[W]e have to contend with an entire catalogue of historical individuals who have figured in the discussions of the Servant…. Undeniably the list resembles the contents of a successful big-game hunt on the exegetical savannah…. Duhm’s theory about the ‘Servant Songs’ has crippled the study of Isaiah 40–55.
Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, A Farewell to the Servant Songs: A Critical Examination of an Exegetical Axiom
[T]he expressions used [to describe the servant] go far beyond biography, indeed they go far beyond the description of anyone who might have existed in the past or the present.
Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2: The Theology of Israel’s Prophetic Traditions
Over the last few centuries, biblical scholarship has focused on the origins of the Bible. Often, modern scholars examine to whom or what a particular biblical passage referred before it became part of the Bible as we know it. When studying Isaiah 53, they have become increasingly interested in discovering the original identity of the servant in contrast to the typological reading strategies discussed in the previous chapter. Attempts to discover the servant’s historical identity have blunted our ability to recognize Isaiah 53’s association of disability imagery with the servant. Scholars have made numerous attempts to identify the servant with either an individual or a community. Traditionally, they have debated whether to identify the servant as an individual person or collective Israel. We will not attempt to settle this debate in this chapter. Instead, this chapter will examine why a serious debate has not developed around the question of whether to identify the servant as a figure with disabilities or as an able-bodied figure. We will explore the process through which ‘servant as able-bodied sufferer’ became the largely uncontested default interpretation during the search for the servant’s identity.
We begin this chapter by showing that, like Duhm, a minority of interpreters throughout history have focused on the disability imagery in order to identify the servant with a person with disabilities. Second, we discover that more recent scholars have downplayed disability as a prominent clue to the servant’s historical identity. Instead, they locate his identity among characters traditionally understood as able-bodied or as healed by God. Third, we turn to scholars who identify the servant with the personification of a collective group rather than one particular individual. For such scholars, the servant’s experience becomes Israel’s collective experience of exile. Often, the collective identification of the servant results in an interpretation of the servant’s disability as describing the experience of exile rather than disability.
In the middle of the twentieth century Christopher R. North surveyed the various proposals for the servant’s identity. North found that scholars had identified the servant with no less than fifteen individuals.1 In 2007, Kristin Joachimsen’s list of scholarly identifications included over twenty individuals. Joachimsen writes,
In Duhmian exegesis, no-one has adopted Duhm’s identification, that is, an unknown contemporary of the prophet Second Isaiah suffering leprosy…. Among the identifications of the servant as an individual, are: the prophet Isaiah, ‘Second Isaiah’, an anonymous contemporary of the prophet ‘Second Isaiah’, King David, King Uzziah, King Hezekiah, King Josiah, King Jehoia-chin, the Persian kings Cyrus or Darius, Zerubbabel or his son Meshullam, Shesbazzar, the prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Moses, Job, an unknown teacher of the Law, Eleazar (a martyr in the time of the Maccabees), the high-priest Onias, a eunuch, a vaguely defined mythical figure, Christ or a forerunner of Christ, and an eschatological or Messianic figure.2
While we do not have enough space to review all these identifications in detail, we should note that very few of the individuals from this list are traditionally interpreted or remembered as having disabilities. Instead, interpreters typically search for the servant’s identity among the able-bodied.
As Joachimsen’s list indicates, historical analysis of the servant’s identity has largely abandoned Duhm’s identification of the servant as an individual with disabilities. Yet Duhm was certainly not the only scholar or the first scholar to suggest that the servant had a disability of some sort. Long before Duhm, early Jewish and Christian interpretations identified the servant as having a skin anomaly or some other disability.3
While some seem more convincing than others, the examples that we will review in this section show an ongoing recognition of disability as a viable identification marker of the servant throughout the history of biblical interpretation. Since this option has never disappeared completely, scholars could choose to identify the servant as a figure with disabilities at any point in the history of interpretation. This choice, however, represents a minority position among interpreters.
In his translation of Isa 53:4 in the early fifth century CE, Jerome uses the Latin word leprosum in reference to the servant’s condition. John F. A. Sawyer suggests that this translation influenced Matthais Grünewald’s famous sixteenth century CE painting of Jesus’ crucifixion on the Isenheim Altar at St Anthony’s monastery. In the painting, lesions cover Jesus’ body. As part of their treatment, patients at the monastery with blood and skin diseases were brought before the altar.4
In the Talmud, the rabbis refer to the messiah’s name as ‘the leprous one’ based on Isa 53:10 (Sanhedrin 98b).5 Regardless of whether the rabbis thought the messiah would actually have a skin anomaly, at minimum, they imply that Isaiah 53 describes the servant as having one (cf. Sanhedrin 98a). Drawing on this tradition, the medieval Jewish apocalypse, Sefer Zerubbabel uses language found in Isa 53:3–5 to describe a heavenly being as ‘a man, despised and wounded, lowly and in pain’.6 Although they identify the servant with Israel collectively, both Rashi and Ibn Ezra (twelfth century CE) acknowledge that 53:3–4 compares the servant to a person with a skin anomaly. Ibn Ezra observes similar vocabulary in Isa 53:4 and the discussion of skin anomalies in Lev 13:5. The sixteenth-century CE rabbinic scholar Maharal (Judah Loew ben Bezalel), however, argues that Sanhedrin 98b does not mean that the messiah will have a skin anomaly. Rather, his decaying body provides a fitting metaphor for someone so spiritual that this person is the antithesis of the physical. Maharal’s position provides an early example of how disability imagery becomes a literary trope that describes an able-bodied figure rather than a figure with a disability.
Eliezer ben Elijah Ashkenazi, also a sixteenth-century rabbi, identified the servant with Job, whom the satan struck with a skin anomaly (Job 2:7). Building on a Talmudic tradition that Job was a symbolic figure (Bava Batra 15a), Ashkenazi argues that both Job and the servant in Isaiah 53 serve as parables for the experience of Israel collectively. While Ashkenazi does not make this identification based solely on disability imagery, this imagery plays a role. He includes several parallels between Isaiah 53 and Job that describe the respective subjects’ physical condition and the reaction to it by others (e.g. Isa 52:14/Job 2:12; 21:5; Isa 53:3/Job 2:13; 31:34; Isa 53:5/Job 6:9; Isa 53:6/Job 7:20).7
Like Duhm, some of his predecessors in the eighteenth century also focused on the disability imagery in order to identify the servant with a person with disabilities. In 1795, Johann Christian Wilhelm Augusti proposed that King Uzziah was the servant because 2 Chr 26:22 states that ‘the rest of the acts of Uzziah, from first to last, the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz wrote’. In 2 Chr 26:19–21, Uzziah acquires a skin anomaly as a punishment for a religious infraction. Augusti reasoned that Isaiah 53 provides a more positive explanation for his skin anomaly as an alternative to the one given in Chronicles. In 1783, Karl Friedrich Bahrdt identified the servant as Hezekiah because of the king’s illness (Isaiah 38; 2 Kgs 20:1–11), which he diagnosed as cancer. In 1795, J. Konynenburg interpreted Isaiah 53 as referring to Hezekiah because of repeated vocabulary involving illness and recovery.8
The nineteenth-century CE rabbinic scholar Ya’qob Yoseph Mord’-khai Hayyim Passani also interpreted the disability imagery in relation to Hezekiah. In fact, he connected the servant’s suffering to a social experience. He writes, ‘when [the Judeans] saw [Hezekiah] afflicted with severe illness, their hatred carried itself still further… judging maliciously that his sufferings were because he had despised their own wicked faith’.9 Nevertheless, as with Ashkenazi’s interpretation of the servant as Job, the disability imagery occurs more as one incidental parallel among many other parallels than a central character trait for Ya’qob Yoseph Mord’khai Hayyim Passani and other scholars who connect the servant with Hezekiah.10 As we will discover later in this chapter, scholars have connected individuals who have a recorded disease, such as Hezekiah, to the servant because of some trait other than just a disease.
Following Duhm’s proposal in 1892, a number of scholars continued to use disability imagery to help them identify the servant, although they did not always diagnose the disability as a skin anomaly. While Karl Budde strongly opposed Duhm’s theory of the ‘servant songs’, he does state that in Isa 53:3–4, the servant ‘is afflicted with a loathsome disease, which is beyond all doubt leprosy’.11 Nevertheless, he interprets this condition as only one of many types of suffering used to describe the servant. In 1900, Richard Kraetzschmar found similarities between the servant and Ezekiel based on Ezek 4:4–8, in which Ezekiel experiences a divinely caused temporary paralysis.12 Both the servant in Isa 53:12 and Ezekiel in Ezek 4:5 must ‘bear’ (ns’) the sin or iniquity of others. While Walther Zimmerli does not identify the servant as Ezekiel, he argues that both Ezek 4:4–8 and Isaiah 53 serve as examples of a tradition about a suffering messenger.13 In 1916, Lauri Itkonen identified the servant in Isaiah 53 as Uzziah because of the king’s skin anomaly.14 In 1954, John Skinner followed Duhm in identifying the servant as an anonymous individual with a skin anomaly.15 Likewise, in 1993, John F. A. Sawyer interpreted the servant as having a skin anomaly.16 As the epigraph for Chapter 2 indicates, in Michael L. Barré’s 1999 presidential address to the Catholic Biblical Association of America, he argues that Isaiah 53 uses language for skin anomalies in the servant’s description.17
In 1922, Ernst Sellin drew several parallels between the servant and Moses. Relying on a vague reference in Exod 15:26 (cf. Deut 7:15; 28:60), Sellin claimed that Moses experienced Egyptian diseases. For Sellin, the disability imagery in Isa 53:2–5 reflects this tradition about Moses.18 More recently, Klaus Baltzer identified the servant as Moses. He cites numerous parallels between the servant and Moses, including the following: ‘The Servant is familiar with sickness…. According to Exod 4:6–8, Moses’ hand becomes leprous and is healed.’19 There are traditions that identify Moses with an Egyptian priest who has a chronic skin anomaly (cf. the third-century BCE Egyptian historian Manetho cited in Josephus, Against Apion, 1.250) and a number of Egyptian works that associate Moses and the Jews with the purging of ‘lepers’ from Egypt (e.g. Lysimachos, Chaeremon, Pompeius Trogus, Tacitus).20 Yet, in Exod 4:6–8, God heals Moses’ skin anomaly immediately. Thus, if we compare the servant’s disability to Moses’ skin anomaly, we imply that the servant recovered quickly from a temporary impairment.
By contrast, Beverly J. Stratton identifies the servant as an exiled Israelite eunuch, which qualifies as a chronic disability, in the Babylonian court. She observes that the servant is ‘marred’ (Isa 52:14) and ‘crushed’ (Isa 53:5, 10) and that these Hebrew words describe genital damage in Lev 22:24–5: ‘Any animal that has its testicles bruised or crushed or torn or cut, you shall not offer to the LORD; such you shall not do within your land, nor shall you accept any such animals from a foreigner to offer as food to your God; since they are marred, with a blemish in them, they shall not be accepted in your behalf.’21 Additionally, Stratton noted that in Isa 56:3, a eunuch describes himself as a ‘withered tree’. While the vocabulary is different from 53:2, she sees a similarity in imagery when the servant is compared to ‘a root out of dry ground’.22 Moreover, the isolation of the servant in Isaiah 53 would appear consistent with the ostensible experience of eunuchs in ancient Israel (cf. Deut 23:1 and our discussion in Chapter 2). Although possibly written by a different author, Stratton observes that Isa 39:7 portrays the Judean exiles as ‘eunuchs’ when the prophet says to Hezekiah that ‘Some of your own sons who are born to you shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’23
The various scholars discussed in this section, however, provide an exception which proves the rule that interpreters prefer to identify the servant with individuals traditionally understood as able-bodied. Able-bodied identifications of the servant represent an interpretative choice so overwhelmingly popular and strongly reinforced over time that it seems like an obvious or natural starting point by default rather than a choice made by many contemporary scholars. Nevertheless, such identifications are a historical development that we may trace to at least the Jewish–Christian dialogues beginning in the second century CE.
As we discovered in the previous section, attempts to identify the servant with a historical figure or circumstance predate modern historical analysis of the Bible. Early Christians did not connect the servant to Jesus only because both were examples of a particular typology. Instead, in early dialogues with (sometimes fictitious) Jews, they argued that the servant in Isaiah 53 was a prophecy about Jesus as an individual. Read as prophecy, the servant became identified with Jesus.
In the second century CE, Justin Martyr interprets Isaiah 53 as a prophecy about Jesus (1 Apology 50–1).24 In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin quotes Isa 52:10–54:6 (Dialogue 13:2–9) and applies this passage to Jesus’ suffering during his passion. His Jewish interlocutor Trypho contends that the messiah would appear in glory unlike Jesus who suffered crucifixion. Even if one grants that the messiah must suffer, Trypho reasons, this does not prove that the messiah must die by crucifixion, since this form of death indicates a divine curse according to Deut 21:23 (Dialogue 32:1; 89:1). He objects to Justin’s claim that Isa 53:3–4, 7–8, 12 prove that the prophecy refers to Jesus and no one else (Dialogue 89:3). For Trypho, the comparison of the messiah to ‘a lamb that is led to the slaughter’ (Isa 53:7) does not mean that the messiah must be crucified (Dialogue 90:1).
Justin responds to Trypho with a number of typological connections between Hebrew Bible passages and the cross. These typologies culminate with a claim that Jesus was the Passover lamb based on a comparison between the lamb in Isa 53:7, understood by Justin as a prophecy of Jesus, and the lamb in Exodus 12 (cf. John 1:29).25 Yet, according to Exod 12:5, the Passover lamb must ‘be without blemish’. This implies that Justin interprets Isa 53:7 as a reference to Jesus as an unblemished lamb rather than a servant with a disability of any sort.
In the third century CE, Origen objects to his Jewish interlocutor Celsus’ claim that the servant’s suffering refers to the Jews’ collective experience of exile. Following the Septuagint (LXX), Origen notes that 53:8 differentiates between the servant and the people when it states, ‘Due to the transgressions of my people, he was led to death’ (Contra Celsum 1:55).26 Celsus also claims that if Jesus was divine, his body would have differed from other human bodies. Yet, according to Isa 53:2, Jesus, ‘had no form or majesty’. Origin responds with an allegory to show that those who do not see Jesus in a more divine form but only with ‘no form or majesty’ have not advanced beyond what Paul refers to as ‘the foolishness of our proclamation’ (1 Cor 1:21).27 In this sense, the disability imagery in Isaiah 53 does not actually describe Jesus as having disabilities. Instead, the imagery is merely an allegory for those who do not have the ability to see that Jesus had a more divine form.
We also find a response to potential Jewish objections to a crucified messiah in the Syraic Demonstrations of Aphrahat (fourth century CE). Citing Dan 9:26–7, Aphrahat argues that the messiah will be killed. He supports this argument by claiming that Isaiah referred to the messiah’s suffering in Isa 52:13–15; 53:2, 5.28 Aphrahat connects this suffering to Jesus’ death by crucifixion. He does not consider the possibility that these verses describe a chronic condition instead of the death of a presumably able-bodied Jesus. In fact, he rejects the idea that the servant could refer to David, whom God calls ‘my servant’ in Isa 37:35, because David was not killed but died at an old age (Demonstrations 17:10).
In the centuries following these so-called dialogues with Jews, the overwhelming consensus within Christian interpretation understood Isaiah 53 as a prophecy about Jesus. The consensus held through at least the Reformation.29 In fact, Sawyer observes that by the twelfth century CE, Christian interpreters understood Isaiah as more of a ‘Prophet of the Passion’ than a ‘Prophet of the Annunciation’ (cf. Isa 7:14; 11:1–2).30 Indeed, connections between Isaiah 53 and Jesus’ passion appear in the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus (fifth century CE), Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century CE), Martin Luther (sixteenth century CE) and John Calvin (sixteenth century CE), among others.31 Artwork and literature of this period emphasized Jesus’ agony with frequent references to Isaiah 53.32 For example, Chaucer quotes Isa 53:5 in the Parson’s Tale as a reminder of human responsibility for Jesus’ pain.33 Nevertheless, with few exceptions such as the aforementioned Isenheim Altar, identifications of Jesus with the servant depicted an otherwise able-bodied person who suffers and dies.
Certainly, the identification of the servant with Jesus encountered strong objection. When Ashkenazi identified the servant with Job, he wrote, ‘Now it should be clear to you that Isaiah uttered this whole passage in relation to Job…. And I have explained it at such length “because I was vexed by the wantonness” [Ps 73:3] with which [the Christians] have sought to interpret it in accordance with their faith.’34 Moreover, Jesus is not the only messianic figure with which the servant was identified. As we found in Chapter 3, the Targum of Isaiah 53 portrays the servant as a messiah with no indications of either suffering or disability. Over against Christian interpretations, later rabbinic scholars such as Isaac Abarbanel (fifteenth century CE) or Moshe Alshech (sixteenth century CE) affirmed the Targumic identification of the servant with the messiah. Yet, while a few possible references to a messiah with disabilities exist (Sanhedrin 98b; Sefer Zerubbabel), most identifications of the servant as a messiah figure other than Jesus depict a presumably able-bodied messiah who may or may not suffer.35
Interest in the servant’s historical identity predates modern attempts at historical analysis of the Bible. While we cannot account for this interest solely as a result of early Jewish–Christian dialogues, these dialogues helped to shift the focus of the servant’s interpretation away from typological approaches and towards historical identification. Although identification with a historical person may help bring the servant to life, this shift only further distances the servant from his disability.
Isaiah 53 not only describes the servant with disability imagery. It also uses imagery associated with royalty elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. This does not mean that disability and kingship are mutually exclusive identities. Kings with disabilities exist within the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature.36 Yet, although royal imagery may not appear as prominently as disability imagery in Isaiah 53, scholars have nevertheless searched for the servant’s identity among able-bodied kings more often than kings with disabilities.
As we noted earlier, scholarly associations between the servant and Uzziah or Hezekiah based on disability imagery provide exceptions that prove the rule. Moreover, Hezekiah has a temporary condition which God heals. By contrast, we discovered in Chapter 2 that Isa 53:10–12 indicates that the servant experiences divine exaltation, but not a change in his physical condition. Thus, although a healing of the servant does not appear anywhere in Isaiah 53, we may create the impression that God heals him if we identify the servant as Hezekiah, who was diseased (hlh) but ultimately recovered (Isa 39:1).
More often, disability imagery in Isaiah 53 provides an incidental parallel for scholars who connect the servant with biblical kings. For example, prior to identifying the servant as Moses, Sellin identified the servant as Jehoiachin, the last Judean monarch whom the Babylonians imprisoned for thirty-seven years (2 Kgs 24:10–16; 25:27–30).37 Almost a century later, Michael D. Goulder returned to Sellin’s hypothesis by finding several points of contact between the servant and Jehoiachin. The disability imagery refers to Jehoiachin because, according to Goulder, thirty-seven years in a damp, dark, Babylonian prison would disfigure the king and cause severe health problems.38 Yet Jehoiachin’s disability is entirely the creation of scholars who supply a back story for his experience in prison. The Bible never suggests that Jehoiachin has a disability nor gives any details about his time in prison that would suggest an acquired disability. In other words, we probably understand the servant as able-bodied if we identify him as Jehoiachin.
Other royal candidates for the servant’s identity are also traditionally remembered as able-bodied (e.g. Cyrus).39 Scholars identify some kings or political leaders as the servant largely because of traditions about their murders or deaths (e.g. Zerubbabel or Meshulam).40 Abarbanel provides a detailed interpretation of Isaiah 53 in connection with Josiah’s death in a battle with Pharaoh Neco of Egypt (2 Kgs 23:29–30; 2 Chr 35:20–5). He attributes the servant’s marred and stricken appearance to Josiah’s fatal battle wounds. For Abarbanel, Isaiah 53 depicts Josiah as a valiant warrior who dies a tragic death. He recognizes the phrase ‘a man of suffering’ in 53:4 as indicating a chronic disability, but interprets it as a description of Neco’s mobility impairment rather than Josiah’s condition.
Since the Hebrew spelling of the name ‘Neco’ is similar to a Hebrew word meaning ‘lame’, various traditions held that the Pharaoh acquired a mobility impairment. According to these traditions, one of the lions on Solomon’s throne injured Neco when he tried to sit on the throne (cf. Qohelet Rabbah 9:2; Leviticus Rabbah 20:1; the Targum’s translation of ‘Neco’ as ‘lame’ in 2 Kgs 23:29).41 Abrabanel seems to invoke these traditions when he explains that ‘After describing the perfections of Josiah, the prophet then depicts the insignificance of the man who caused his ruin, Phar‘oh Necho. In view of his bodily defects he says, He was despised and forlorn of men: for Necho was not a valiant man… but lame in his feet from gout… so here he terms him “a man of pains”.’42 For Abrabanel, the disability imagery describes Neco rather than the servant in Isaiah 53. The servant is Josiah, a valiant and presumably able-bodied warrior who suffers fatal injuries.
As with the royal imagery, scholars frequently rely on the prophetic imagery to identify the servant. Wolfgang M. W. Roth argues that the anonymous servant presents the prophetic office in its ideal form. Noting that the title ‘servant’ often designates a prophet in the Hebrew Bible, Roth concludes that the servant represents ‘the prophet of Yahweh… known by his function: to stand between man and God in service and in suffering’.43 Unlike Duhm, however, scholars rarely interpret the servant as a prophet with disabilities. As we observed earlier, disability represents only one of many parallels that some scholars use to identify Moses as the servant. Thus, they do not interpret Moses as primarily a prophet with disabilities.
In this section, we do not mean to suggest that Isaiah 53 does not portray the servant in a prophetic role. We do not have to choose between identifying the servant as a prophet or a figure with disabilities. These identities are not mutually exclusive. The comparisons of the servant with Moses and Ezekiel mentioned earlier suggest that we could describe the servant as a prophet with disabilities. Instead, our point is that we should not turn the disability imagery into prophetic imagery.
Moses. Since at least the time of the Talmud, scholars have associated the servant with Moses without focusing on disability. In Sotah 14a, the rabbis quote Isa 53:12 as a reference to Moses’ role as an intercessory prophet who offered his life on behalf of the people during the Golden Calf incident (Exod 32:32). Later rabbinic interpreters such as Abarbanel and Solomon b. Moses ha-Levi (sixteenth century CE) affirm this connection between Isa 53:12 and Moses.44 Yet Isa 53:12 contains none of the disability imagery present elsewhere in our passage. Despite Moses’ disability in Exod 4:6–12 and 6:12, 30, the use of Isa 53:12 to connect Moses with the servant focuses on his intercessory role rather than his disability.45
Among modern scholars, Sellin, Baltzer, and Chavasse champion the identification of the servant as Moses. Yet, as we discussed earlier, Moses’ disability serves as one incidental parallel among many for Sellin and Baltzer. Their primary point of comparison is the deaths of Moses and the servant. Sellin argues that passages such as Isaiah 53 and other biblical passages (Hos 5:1; 9:7–14; 12:14; 13:1; Zech 11:4–17) reflect a tradition that the people murdered Moses, rather than Zimri, during the Baal Poer incident at Shittim (Numbers 25).46 For Baltzer, Isaiah 53 is ‘an interpretation of Deuteronomy 34, with Moses’ rise, death and burial. The Servant’s grave “among criminals and beside a rich man” can be understood as a contemporary interpretation, referring to the death of Moses in Moab, on Mount Nebo, opposite Baal-poer, before the entry into the promised land’.47 Chavasse connects the reference to the servant’s grave being with the wicked in Isa 53:9 to repeated references to Moses’ death outside of Israel and on behalf of others (Deut 1:37; 3:23–6; 4:21–2). He also connects Moses’ unparalleled humility (Num 12:3) with the servant’s meekness (Isa 53:7).48
Other scholars prefer to identify the servant as an unnamed prophet in the tradition of Moses (cf. Deut 18:15–19). While Gerhard von Rad acknowledges in passing that ‘the idea that [the servant] was a leper is old’,49 he argues that the hyperbolic language could not describe an actual individual because of its ‘flowery’ and ‘extreme’ style.50 This leads him to the conclusion that the servant represents a future prophet in the tradition of Moses. He writes, ‘The songs have as their theme proclamation and suffering—the basic prophetic functions at the time… by the seventh century [BCE] the idea of the prophetic role had changed, and the prophet was portrayed as a suffering mediator.’51 More recently, both Gordon P. Hugenberger and Christopher R. Seitz refer to the servant as a ‘second Moses’ figure. Yet Seitz interprets the disability imagery in relation to the servant’s Moses-like intercessory activity in 53:12 (cf. Deut 9:25–29).52 Hugenberger connects Isa 53:3–8 to the repeated rejections of Moses by the people in Exodus and Numbers.53
Jeremiah. For some scholars, Jeremiah has a great deal in common with the servant.54 In fact, Duhm originally thought the four ‘servant songs’ described Jeremiah before he decided that the servant was an unnamed teacher of the law who had a skin anomaly.55 While the Bible never indicates that Jeremiah has a disability, it does record a great deal of his suffering. Jeremiah uses very similar imagery to what we find in Isa 53:7–8 when he complains, ‘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!”’(Jer 11:9).
Scholars have compared the servant to Jeremiah since at least Saadia Gaon in the tenth century CE.56 In addition to the similar imagery in Jer 11:9 and Isa 53:7–8, Saadia Gaon also understands the description of the servant as a ‘young plant’ (53:2) as a reference to Jeremiah’s youth (Jer 1:6). He takes the phrase ‘he bore the sin of many’ in 53:12 as a reference to Jeremiah’s intercession before God on behalf of the people (Jer 18:20). The servant’s ‘portion’ in 53:12 refers to the provisions with which the captain of the guard provides Jeremiah (Jer 40:5). Although Abarbanel criticized Saadia Gaon’s identification, other early rabbinic scholars, such as Ibn Ezra, affirmed it.57 Saadia Gaon’s references to Jeremiah, however, come from the parts of Isaiah 53 that do not include disability imagery. Thus, our focus may shift towards an able-bodied sufferer like Jeremiah if we follow Saadia Gaon.
By at least the time of the Reformation, some Christian interpretations begin to identify the servant with persons other than Jesus. Jeremiah provided an attractive alternative. In 1644, Hugo Grotius proposed that, although several references to a servant in the preceding chapters referred to Isaiah, the servant in Isaiah 53 referred to Jeremiah as a prefiguring of Jesus. As modern biblical scholarship began to emerge over the next few centuries, Anthony Collins (1727) and Christian Karl Josais Freiherr von Bunsen (1857) followed Grotius’ proposal.58
More recently, Brevard Childs acknowledges that, ‘Verse 3b speaks even of [the servant] being afflicted with sickness or disease. However, almost immediately one senses that the chief interest of the narrative is not biographical; rather, the concrete features that encompass the ensuing description focus largely on the response of others to him.’59 Correctly, Childs observes that Isaiah 53 focuses primarily on the servant’s social experience. Nonetheless, he does not comment on the servant’s social experience to further explore the servant’s physical condition or disability. Rather, Childs criticizes Duhm’s attempt to diagnose the servant’s condition as a skin anomaly by stating that ‘it is a mistake to specify the sickness too precisely’.60 Yet Childs is not criticizing a medical model approach to Isaiah 53. Instead, this lack of precision allows him to apply this imagery to experiences other than sickness and disease, such as the difficulties faced by innocent sufferers or those holding the prophetic office. Although Childs acknowledges that the verbs in 53:10 mean ‘to make sick’, he understands this imagery as an idiom for innocent suffering (cf. Pss 22:6–7; 88:8) rather than a description of disability. He writes that Isaiah 53 ‘begins to resonate with the typical idiom of the innocent suffering one of the Psalter… [forming] a continuing lament of the suffering innocent of the Psalter (Pss. 35:13; 41:4; 77:16)… Much like the idiom of the Psalter, physical and spiritual suffering are combined without carefully defined boundaries and so probe its multifaceted aspects.’61
While he does not identify the servant as Jeremiah, Childs finds parallels to the servant’s suffering in the book of Jeremiah (Jer 15:17; 20:7, 10). The texts from Jeremiah that Childs cites, however, do not contain any disability imagery. Instead, Jeremiah describes his social experience as a prophet rather than as a person with disabilities. For example, in 20:7, Jeremiah describes his social experience as follows: ‘O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.’62 Using such comparisons, Childs concludes, ‘Much like Jeremiah, the description of prophetic suffering depicts a calling, even an office, into which the servant of God has been summoned. However, the confession that then follows in chapter 53 begins to probe a new dimension of obedient suffering, unknown to Jeremiah or the other prophets.’63 Yet Childs never implies that this ‘new dimension’ of suffering somehow relates to the servant’s experience of disability, be it a skin anomaly or some other unspecified ‘sickness or disease’. Intentionally or not, this could lead us to overlook a figure with disabilities as a subject of Isaiah 53. The experiences of such a figure may get lost in the shuffle.
Second Isaiah. As we discussed in the Introduction, most scholars maintain that Isaiah 40–55 comes from a period after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. While we can connect the content of these chapters to the historical circumstances of the Babylonian exile or its aftermath, we have no personal details or biographic information about whoever produced them. Scholars personify the source(s) of these chapters as an anonymous prophet that they call ‘Second Isaiah’ (although some argue that Isaiah 53 comes from ‘Third Isaiah’ or some other figure(s) within the Isaianic tradition). This process of personification involves speculation about the back story of Second Isaiah even though we have no specific information about his or her life.64 Some scholars even use the conjectured personification of Second Isaiah to fill in the missing back story of the servant’s experience. Identifying the servant with a personification allows scholars to propose that the details of Isaiah 53 refer to a range of imagined events within an unknown life. Yet, few, if any, scholars personify Second Isaiah as a person with disabilities.
In 1921, Sigmund Mowinckel popularized the identification of the servant as Second Isaiah. His proposal received immediate acclaim from other prominent biblical scholars such as Otto Eissfeldt, Hermann Gunkel, and Hans Schmidt.65 According to Mowinckel, the fact that we do not know anything about Second Isaiah is an exaggerated problem. He focused on a number of passages from Isaiah 40–55 to flesh out Second Isaiah’s back story. Thus, for Mowinckel, the servant in our passage is an otherwise able-bodied prophet based mostly on passages outside of Isaiah 53.66 Throughout the twentieth century, Second Isaiah remained one of the most popular individual candidates for the servant’s identification. As we discussed in Chapter 2, Begrich argues that Second Isaiah prophesies his or her own death in our passage and Roger N. Whybray and G. R. Driver suggest that the Babylonians imprisoned Second Isaiah based on the imagery in 53:8 (cf. Isa 42:9; 61:1). Yet the idea of the servant’s imprisonment is a complete conjecture that goes far beyond what our passage says.
More recently, Joseph Blenkinsopp argues that Isaiah 53 is a eulogy for Second Isaiah that originated among Second Isaiah’s disciples before the chapter was inserted into Isaiah 40–55. Blenkinsopp observes that, with the exception of 54:17, in Isaiah 49–55, the term ‘servant’ refers to an individual prophetic figure (Second Isaiah). According to Blenkinsopp, we encounter the activities of this prophet’s disciples in the repeated references to a disenfranchised prophetic group called the ‘servants’ in Isaiah 56–66 (Isa 56:6; 63:17; 65:9, 13–15; 66:14).67 While Blenkinsopp’s theory seems slightly less speculative than Whybray or Driver’s theory, none of these identifications of the servant as Second Isaiah include disability as part of the imaginative back stories for this hypothetical figure.
Often, interpreting Isaiah 53 as primarily describing the prophetic experience has reconfigured the servant as a presumably able-bodied prophetic sufferer. In such readings, parallels with other prophetic literature suggest that our passage uses disability imagery to communicate the difficulties of the prophetic experience rather than an experience of disability. This interpretative strategy risks the erasure of the servant’s disability from the passage.
The search for the servant’s identity has produced more individual candidates than we have room to discuss in this book. Yet scholars often overlook his status as a figure with disabilities even though they acknowledge that the imagery in Isaiah 53 depicts the servant as having an often unspecified disability. Certainly, some of the individuals identified as the servant have disabilities or diseases. For example, God causes Ezekiel’s temporary paralysis and loss of speech (Ezek 3:22–27; 4:4–8), but heals him in Ezek 24:27. Likewise, Hezekiah recovers from his illness. Unlike the servant, these individuals have temporary disabilities. Such identifications allow us to imagine the servant without a disability in the end.
Furthermore, those candidates with temporary disabilities or diseases represent a minority of the individuals that scholars have identified as the servant. The majority of the candidates do not require any type of healing because they do not have a recorded disability. More often than not, scholars have identified the servant with a traditionally able-bodied individual. Disability does not factor heavily into these identifications. The servant needs no healing because the various proposals for the historical identity of the servant have removed the servant’s disability altogether by associating him with various able-bodied individuals.
The search for the servant’s identity among historical individuals reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, even in this period, some scholars raised strong objections to this approach. In 1899, Budde wrote a lengthy article with detailed criticisms of Duhm and the various attempts to identify the servant with an individual.68 He preferred to identify the servant with the personification of a collective group.69
Budde was not the first scholar to offer a collective identification. As we discussed above, as early as the third century CE, Origen mentioned the identification of the servant as a collective reference to Israel as the position of his Jewish interlocutor Celsus. By the twelfth century CE, this identification of the servant was commonplace among Jewish interpreters such as Rashi, Ibn Erza, David Kimhi (Radak), and others. For example, Radak wrote that Isaiah 53 ‘refers to the captivity of Israel, who are here called “my servant” as in xli 8’.70 Radak identifies the servant as Israel based on Isa 41:8, which reads, ‘But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen.’ Likewise, several other passages in Second Isaiah refer to a singular servant as Israel/Jacob (cf. 43:10; 44:1–2, 21; 45:4; 49:3). Thus, there is precedent for identifying the servant in Isaiah 53 as Israel.
A number of medieval Jewish interpreters commend this collective interpretation to counter the Christian associations of the servant with Jesus. Yet we cannot attribute the collective interpretation of the servant to an anti-Christian polemic alone. As we discussed in the previous chapter, Dan 12:3 typologically connects a Jewish group referred to as the ‘wise’ (a plural form of skl) with the servant because Isa 52:13 describes the servant as ‘prosperous’ (a singular form of skl). Thus, the collective interpretation of the servant may predate Christianity by well over a century.
Furthermore, some scholars have used skl to argue that Isaiah 53 itself identifies the servant as Israel long before later interpreters identified the servant with various individuals. Harry Orlinsky observes that the form of skl in 52:13 is yaskil. He argues that the phrase ‘my servant shall prosper (yaskil)’ sounds like ‘my servant Israel (Hebrew: yisrael)’. For Orlinsky, 52:13 creates an intentional pun with the word ‘Israel’ as a clue to the audience that the servant in Isaiah 53 is a collective reference to Israel.71 This suggestion attempts to address the problem that, unlike Isa 41:8 or 49:3, Isaiah 53 does not clearly identify the servant as Israel but repeatedly refers to him with singular rather than plural or collective words.
Disability imagery as exilic imagery. As Jill Middlemas emphasizes, the identification of the servant with Israel focuses on the suffering of Israel in exile.72 This identification understands the disability imagery in our passage as describing the experience of siege or exile rather than the experience of disability. Fredrik Haägglund observes that various forms of Hebrew words in Isa 53:3–4 that we translated as ‘suffering’ and ‘diseased’ appear in other prophetic passages that describe Jerusalem or Judah in the context of exile. In Jer 10:19, the inhabitants of Judah collectively lament their exilic experience with vocabulary very similar to that used in our passage: ‘Woe is me because of my hurt! My wound (nkh) has become diseased (hlh). But I said, “Truly this is my disease (hlh), and I must bear (ns’) it.”’ In Isa 53:4, we read, ‘Surely he has borne (ns’) our diseases (hlh) and carried our suffering; yet we accounted him plagued, struck down (nkh) by God, and afflicted. But he was made profane for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises (brh) we are healed’ (cf. Jer 51:8; Lam 1:12, 18). Like Jer 10:19, Isa 1:4–6 personifies the ‘sinful nation’ of Judah (v. 4) with imagery similar to Isa 53:4–5. It reads, ‘Why should you be struck (nkh) anymore? Why do you persist in rebellion? The whole head is diseased (hlh), and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but sores and bruises (brh) and fresh wounds (nkh); they have not been drained, or bound up, or softened with oil’ (Isa 1:5–6).73
Furthermore, both Isa 53:4 and 8 use the Hebrew word ‘plagued’ (ng‘) to describe the servant’s condition. We observed in Chapter 2 that this word often describes skin anomalies in Leviticus 13–14. Yet, when depicting the destruction of Israel, Amos 9:5 uses the word ‘plagued’ in reference to the land of Israel rather than a figure with a skin anomaly: ‘The Lord, GOD of hosts, the one who plagues (ng‘) the earth and it melts.’74 The use of disability imagery to identify the servant as exiled Israel, however, creates further distance between the disability imagery in Isaiah 53 and the social experience of disability. Few, if any, scholars claim that the servant’s disability functions as a description of the exiles’ actual physical condition.
Tryggve N. D. Mettinger explains the disability imagery in Isaiah 53 as a reference to Israel’s reduced population during exile. He translates the second verb in Isa 53:3 (hdl) as ‘lacking’ as in ‘he was despised and lacking humans’. Connecting this verse to Isa 41:14 and 54:1, Mettinger argues that Isaiah 53 ‘speaks of an Israel which has been reduced to a small and insignificant group’.75 Mettinger also cites Gerleman’s observation (which we discussed in Chapter 2) that the phrase ‘land of the living’ in 53:8 may refer to the land of Israel rather than a state of life as opposed to death. Thus, according to Mettinger, the phrase ‘excluded from the land of the living’ refers to the Judeans collective experience of exile from the land of Israel.76
Mettinger’s interpretation does not adequately account for the repeated descriptions of the servant as ‘diseased’ (vv. 3, 4, 10) or ‘plagued’ (vv. 4, 8) throughout our passage. Instead of analysing these specific images, Mettinger compares our passage with Isa 50:4–11 and 51:4–8 in order to arrive at what he calls ‘a meaningful interpretation of the expressions of [the servant’s] suffering’.77 Yet the comparison with these other passages allows Mettinger to generalize the nature of the servant’s suffering in Isaiah 53 because these other passages from Isaiah do not contain disability imagery. As we discussed in Chapter 2, scholars have understood the servant as a (sometimes fatally) injured able-bodied figure by reading Isa 50:4–11 into Isaiah 53. Isaiah 51:4–8 addresses Israel collectively and shares specific imagery with 50:4–11 (compare the phrase ‘wear out like a garment’ in 50:9 and 51:6). Yet the imagery of suffering in 51:4–8 is too general to compare with the disability imagery of Isaiah 53.78
In contrast to Mettinger, we argued in Chapter 2 that both 53:3 and 8 use this imagery to describe disability as a social experience in the ancient Near East. We translated the verb hdl in 53:3 as ‘withdrew’ rather than ‘lacking’. Thus, we prefer the translation ‘he was despised and withdrew from humanity’ to ‘he was despised and lacking humans’. Correctly, Barré observes, ‘the Servant is depicted as a person tending to withdraw from others, perhaps in a way similar to lepers who kept their distance from others in the community’.79 As we discussed in Chapter 2, this phrase fits well with our passage’s description of disability as a social experience. Earlier in this chapter, we observed that both Rashi and Ibn Ezra acknowledge that 53:3–4 compare the servant to a person with a skin anomaly even though both Rashi and Ibn Ezra identify the servant with Israel collectively. Regarding the servant’s exclusion from ‘the land of the living’ in 53:8, we agree with Mettinger that the phrase can refer to the land of Israel or possibly human society more generally. Yet, as with 53:3, this phrase describes a figure with disabilities’ social isolation from the larger population more clearly than a collective experience of exile from the land of Israel. The rest of 53:8 supports our interpretation when it describes the servant as ‘plagued’: ‘he was excluded from the land of the living, plagued for the transgression of my people’. In the larger context of v.8, the phrase ‘excluded from the land of the living’ helps to describe the servant’s social experience of disability.
Both Haägglund and Mettinger, among others, support their identification of the servant as exiled Israel by comparing Isaiah 53 with Ezekiel 37 because of similar vocabulary.80 Ezekiel 37 includes a vision of a valley full of dry bones. After Ezekiel prophesies to the dry bones, they come to life (Ezek 37:4–10). Then, God tells Ezekiel, ‘these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are excluded.” Therefore prophesy, and say to them [Israel], “Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel”’ (Ezek 37:11–12). The bones (Israel) claim that they are ‘excluded’. The same Hebrew term appears in Isaiah 53:8, which states that the servant ‘was excluded from the land of the living’. Also, both passages refer to the ‘grave’ (Ezek 37:12; Isa 53:9). A key difference, however, is that Israel is already in its grave in Ezekiel 37, whereas Isa 53:9 only states that others prepared a grave for the servant, as we discussed in Chapter 2. Yet, more important for our purposes, is the fact that Ezekiel 37 includes a physical restoration of the dry bones to an able-bodied state. Comparing this recovery of the dry bones to the servant’s experience may allow us to assume that God also heals the servant and that the servant becomes able-bodied by the end of Isaiah 53.
Yet the comparison between Isaiah 53 and Ezekiel 37 obscures the typical way that most prophetic texts composed after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem use disability imagery in reference to Israel’s experience of restoration from exile. Usually, they do not include a healing. Healing was not a standard element in the literary trope that uses disability imagery to depict the exilic experience. For example, Mic 4:6–7 states, ‘In that day, says the LORD, I will assemble the lame and gather those who have been driven away, and those whom I have afflicted. I will make the lame a remnant, those driven away a strong nation. The LORD will rule over them in Mount Zion from that day and forever.’ Jeremiah 31:8 declares, ‘See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labour, together; a great company, they shall return here’ (cf. Zeph 3:19).81 This reinforces our claim in Chapter 2 that the servant does not recover from his disability in Isaiah 53.
Nevertheless, these passages use imagery of disability to describe the suffering and hardships of the presumably able-bodied in exile. Such passages provide precedent for interpreting the servant’s disability in Isaiah 53 as describing the experience of exile rather than disability. As with Isaiah 53, most of the passages that use disability imagery to express the experience of exile do not focus on or even include a removal of the disability. Isaiah 35:5–6 provides an exception that proves the rule when it describes the return of the exiles to Zion in the following terms: ‘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.’ More frequently, biblical passages that use disability to describe the exilic experience do not need to include healings because they divorce the disability imagery from the lived experience of persons with disabilities. Regarding such passages, Rebecca Raphael observes, The key passages in Hebrew prophecy that are known for speaking of healing for disabled persons are not about disabled persons, and usually do not speak of healing. Indeed, a lack of reference to mended bodies indicates that the disability terms are doing something other than referring to actual disabled persons. The most obvious cases of non-healing are in Jeremiah, Micah and Zephaniah… Ingathering is not healing, nor is healing used as a metaphor for ingathering.82
This phenomenon may very well represent the highpoint of biblical literature’s use of disability imagery as a literary trope that articulates the suffering of otherwise able-bodied people. Healing is unnecessary when the communities described in the passage are presumably able-bodied to begin with.
The servant and personified Zion. Since at least the twelfth century CE, scholars favouring the collective interpretation have also appealed to the passages that immediately surround Isaiah 53 to resolve the problem that the servant is referred to in the singular throughout our passage. Ibn Erza observes that Isaiah 54 personifies the conquered city of Zion as an individual woman. Furthermore, immediately preceding our passage, Isa 52:1–12 personifies Zion as a captured woman to whom God promises liberation: ‘Shake yourself from the dust, rise up, O captive Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter Zion’ (52:2). Both Isaiah 52 and 54 depict the personified city in a state of captivity or exile. Zion personifies the Judean people’s experience of exile in the passages immediately surrounding Isaiah 53. Thus, even if Isaiah 53 depicts the servant as an individual, the context of the passage suggests that he represents a personification of Israel in exile just as ‘Uncle Sam’ personifies the United States government collectively.83
The changes in gender in Isaiah 52–4 from a female Zion to a male servant back to a female Zion do not present a problem for this interpretation. We find a similar gender switch in the book of Lamentations. Lamentations 3 personifies exiled Israel as a man in pain (Lam 3:1–4, 30; cf. Isa 50:6). Yet, Lamentations 1–2 and 4 surrounds this male personification with personifications of exiled Israel as ‘daughter Zion’ (Lam 1:6, 17; 2:1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 18; 4:2, 22). Moreover, Leland Edward Wilshire observes that Isa 51:16 uses the Hebrew masculine singular pronoun for ‘you’ when God personifies Zion: ‘I have put my words in your mouth… saying to Zion, “You [masculine singular pronoun] are my people.”’84 Seitz notes that Isa 49:14–15 compares God to a mother and Zion to a male child when it states, ‘But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.’85
Both Wilshire and Seitz develop the identification of the servant as the city of Zion. After citing the similarities between the personification of the servant and of Zion in Second Isaiah, Wilshire observes parallels between Isaiah 53 and other Mesopotamian poems that describe fallen cities. For example, Isa 53:7 compares the servant to ‘a lamb that is led to the slaughter’. Regarding the fallen Sumerian city of Ur, the ‘Lament over the Destruction of Ur’ (second millennium BCE) declares, ‘O my city, like an innocent ewe thy lamb has been torn away from thee; O Ur, like an innocent goat thy kid has perished’ (ANET, 456).86 Wilshire interprets the servant’s ‘marred’ and ‘despised’ state as references to Zion’s destruction and humiliation rather than as images of disability.87 As the final servant song, Isaiah 53 promises the restoration of Zion after a period of exile and humiliation.88
Seitz draws parallels between the suffering of the servant and the suffering of Zion (e.g. Isa 49:13; 51:21; 54:11). He argues that, in contrast to Ezekiel or Lamentations, Second Isaiah does not focus on the sinfulness of Zion itself. Picking up on the specific images of disability in our passage, Seitz writes ‘an interpretation of the servant in 52:13–53:12 as Zion… is in continuity with the depiction of Zion-King in Isa 38. Hezekiah is sick and at the point of death. The emphasis is not on his sinfulness (38:17), but on his state of illness (28:9–20) and his prior faithfulness. The psalm narrates the movement from sickness, to near death, to new life, to awaiting full health. Has the final servant poem been composed for Zion on analogy with the psalm of Hezekiah?’89 In answer to Seitz’s question, we would caution against pressing this analogy very far. Certainly, as we discussed in Chapter 2, Isaiah 38 shares imagery of disability with Isaiah 53. The difference is that Hezekiah’s has a temporary illness whereas the servant has a chronic disability. As we noted earlier, the comparison with Hezekiah’s illness allows us to imagine a divine healing of the servant that does not appear in Isaiah 53.
Similarly, comparisons with Zion may also imply a healing of the servant. In Isaiah 53–4, the servant and Zion share imagery involving disability. Both Isa 49:21 and 54:1 refer to a personified Zion as infertile. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts portray infertility as a disability and associate it with several other physical and cognitive disabilities. Yet, Isa 54:1 explicitly promises that the infertile Zion will have many children. ‘Sing, O barren one who did not bear; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate woman will be more than the children of her that is married, says the LORD.’ Unlike the servant, the personified Zion experiences a removal of her disability. If we interpret both the servant and Zion as personifying the same thing, we find yet another way to imply that God healed the servant’s disability.
In our last two chapters, we have traced the transformation of the servant from a figure with disabilities in a poem to a typological figure to a historically identifiable and usually able-bodied person or group. The disappearance of the servant’s disability does not occur in the text but in the process of interpretation. The servant’s transformation into an able-bodied sufferer results from a long series of interpretative choices by scholars. Biblical scholarship has a venerable tradition of divorcing the imagery of disability in Isaiah 53 from the experience of disability. The search for the servant’s identity is no exception. Throughout this search, many interpreters use the disability imagery to focus on the suffering of almost any person or group except those with disabilities. The servant with disabilities fades from our memory while the suffering servant emerges.