond with ancient Near Eastern ‘skin anomaly’ curses that speak of the exclusion of people with skin anomalies (Akkadian: saharšuppû) from the temple.17
A Babylonian omen text describes a person with a skin anomaly as ‘rejected by his god (and) he is rejected by humanity’. Another prayer explains impairments (including, but not limited to, skin anomalies) as a punishment for entering a temple while in a state of impurity (a term which we will explain below).18 In the Mesopotamian text ‘Gilgmesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld’, those with skin anomalies were isolated even in the netherworld. When Gilgamesh asks Enkidu about the fate of persons with skin anomalies in the netherworld, Enkidu informs him that they reside outside the city, with separated food.
Likewise, we find the social isolation of people with skin anomalies called for in other passages from Leviticus and Numbers. According to Lev 13:46, a person with a skin anomaly ‘shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp’ (cf. 2 Kgs 15:5).19 In Num 5:2, the Israelites are instructed to ‘remove from the camp everyone with a skin anomaly’. When Miriam contracts a skin anomaly in Numbers 12, Aaron compares her skin to the skin of a dead baby and she is ‘shut out’ of the Israelite camp for seven days (12:10–15). Moreover, Aaron interprets Miriam’s skin anomaly that results in her isolation as punishment for not only herself but others as well (v. 11; cf. Isa 53:4–6).20
As the story of King Azariah, also called Uzziah, indicates, even kings could undergo isolation if they had a skin anomaly. ‘The LORD struck the king, so that he had a skin anomaly to the day of his death, and lived in a separate house. Jotham the king’s son was in charge of the palace, governing the people of the land’ (2 Kgs 15:5; cf. 2 Chr 26:16–23). In Isa 38:11, Hezekiah faces potential exclusion from the ‘land of the living’. His physical condition includes a ‘boil’ (38:21), a word which indicates a skin anomaly elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Lev 13:20; cf. Exod 9:9–11; Job 2:7), although we cannot be sure of this diagnosis. Along these lines, a rabbinic tradition interprets Hezekiah’s condition as a skin anomaly that caused his skin to peel off as a divine punishment because he ‘peeled off’ the gold of Solomon’s temple and gave it to the Assyrians (2 Kgs 18:16).21
The social isolation of those with skin anomalies may also help us understand the phrase in Isa 53:8 that the servant was ‘excluded from the land of the living’. A very similar verbal form of the word ‘living’ appears in 2 Kgs 5:7a when the Syrian king requests that the Israelite king cure Naaman’s skin anomaly. The Israelite king responds, ‘Am I God, to give death and give life that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his skin anomaly (emphasis added)’? Here, ‘life’ refers to the absence of a skin anomaly rather than the act of bringing a dead person to life.22 In this sense, the exclusion from among the living in 53:8 may refer to the isolation of those with skin anomalies. It may build on the perceived connections between skin anomalies and death that we found in the story of Miriam’s skin anomaly. Who cares where the servant dwells, as long as he does not dwell among us, in the land of the living? Isaiah 53, however, condemns this treatment of the servant as oppression and a miscarriage of justice (vv. 4, 8–9).
The isolation of people with skin anomalies did not result from a notion that people with skin anomalies were sinful (a moral model of disability). These commands for the isolation of persons with skin anomalies operate under more of a cultural model of disability. Rather than focusing on sinfulness, biblical texts present this isolation as a social experience connected to Israelite practices concerning ritual purity and impurity. Impurity prohibits a person from participating in certain religious or cultic practices. Generally, scholars distinguish between ritual and moral impurity, sometimes called tolerated and forbidden impurities respectively. Ritual impurity refers to impurity contracted through circumstances expected throughout the typical life cycle, such as death, sickness, menstruation, sex activity, and so on. By contrast, moral impurity results from often, but not always, avoidable wrongdoings or pollutions of certain sacred spaces. The Hebrew Bible presents skin anomalies as a ritual or tolerable impurity rather than a moral or forbidden impurity.
Thus, although skin anomalies can be a form of punishment for sin in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kgs 5:20–7; 2 Chr 26:16–21), having a skin anomaly is a ritual impurity but not a sin. Only the mishandling or disregard of required rituals in cases of a skin anomaly constitutes a sin.23 This distinction between ritual and moral impurity highlights the injustice of associating the servant with the wicked and transgressors. Despite the fact that the servant commits no moral offence, he is grouped with these parties largely on account of his physical condition (vv. 8, 12). The passage decries this treatment as an act of oppression.
Nor is a medical model appropriate for understanding the isolation of people with skin anomalies in the Hebrew Bible. Ritual purity requirements in the Hebrew Bible did not always apply to non-Israelites. Thus, besides an aesthetic objection, a concern over the contagiousness of their condition would provide the only plausible reason to isolate non-Israelites with skin anomalies. In 2 Kings 5, however, the Syrian general Naaman has a skin anomaly, but still leads his troops and interacts with his family, his king, and even the Israelite prophet Elisha. Thus, people with skin anomalies were not isolated because their condition was considered medically contagious. After citing the case of Naaman, Jacob Milgrom writes,
To be sure, had [Naaman] been Israelite he would have been banished like Miriam (Num 12:14–16), the four outcasts (2 Kgs 7:3–10), and Uzziah (2 Kgs 15:5). But this only proves that Israelites bearing [skin anomalies] were not banished for hygienic reasons. In fact, Leviticus confirms the idea that [a skin anomaly] was not considered a [contagious] disease: furniture removed from the house before a priest’s examination cannot be declared impure (14:36)…. [Likewise, the rabbis] declare that [skin anomaly] rules are not applicable to non-Jews and their homes in the Holy Land (m. Neg. 3:1) and to all houses outside the Holy Land (m. Neg. 12:1). In short, we are dealing with ritual, not pathology…. The conclusion is inescapable: [skin anomaly] rules are grounded not in medicine but in ritual.24
Skin anomalies were understood as a ritual or cultic contaminant that could render sacred Israelite spaces impure. The inspection of skin anomalies by priests (Leviticus 13–14) was not meant to provide a medical diagnosis, but to determine a person’s status as ritually pure or impure in regard to cultic participation. In this sense, skin anomalies are understood as a social or cultic issue and not simply a medical condition.
Other disability imagery in Isaiah 53 as a social experience. The imagery in Isaiah 53 that does not necessarily suggest a skin anomaly still focuses heavily on the servant’s disability as a social experience. The passage begins with a description of the servant in 52:14. ‘Just as there were many who were astonished at him—so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals’ (cf. Isa 49:7). Elsewhere, biblical authors use Hebrew words such as ‘appearance’ (mr’h) and ‘form’ (t’r) to describe humans and animals physically. For example, Genesis uses these words to describe Rachel’s beauty (29:17) and Joseph’s good looks (39:6; cf. the cows in 41:18–19). Yet Isa 52:14 describes the servant’s appearance and form as ‘marred’. The prophet Malachi uses a similar form of this word ‘marred’ to describe animals that are physically ‘lame and diseased’. In Mal 1:13–14, the prophet declares, ‘You bring what has been taken by violence or is lame or diseased (hlh), and this you bring as your offering!… Cursed be the cheat who has a male in the flock and vows to give it, and yet sacrifices to the Lord what is marred.’ Likewise, Lev 22:25 prohibits the sacrifice of animals that ‘are marred, with a blemish (mum) in them’. Thus, the imagery used to describe the servant by Isaiah as ‘marred in appearance’ can connote an unspecified physical disability or disease. While the imagery does not focus on the exact nature of his disability, it clearly focuses on his social experience. As the passage continues, we discover that Isaiah 53 frames the servant’s disability or disease primarily as a social and political experience and not just a physical description.
As in 52:14, Isaiah 53 uses the words ‘appearance’ and ‘form’ again in v. 2. The passage foregrounds the social dimensions of the servant’s experience of disability in v. 2 by insisting that others saw his physical appearance as extremely undesirable. ‘He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.’ The following verses explain his perceived unattractive appearance as the result of an impairment of some sort (vv. 3–4).
David J. A. Clines interprets the comparison in 53:2 of the servant to ‘a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground’ as an image of stunted growth.25 Although stunted growth may not qualify as a disability, it would qualify as a stigmatizing physical feature, especially if we identify v. 2 as the reaction of the shocked kings mentioned in 52:15. A short or even average stature was a disqualifying feature for candidates for the throne in other ancient Near Eastern texts such as the Ugaritic Baal Cycle.26 Moreover, the association of ground that is ‘dry’ (syh) with disability imagery appears elsewhere in Isaianic passages that come from the same time period as Isaiah 53. In a utopian vision, Isa 35:1 declares that ‘The wilderness and the dry land (syh) shall be glad.’ The following verses continue this vision of transformation by promising that ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy’ (35:5–6a). The connection between dry ground and disability as conditions in need of transformation in Isaiah 35 may explain the association of the servant with both dry ground and disability in Isa 53:2.
With our focus on social experience in mind, we should note that John H. Walton discusses an intriguing possible source of influence on Isaiah 53. Citing the imagery in 52:13–14, Walton draws parallels between a Hittite and Assyrian ritual which involves the elevation to kingship of a person with a cognitive impairment in order to take on the suffering of the real king and Isaiah 53’s exaltation of a person with a physical disability in order to take on the punishment of the people (cf. vv. 4–6). In the mid-twentieth century, scholars began to investigate parallels between Isaiah 53 and this Mesopotamian ‘substitute king ritual’.27 This ritual sought to save a king from harm when an omen seemed to threaten him. It involved the enthronement of a substitute king in the hope that the negative effects of the omen would fall upon the substitute and the real king would remain unharmed. One Assyrian text describes the substitute as a ‘simpleton’ or ‘halfwit’ (Akkadian: s aklu). Walton understands the use of the word saklu as suggesting a person with a cognitive impairment.28 If the substitute king ritual influenced the description of the servant and his suffering for others, this possible parallel may shed light on why Isaiah 53 describes the servant as a figure with disabilities. Also, it draws attention to Isaiah 53’s focus on disability as a social experience.
The examples reviewed in this section do not provide decisive evidence for a specific disability, be it a skin anomaly or some other condition. Nevertheless, they show that when we interpret the disability imagery in Isaiah 53 as a social experience rather than through a medical model, the portrayal of the servant as a figure with disabilities becomes clearer. Yet the influence of the medical model is not the only reason that scholars have rejected Duhm’s idea that the servant had a disability. Rather than a figure with a disability, scholars have also tended to interpret the servant as an able-bodied victim who suffers either temporary or fatal injuries.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, an injury may result in an acquired disability. This was likely a common occurrence in ancient Israel. We should distinguish, however, between an acquired disability and a fatal injury. When scholars interpret the servant as injured, they tend to understand his injury as resulting in death rather than an acquired disability. In other words, scholars portray the servant as a (fatally) injured able-bodied figure instead of one who acquires a disability through injury.
In part, this portrayal may reflect the scholarly tendency to interpret Isaiah 53 as one of Duhm’s servant songs. Some of Duhm’s other servant songs describe a physical injury caused by humans. For example, in Isa 50:6, a servant states, ‘I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’ By contrast, Isaiah 53 does not contain any explicit description of a physical injury caused by humans.29 We may interpret the servant in Isaiah 53 as primarily injured by humans rather than disabled by divinity only if we read this chapter against the backdrop of the servant song in Isaiah 50. This interpretative move becomes clear in Claus Westermann’s comment that in 52:14 ‘the last servant song takes up the central part of 50:4–9’.30 Intentionally or not, scholars who argue for injury by humans as the context of the servant’s suffering may be reading Duhm’s other servant songs into Isaiah 53.
The servant’s condition does not appear to result from humanly inflicted injuries in Isaiah 53. In his 1999 presidential address to the Catholic Biblical Association of America, Michael L. Barré observed that
[T]here is not a single term in [Isa 52:13–53:6] that refers to any affliction of the Servant clearly brought about by human agency. Rather, the vocabulary is consistent in alluding to physical afflictions traditionally ascribed to the gods in ancient Near Eastern literature…. By comparison, what the Servant suffers at the hands of fellow human beings [in 53:7–12] consists almost exclusively of being arrested, being taken away from his home(land?) by juridical decree, and being classified with sinners.31
For Barré, the servant’s physical condition does not result from human torture or attack on an otherwise able-bodied individual. The first part of the passage does not describe the suffering of an able-bodied person. Instead, it describes physical conditions brought on by a divine being. The so-called ‘suffering’ that the servant endures at the hands of other humans focuses on an oppressive social experience of living with disabilities as depicted in the later part of the passage. In this sense, our passage portrays disability as a social and political reality and not simply a medical condition. The servant’s suffering arises from an unjust interaction of a figure with impairments with his social environment (53:8, 10).
Nevertheless, scholars have claimed repeatedly that the context of Isaiah 53 implies physical injury rather than disability. For example, Roger N. Whybray writes, ‘The words and phrases used in the poem to describe his sufferings were not, or at least not primarily, due to sickness but to physical ill treatment.’32 Whybray’s textual support for this claim remains unconvincing. He interprets, ‘stricken by God’ in v. 4 as a superlative for ‘horribly beaten’ by humans.33 Yet this interpretation prefers an idiosyncratic reading of ‘stricken by God’ over the usual biblical association of God ‘striking’ an individual or group with a disease or disability that we discussed earlier. We can only justify Whybray’s claim if we read the descriptions of the servant’s physical condition in the first parts of the passage as the result of the oppressive treatment by humans described in 53:8–9. Yet, the fact that Isaiah 53 connects the specific physical descriptions throughout the passage to a divine causation calls this interpretation into question.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, determining whether the servant had an injury or disability is complicated by the fact that hlh has a wide semantic range that includes injury, illness, disease, and disability. Although Isaiah 53 uses forms of hlh to describe the servant’s condition throughout the passage, many scholars have decided not to associate this repeated use of hlh with a disability or disease. For example, regarding 53:3, John Goldingay and David Payne write, ‘In parallelism with mak’Mbôt [“suffering”] is hōlî [“disease”], which commonly means “illness”… But the context speaks more explicitly of harm from other people than of disease. The noun and the verb hālāh do occasionally mean “wound” (significantly 1.5) and this would thus fit well. But more often the noun denotes “weakness”.’34 Contrary to this interpretation, the context in which hlh appears in regard to the servant suggests a disability more than a physical injury afflicted by humans. Even if the passage uses hlh as a metaphor for the condition of others in v. 4 (cf. Isa 33:24) and speaks metaphorically of their ‘healing’ in v. 5, it does not mean that hlh is primarily a metaphor for something other than the servant’s disability in vv. 3 or 10.35 An early Greek translation known as the Septuagint (LXX) reflects this important distinction. In v. 4, it uses a Greek word meaning ‘sin’ (amartia) to translate hlh when it does not refer to the servant: ‘he bears our sins’ instead of ‘he has borne our diseases’. Yet the same translation uses Greek words meaning ‘sickness’ and ‘disease’ to translate hlh when it refers to the servant in vv. 3 and 10.36 Furthermore, Goldingay and Payne admit that hōlî, which is a form related to hlh, commonly means illness. Thus, we should only opt for another meaning, such as wound or injury, if the context clearly suggests these alternative meanings. The context of Isaiah 53, however, does not clearly suggest such meanings.
None of the physical descriptions in Isaiah 53 suggests that his condition results from injuries inflicted by humans. The servant is not presented as an otherwise able-bodied figure who suffers physical abuse or injury. Instead, he suffers socially oppressive conditions as a by-product of living with his impairments. As Barré implies, the later portion of Isaiah 53 documents this social experience of disability.
The servant seems alive and well in 53:10–11. Yet many interpreters argue that vv. 7–9 focus on the servant’s death. This allows us to imagine the servant as an otherwise able-bodied figure who dies rather than one who lives with disabilities. Two main reasons support the argument that the (able-bodied) servant dies. First, there are references to his grave, death, and his exclusion from the land of the living in vv. 8–9, 12. Second, some scholars have connected the language in vv. 7 and 10 to the ritual sacrifices in Leviticus and Numbers.
Possible references to the servant’s death. Although v. 8 states that the servant is ‘excluded from the land of the living’, this verse does not describe the murder or execution of the servant by humans. Instead, it may describe the isolation experienced by some ancient Israelites with skin anomalies or other disabilities. The word ‘living’ in the phrase ‘excluded from the land of the living’ (v. 8) refers to healthy or able-bodied people and not simply the living. The phrase ‘land of the living’ also appears in Isa 38:11. The larger context of Isaiah 38 concerns a restoration to health of the diseased (hlh) King Hezekiah. In 38:16, a verbal form of this word ‘living’ refers to this type of restoration when Hezekiah says, ‘Oh, restore me to health and make me live!’ (cf. ‘the living’ in 38:19). Thus, ‘the land of the living’ in Isa 53:8 may refer to the community of healthy or able-bodied people. Gillis Gerleman observes that the Hebrew Bible also applies the phrase ‘land of the living’ to the land of Israel.37 Similarly, Whybray understands ‘land of the living’ in Ezek 32:23–7, 32 as a reference to human society or communities more generally (cf. Ps 116:9).
Whybray also notes that Isa 53:8 uses the verb ‘excluded’ rather than ‘cut off’ from the land of the living.38 As Jan Alberto Soggin has shown, whereas ‘cut off from the land of the living’ can refer to killing or the death penalty (cf. Jer 11:19), ‘excluded from the land of the living’ can refer to a state of separation.39 Thus, some scholars interpret Isa 53:8 as indicating that the servant was removed from Israelite, or even human, society rather than killed. As we discussed earlier, this type of isolation from the community seems in keeping with how other Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts portray the social experience of people with skin anomalies and other disabilities.
Isaiah 53:9 could imply the servant’s death when it states, ‘They prepared his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich.’ Yet the preparation of his grave does not mean that he occupied it. Furthermore, scholars have compared this verse to a line from the Mesopotamian ‘The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’.40 After describing his disability or illness for several lines, the narrator of this poem states, ‘My grave was open, my funerary goods ready. Before I died, lamentation for me was done’ (COS 1.153: 489). As with Isa 53:9, this poem states that others prepared the narrator’s grave and not that they killed or buried him. Like ‘The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’, Isaiah 53 mentions the preparation of the servant’s grave after several verses that describe a divinely induced disease or disability. In this sense, the reference to the servant’s grave fits with a description of the servant’s physical condition more than a description of his death due to humanly inflicted injuries.
We should also note that v. 10 states that the servant will ‘see his offspring, and shall prolong his days’. Elsewhere, the Hebrew Bible connects the ability to see one’s offspring for several generations with a long and fulfilled life (Gen 50:23; Job 42:16; cf. Adad-guppi’s claim to see her ‘great-great grandchildren’ [ANET, 561]).41 This description of the servant depicts him as living to an old age rather than meeting an untimely death.
Finally, we could interpret the phrase ‘he poured out himself to death’ in v. 12 as a reference to his death. Yet it probably means that the servant risked his life. In Ps 141:8, the NRSV translates an almost identical Hebrew phrase as ‘leave me defenceless’. This implies that the phrase may refer to a life-threatening situation rather than death. The LXX’s translation of Isa 53:8–9 supports the former option. In this Greek version, the servant ‘is led to death’ (v. 8), but God ‘turns over the wicked instead of [the servant’s] grave and the rich instead of his death’ (v. 9; our translation).
The servant as ritual sacrifice. Isaiah 53:7 compares the servant to ‘a lamb that is led to the slaughter’ and ‘a sheep who is mute before its shearers’. For some scholars, the comparison to a slaughtered lamb implies that the servant died by human hands. Yet scholars rarely, if ever, suggest that the comparison to a mute sheep implies that the servant has a speech impairment even though similar forms of the Hebrew word translated as ‘mute’ describe Ezekiel’s speech impairment (cf. Ezek 3:26; 24:17; 33:22). Instead, since 53:10 refers to the servant as ‘an offering for sin’ (’ šm), some understand the passage as comparing the servant’s death to the ritual sacrifice of a goat or lamb as a ‘sin/guilt offering’ (’ šm) in Lev 5:18–19 or the scapegoat in Lev 10:17 and 16:22.42 While the NRSV’s translation of 52:15 as ‘so he shall startle many nations’ comes from a Greek version of Isaiah 53, translations such as the KJV come from Hebrew and other Greek versions that read ‘so shall he sprinkle many nations’.43 Some scholars note that the verb ‘sprinkle’ refers to the sprinkling of animal blood in texts involving ritual sacrifices (Lev 4: 6, 17; 5:9; 6:20; cf. Exod 29:21). In this sense, the servant dies as a sacrificial lamb on behalf of others.
Leviticus 5: 15, 18, and 25 repeatedly require that the animal used for the ritual sacrifice be ‘without blemish’ (tamim), a term that refers to the animal’s physical condition (cf. Lev 22:21). This allows interpreters to compare the servant to the unblemished or physically fit animal that dies a sacrificial death in ritual texts from the Pentateuch while downplaying the more immediate comparisons involving disabilities that run throughout Isaiah 53. It ignores the fact that Isa 52:14 describes the servant as ‘marred’ (Hebrew root šht) which would render him unfit to serve as a ritual sacrifice according to Lev 22:25. Similarly, Malachi decries the use of ‘diseased’ (hlh) or ‘marred’ (šht) animals for ritual sacrifice (Mal 1:13–14). In fact, Mal 1: 12 describes the sacrificial food from such animals as ‘despised’, which is the exact same Hebrew word used twice to describe the servant in 53: 3 (cf. Mal 1: 7). Moreover, Mal 1:12 claims that such sacrifices ‘profane’ the name of the LORD, which is the same word used to describe the servant in 53:5.
Regarding 52:15, one would not ‘sprinkle’ the blood of something marred (52:14) because such disfigurement renders it unfit for sacrifice. It is possible that the ‘sprinkling’ in 52:15 could refer to the servant’s blood spilled through violence. This is how the word is used in its only other appearance in the book of Isaiah (63:3; cf. 2 Kgs 9:33). Yet, a more probable explanation is that the servant’s physical appearance ‘startles’ many nations rather than sprinkles them. When compared with the ritual requirements in Leviticus and Malachi, the vocabulary used to describe the servant throughout Isaiah 53 depicts him as physically unfit for sacrifice rather than as an unblemished offering.
Furthermore, the word for ‘slaughter’ (tbh) in the phrase ‘a lamb that is led to the slaughter’ (53:7) never appears in Leviticus or Numbers. The Bible never uses this word in the context of a ritual sacrifice or death performed by a priest. Instead, this type of slaughtering of an animal refers to work of a cook or butcher killing for food (Gen 43:16; Exod 22:1 [21:37 in Hebrew]; Deut 28:31; 1 Sam 25:11;cf. 1 Sam 9:23–24).44 Other texts extend this image metaphorically to the wartime slaughtering of humans as a divine punishment (Isa 34:2; 65:12; Jer 25:34; Lam 2:21;Ezek 21:10, 15, 28 [21:15, 20, 33 in Hebrew]), but this metaphor does not invoke imagery of a ritual sacrifice performed by priests.45 The closest parallel to the image of a slaughtered lamb in 53:7 does not come from a text involving ritual sacrifice. In Jer 11:19, the prophet claims, ‘But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter. And I did not know it was against me that they devised schemes, saying, “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit, let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will no longer be remembered”’ (cf. Ps 44:22; Prov 7:22). Rather than suggesting a ritual sacrifice, the lamb imagery expresses how Jeremiah’s opponents deceived the prophet. Moreover, both Fredrick Haägglund and Bernd Janowski argue that the language of ‘an offering for sin’ (’šm) in 53:10 does not reflect the sacrificial language of Leviticus or Numbers.46 Instead, Janowski compares our passage’s use of ’šm to its use in 1 Sam 6:3 and other texts outside Leviticus and Numbers.47
The use of ’šm in 1 Sam 6:3 associates this offering with imagery of impairment and ritually impure animals rather than the sacrificial death of an unblemished animal. In 1 Sam 5:9, the LORD ‘strikes’ (cf. Isa 53:4, 8) the Philistines with tumors. In 1 Sam 6:3, the Philistines are told, ‘If you send away the ark of the God of Israel, do not send it empty, but by all means return him a guilt offering (’šm). Then you will be healed (rp’) and will be ransomed; will not his hand then turn from you’? As part of their guilt offering, the Philistines create five golden models or images of both their tumors and of the mice (‘kbr) that ‘mar’ (a verbal form of šht) the Philistines’ land (1 Sam 6:5, 11; cf. Isa 52:14). Leviticus 11:29 lists mice (‘kbr) as ritually impure animals (cf. Isa 66:17). In other words, representations of the Philistines’ impairments and ritually impure animals serve as an offering to heal them. Similarly, the servant, who is described as ‘marred’ (a noun form of šht in Isa 52:14) and as if he is ritually impure throughout Isaiah 53, serves as the offering in the phrase, ‘When you make his life an offering for sin (’šm)’ (53:10). Moreover, 53:5 states that ‘by [the servant’s] bruises we are healed (rp’; cf. 1 Sam 6:3)’.
If we want compare the servant to an animal because 53:10 refers to him as an ’šm, we should remember that an ’šm could involve a golden image of a ritually impure animal as well as an unblemished, sacrificed, animal. Although the parallels between Isaiah 53 and 1 Samuel 6 are not exact,48 the similarities between these passages show that the ritually pure, unblemished, sacrificial lamb required in Leviticus is not the only animal associated with an ’šm. Together, the imagery in Isaiah 53 that repeatedly describes the servant as unfit for sacrifice (cf. Malachi 1), the lack of the word ‘slaughter’ in instructions for ritual sacrifices, the lamb imagery in Jer 11:19, and the ’šm imagery in 1 Samuel 6 all discourage comparisons between the servant and a ritually sacrificed animal.
As with Isa 52:13, Isa 53:10–12 emphasize that the servant will ultimately enjoy a place of divine honour. For some interpreters, these verses imply the servant’s return to at least an able-bodied state, if not a reference to his resurrection.49 According to such interpretations, the servant, identified as ‘righteous’ in v. 11, experiences a divine healing and is once again able-bodied by the end of Isaiah 53. We suspect, however, an assumed connection between righteousness and physical restoration influences such interpretations more than clear evidence from the text. We will begin this section by demonstrating that Isaiah 53 does not make this connection. Then, we examine how scholars assume a physical restoration by assigning Isaiah 53 to a particular genre rather than basing their claim on clear textual evidence.
The pious person with disabilities. Elsewhere in the Isaianic tradition pious persons with disabilities receive divine rewards without becoming able-bodied. For example, Isa 56:4–5 allows the pious eunuch to enter the temple: ‘For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’ Genital damage would qualify a eunuch as a person with a disability by our definition of disability. Saul M. Olyan discusses eunuchs within the context of disability.50 He interprets Isaiah 56 as a critical response to Deut 23:1, which bans people with genital damage from sacred spaces. Olyan writes,
Isa 56:3–7 does not envision the normalization of the eunuch through efforts by Yhwh to mitigate any marginalizing effects of his physical disability…. Rather, it is the cultic proscription of the eunuch, based on a broad reading of Deut 23:2 (Eng. 1), that is to be eliminated in the future utopia, allowing the eunuch to participate fully in the rites of Yhwh’s temple…it is not the eunuch’s disability per se that Yhwh addresses, but rather the ban of his entry into the temple and participation in its rites.51
Isaiah 56:3–7 decries the eunuch’s removal from the community as an incident of unjustified oppression. Although some scholars suggest that Isaiah 53 and 56 come from different authors, they portray experiences of figures with disabilities as unacceptable social oppression in a similar manner. Furthermore, in both cases, the disability is neither healed nor removed. These texts do not approach issues of disability through a medical model. Instead, they critique the oppressive social circumstances experienced by the figure with disabilities. Both Isa 53:10–12 and 56:4–5 promise that the pious figure with disabilities will enjoy a position of privilege in the future with no indication that his physical condition will change.52 In contrast to ‘The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’, these texts contain no divinely induced removal of or recovery from a disease or disability. Instead, Isa 53:10–12 has more in common with Job 42:7–17. Like Isa 53:10–12, this passage affirms Job’s righteousness and claims that he will be honoured with a divine reward. Like the servant in Isa 53:10, Job lives to ‘see’ multiple generations of his children (Job 42:16). Like the servant, Job’s community discovers that Job does not suffer because of his own sins but ultimately intercedes on their behalf (Job 42:7–9; Isa 53:4–5).53 Yet the Bible does not claim that Job undergoes a physical healing of the skin anomaly that he acquires in Job 2:5.54 To assume that divine honour and reward must include the removal of a disability suggests that we cannot imagine a person having both a disability and a high quality of life. Since, unlike the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible rarely focuses on the healing of disabilities,55 this assumption may tell us more about our own biases than about the text itself.
Healing through genre. Scholars frequently supply a recovery that does not actually appear in the text by interpreting our passage according to the conventions of certain genres of biblical poetry. The study of ancient Near Eastern literary genres has served as a standard tool of analysis within biblical scholarship for well over a century. This approach suggests that if we can determine the genre or type of speech reflected in a given passage, then we can better understand how the text uses its language or images. Yet this interpretative strategy may also lead to the removal of the servant’s disability by interpreting the disability imagery as a stock feature of a genre rather than a description of a figure with disabilities. While scholars have expressed a wide variety of opinions regarding the exact genre that Isaiah 53 reflects,56 many compare it to a genre of biblical poetry that they call ‘the individual song of thanksgiving’. Thus, Isaiah 53 becomes an example of a genre that celebrates the recovery of the able-bodied instead of recounting the servant’s experience of disability.
Roughly a century ago, Hermann Gunkel isolated the formal properties of the individual song of thanksgiving. For Gunkel, examples of this genre usually contain the following elements: 1) an introduction in which the individual says that he or she will thank God. 2) A narration of the individual’s trouble. In this narration, the individual often recounts the former trouble that he or she faced, how he or she petitioned the LORD, and how the LORD delivered him or her from the trouble. 3) A proclamation, usually to others, of the LORD’s deliverance. Gunkel thought that an ancient Israelite would have used this genre of psalms in a religious or cultic worship setting. The individual would have praised God and recounted his or her experience of divine deliverance to the congregation, sometimes accompanied by a sacrifice.57
Gunkel saw this genre reflected in Psalms 18, 30, 32, 34, 40, 41, 66, 92, 116, 118, 138 as well as other biblical texts such as Isaiah 38, Jonah 2, or Job 33.58 Several of these texts mention some type of physical disability or illness as the source of trouble. Gunkel proposed that ‘extreme illness’ was the most frequent cause of distress addressed by these texts.59 For example, in Ps 32:3–4, the individual states, ‘While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.’ In Ps 41:3, he or she declares, ‘The LORD sustains them on their sickbed; in their illness you heal all their infirmities (hōlî, a word related to hlh).’ We should note that Gunkel does not attribute the Psalmist’s suffering to his or her illness alone as if it were simply produced by a medical condition. Instead, he observes how the suffering arises from the Psalmist’s social experience of living with an illness. Regarding Psalm 41, Gunkel writes, ‘Ps 41:6–9 portrays how the critically ill person is tormented by the poisonous speech of those who will not believe in his innocence and expect him to die soon. Or we hear how the person who is ill suffered from being held in low esteem, even by his closest friends.’60 Although Gunkel acknowledges other causes of trouble, he writes that in examples of this genre, ‘A person is saved out of great distress—the shipwrecked man who is fortunate enough be brought to land, the prisoner who is liberated, and especially the sick person who is restored to health.’61 Indeed, a disease or illness is the source of distress in Isaiah 38, the one example from Isaiah which Gunkel identifies as reflecting this genre.
We have already observed that Hezekiah’s prayer in Isaiah 38 has several connections with Isaiah 53. Yet, unlike the servant in Isaiah 53, Hezekiah recovers in Isaiah 38. Likewise, both Psalms 32 and 41 include a divine deliverance from a disability or illness (32:5–7; 41:2, 12). Furthermore, the apparent similarities between Isaiah 53 and Psalm 30 focus on issues of recovery or deliverance. Certainly, Isaiah 53 promises that the servant will experience some type of honour in vv. 10–12. Yet nothing in our passage suggests that the servant experiences a recovery. The comparison with Psalm 30, however, implies that the servant’s deliverance involves the removal of an individual’s illness or disease. Psalm 30:2 states, ‘O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.’ Nothing in this Psalm addresses social or political oppression. Instead, it recalls divine assistance in the recovery from a near fatal illness or disease of some sort. In 30:3, the Psalmist declares, ‘O LORD, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit’ (cf. 30:9). Comparisons between our passage and Psalm 30 may create the impression that the servant experienced a healing that Isaiah 53 never states explicitly.
Unlike Isaiah 53, the examples of the individual song of thanksgiving provided above were written in the first person. Since the servant never speaks or narrates his own experience in Isaiah 53, we could question whether this text represents an individual song of thanksgiving. Gunkel, Sigmund Mowinckel, and a number of other scholars, however, suggest that Psalm 107 reflects a thanksgiving liturgy recited on behalf of multiple individuals in the third person.62 Joachim Begrich, who completed Gunkel’s Introduction to the Psalms after Gunkel’s death, proposed that, like Psalm 107, Isa 53:1–10 also reflects a third person individual psalm of thanksgiving. Begrich saw vv. 2–9 as modelled after the narration of the individual’s trouble that typically appear in individual songs of thanksgiving. He interpreted v. 10 as a proclamation of the LORD’s deliverance.63
To show how v. 10 indicates a divine deliverance, Begrich translated one of the verbs in this verse as ‘[the LORD] healed him’ instead of ‘made him diseased’. As we will find in Chapter 3, a Greek translation suggests that the LORD ‘cleansed’ the servant in this verse. Begrich, however, does not follow this Greek translation. Instead, he derives ‘healed’ by rearranging the Hebrew consonants and the spacing of the letters from hhly’m-tsym to hhlym’t-sym. These moves change the translation from ‘make him diseased. When you make’ to ‘healed the one who made’.64 A similar form of the word hhlym (‘to heal him’) appears in Hezekiah’s prayer for healing (Isa 38:16). Since Isaiah 38 and 53 share other key words and phrases (e.g. ‘disease’ hlh in Isa 38:9; 53:3, 4, 10; ‘land of the living’ 38:11; 53:8), Begrich’s proposal is intriguing. Nevertheless, none of the ancient manuscripts reflects this translation for 53:10. As Brevard Childs correctly observes, ‘there is not explicit mention of a healing of the servant up to this point, and the difference between “afflict him with sickness” and “healed him” is hardly inconsequential’.65 Begrich’s translation of v. 10 seems to interpret Isaiah 53 according to the conventions of the individual song of thanksgiving genre and not the text itself.
Despite his translation of v. 10, Begrich does not argue that the verse indicates that the servant recovered from a physical illness or impairment. In fact, he does not view the servant as a figure with disabilities or diseases at any point in the poem. Although he identifies Isaiah 53 as an individual song of thanksgiving, he does not interpret it as commemorating a physical recovery. Instead, he identifies the servant as the supposed author of Isaiah 40–55 (Second Isaiah) and argues that the author used this genre as a poetic way of prophesying about his own death and resurrection.66 In other words, Begrich thinks the passage predicts the servant’s death, but has nothing to do with a recovery from illness as many other individual songs of thanksgiving do. In fact, Begrich’s theory implies that the passage has very little to do with a delivery from any of the types of distress that Gunkel proposed. Begrich’s theory allows us to divorce the literary form or genre of the text from the typical context in which Gunkel thought it was used in everyday life.
Likewise, Otto Kaiser argues that Isaiah 53 reflects an individual song of thanksgiving. Whereas Begrich interprets the servant as an individual, Kaiser prefers to interpret the servant as a collective reference to Israel’s exilic community.67 Nevertheless, like Begrich, he does not connect it to an experience of illness and impairments. Instead, he views it as a response to a lamentation of the people in exile.68 According to Kaiser, only 53:1–6 reflect an individual song of thanksgiving. The prophet incorporates vv. 1–6 into a larger ‘oracle of salvation’ for the exilic community. As in Begrich’s interpretation, Kaiser imagines an historical situation for our passage that appears very different than the typical functions of this genre that Gunkel proposes. For both Begrich and Kaiser, a form of poetry often associated with experiences of illness, disease, or other impairments now describes a situation far removed from this context.
It becomes easy to assume a recovery that does not actually appear in the text when we interpret Isaiah 53 according to the conventions of certain poetic genres such as the individual song of thanksgiving. This interpretative strategy may not identify the servant with a presumably able-bodied individual or group. Nevertheless, it may lead to the removal of the servant’s disability by interpreting the disability imagery as a stock feature of a genre.
Some scholars suggest that the servant’s isolation from human society in Isaiah 53 results from imprisonment.69 For example, Whybray correctly criticizes Begrich and Kaiser for suggesting that Isaiah 53 uses the individual song of thanksgiving in completely idiosyncratic ways. He notes that the Hebrew Bible never uses individual songs of thanksgiving as prophetic references to the author’s death and resurrection or as oracles of salvation to comfort the exilic community.70 By contrast, Whybray proposes a historical context more in keeping with the uses of an individual song of thanksgiving that Gunkel suggests. Whybray hypothesizes that Isaiah 53 was an individual song of thanksgiving composed to commemorate Second Isaiah’s release from a Babylonian prison. The song was sung at a religious assembly of the Judean exiles.71 This hypothesis follows Gunkel’s criteria for an individual song of thanksgiving both in its form and its imagined historical context.
As we noted earlier, Gunkel proposes that ancient Israelites could use this genre to celebrate a release from prison. Gunkel uses Psalm 107 as an example: ‘Some sat in darkness and in gloom, prisoners in misery and in irons… Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress; he brought them out of darkness and gloom, and broke their bonds asunder. Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to humankind’ (vv. 10, 13–15). Some forms of the Hebrew words ‘restraint’ and ‘justice’ (Isa 53:8) can denote some type of detention and legal proceeding that the servant may have endured. Thus, Whybray follows G. R. Driver as well as a number of other scholars in arguing that 53:8 describes some type of imprisonment.72
In this sense, Whybray’s identification of Isaiah 53’s genre as an individual song of thanksgiving supports the idea that the passage describes an otherwise able-bodied prisoner rather than a figure with disabilities. Furthermore, if Isaiah 53 was composed in the aftermath of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, then the general historical context may also suggest imprisonment. As we will find in Chapter 4, some scholars connect this passage with the imprisonment and release of King Jehoiachin (2 Kgs 25:27–30). Other post-587 BCE texts from Isaiah that involve a servant figure also mention the release of prisoners (42:9; 61:1). Nonetheless, the historical context of the Babylonian Exile does not mean that the Babylonians imprisoned the majority of the exiles. For example, the Babylonians did not imprison the prophet Ezekiel. While the book of Daniel comes from a later historical period, it does not portray Daniel and other elite Judeans as confined to prison (Daniel 1–6). Jeremiah’s letter to the Babylonian exiles of 597 BCE implies that they could acquire property and marry while in Babylon (Jeremiah 29). Thus, we have little reason to assume that the Babylonians would have imprisoned Second Isaiah.
We should also note that while ‘without restraint and without justice’ in 53:8 means the act was unjustified, these terms could mean many things other than imprisonment. The imagery of oppression within the passage has stronger connections with the social experience of disability. The repeated use of images of disease, illness, impairment and so on throughout Isaiah 53 (the various forms of hlh in vv. 3, 4, 10) as well as references to his ‘marred’ form and appearance (52:14; 53:2) suggests an overall context of disability much more than imprisonment. Moreover, a recovery from illness represents the most frequent context for extant examples of individual songs of thanksgiving. If we want to connect Isaiah 53 to this genre of poetry, we should remember that issues surrounding illness or disability are the passage’s most prominent motif and the genre’s most common use, at least based on the biblical examples that Gunkel cites.
We should remain cautious, however, about connecting Isaiah 53 with individual songs of thanksgiving. A focus on the generic affinities between our passage and individual song of thanksgiving distances the description of the servant from the specific experiences of people with disabilities. Unlike Begrich or Whybray, most scholars do not argue that Isaiah 53 provides an actual example of an individual song of thanksgiving because, as Kaiser argues, several of its features do not reflect the genre’s typical elements. For example, although Claus Westermann follows Begrich’s translation of the verb in v. 10 as ‘healed’, he only sees the individual song of thanksgiving genre in ‘the background’ of the passage.73 Roy F. Melugin agrees with Westermann and writes, ‘The structure of the poem is basically the prophet’s own creation.’74 Paul D. Hanson suggests that attention to the form or genre of Isaiah 53 helps us ‘establish whatever objective markers [that] can be identified’.75 Yet he observes only ‘affinities’ between Isaiah 53 and ‘thanksgiving psalms’, without making a more specific genre designation. He compares Isaiah 53 to Psalm 30 and 54, although Gunkel did not label the later psalm as an individual song of thanksgiving. While Psalm 54 mentions the Psalmist’s ‘enemies’ (v. 5), it never mentions any disease, illness, or disability of any kind. A comparison to Psalm 54 may obscure the presence of imagery associated with disability in Isaiah 53.
Certainly, like Duhm’s identification of the servant as a person with a skin anomaly, Gunkel’s attempts to reconstruct the historical situations in which ancient Israelites used the individual song of thanksgiving remain quite speculative. The Hodayot found among the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect, or at least imitate, this genre. They suggest, however, a very different historical situation than any of the ones that Gunkel proposes for this genre.76 Although many scholars argue that the individual song of thanksgiving genre influences Isaiah 53, few of them argue that this passage was composed to give thanks for recovery from an illness or disease. Yet, as we have discovered, these scholars do not reject disability as a possible reason for its composition because of the speculative nature of Gunkel’s theory. In fact, several argue that Isaiah 53 was composed to give thanks for a release from imprisonment. This idea, however, is just as speculative as the recovery from illness theory and, according to Gunkel, is a far less frequent reason for reciting an individual song of thanksgiving.
A number of scholars regard the imagery running throughout Isaiah 53 as describing someone with some sort of disability or disease even if they prefer not to diagnose it precisely as a skin anomaly.77 The imagery that the servant’s description uses is usually imagery associated with persons with diseases or disabilities in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature. In this chapter, we have emphasized that our inability to diagnose the servant’s condition as a skin anomaly should not discourage us from identifying him as a figure with disabilities. The imagery throughout Isaiah 53 depicts the servant as having a chronic but unspecified disability. Yet, in depicting the servant’s disability, Isaiah 53 does not focus on a medical description of an anomalous body. The passage provides us with very few, if any, clues that would help us visualize the servant’s body, much less diagnose his condition.
Although interpreters often imagine the servant as an otherwise able-bodied person who suffers or even dies, a close examination of our passage provides little support for such interpretations. We suspect that these interpretations of Isaiah 53 are overly influenced by Duhm’s other ‘servant songs’. Moreover, while God ultimately vindicates the servant, the text does not equate this honour with a removal of his disability. In keeping with texts such as Isaiah 56, our passage depicts a figure with disabilities who is vindicated from social oppression rather than cured of a defective body. However else it may function, Isaiah 53 provides a portrait of disability in the ancient Near East as a social and political experience. If we decide whether Isaiah 53 describes the servant as having a disability based only on our ability to diagnose the servant’s condition, we will probably miss how the passage depicts an ancient Israelite experience of disability.
In addition to complicating efforts at a precise medical diagnosis, the lack of specific bodily description in Isaiah 53 prevents us from sentimentalizing the servant’s disabled body as an image of individual tragedy. The passage does not contain enough physical description to claim that it arouses pity or pathos for the servant with the specifics of his impaired body. Disability scholarship has frequently examined how characters with disabilities in literature often reinforce the questionable idea that disability imagery naturally evokes individual emotional responses.78 Yet Isaiah 53 focuses on the servant’s social experience rather than his impaired body. Our passage does not approach disability as a tragic embodiment isolated to an individual body in order to produce heartwarming or heartbreaking emotions from its audience. Close attention to the discourse or model that a text uses to approach disability is of paramount importance.
Nothing in Isaiah 53 implies that the servant’s disability was a temporary condition or temporary injury. In the following chapters, we discover that commentaries and translations use various exegetical strategies to read a recovery or removal of the servant’s disability into the text. Yet the passage’s presentation of the servant focuses consistently on his social experience of disability throughout Isaiah 53. This creates a deep irony that runs through the history of scholarship on this passage. Our passage provides a nuanced portrayal of this servant with disabilities. Yet the history of scholarship is largely a record of how we have neglected this portrayal of his disability and invented the able-bodied suffering servant. As we discover in the next two chapters, interpreters have gone to great lengths to show that the suffering servant may be injured, dead, recovered, or imprisoned, but that he is not disabled.