Isaiah 53
Who Is the Servant?

Objection 1 · "Messiah" Never Appears in the Passage

Singer is emphatic: the word מָשִׁיחַ (mashiach) does not occur anywhere in Isaiah 53. Calling it a messianic prophecy imports a category the text itself never invokes.

Weight: True, but this test disqualifies far more than Isaiah 53. The word mashiach as a title for the future royal deliverer occurs explicitly in only a small handful of Tanakh passages — Daniel 9:25–26 is essentially the clearest case. Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 9, and Isaiah 11 are all texts Jewish tradition itself has read messianically at various periods, and none of them contains the word either. Absence of the term proves nothing about a passage's referent; it only shows that "messianic" is a category readers apply based on content and later tradition, not a label the text is required to supply.

Objection 2 · Isaiah Repeatedly Calls Israel "My Servant"

Elsewhere in Isaiah, the nation itself is explicitly named עַבְדִּי ("my servant") — 41:8, 44:1, 44:21, 49:3. Since "servant" is Isaiah's standing term for Israel, the default reading of 52:13–53:12 should be the same.

Weight: Correct as far as it goes — but the "Servant" designation is not monolithic across every occurrence, and Isaiah's own text shows this. Isaiah 49:3 does call the servant "Israel," yet two verses later, 49:5–6, describes this same servant's mission as being sent to Israel — "to bring Jacob back to Him, that Israel be gathered to Him... to raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the preserved of Israel." A figure whose job is to restore Israel cannot, in that verse, simply be identical with the Israel he restores. The word's referent shifts with context inside Isaiah's own servant material; assuming one fixed corporate referent for every occurrence begs the question rather than settling it.

Objection 3 · The Servant Elsewhere Is Blind, Deaf, and Sinful

Isaiah 42:18–25 describes the servant as blind and deaf, having sinned against God's law and been given over to plunder — a match for Israel's actual, culpable condition, not a sinless individual Messiah.

Weight: This should be conceded, not argued around — Isaiah 42:18–25 clearly does describe a collective, sinful Israel under judgment. But it is a different oracle from 52:13–53:12, and the two servant portraits do not match. The figure of 53:9 is explicitly sinless — "he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth" — and 53:4–6 and 53:8 describe him bearing griefs, iniquities, and transgressions that are explicitly not his own but belong to others. The same word describing two different figures across different oracles in the same book is not unusual in prophetic literature; it does not force a single referent onto both passages.

Objection 4 · Vicarious Suffering Contradicts Torah

Ezekiel 18:20 states plainly: "the soul that sins, it shall die" — not someone else on its behalf. Substitutionary suffering for another's sin, Singer argues, is foreign to, and forbidden by, the Torah's own principle of individual moral responsibility.

Weight: Ezekiel 18 addresses a specific and different question — personal legal/moral responsibility, ruling out the idea that a child is punished merely for a parent's sin (the chapter's actual context, vv. 1–4). It is not a statement about the sacrificial system's own internal logic, which the Torah establishes on the opposite principle: an animal's life given in place of a person's (Leviticus 17:11, "the blood makes atonement for the soul"), and the scapegoat bearing the nation's iniquities away (Leviticus 16:21–22). If Ezekiel 18 ruled out all vicarious bearing of consequence, it would equally rule out the Levitical sacrificial system itself — a conclusion Singer does not draw and Judaism does not hold. The objection proves too much.

Objection 5 · Rashi and the Rabbinic Mainstream Read It as Israel

Since Rashi (1040–1105), the dominant Jewish reading has identified the servant with the nation of Israel — this, Singer notes, is simply the settled, majority position within Judaism.

Weight: True as a statement about the current majority view, and it should be stated plainly rather than minimized. But "majority current view" and "earliest view" are different claims. As the next section shows, the reading that predates Rashi by roughly nine centuries — reaching back to the Targum and the classical midrashim — identifies the servant not with Israel but with the Messiah. Rashi's reading did not exist in a vacuum against an older, unbroken Jewish consensus; it was itself a departure from an earlier interpretive tradition.

Objection 6 · The Passage Is Avoided in Synagogue Reading

Isaiah 53 is not read as a haftarah in the annual cycle — sometimes cited by Christian apologists as proof it was deliberately excised by rabbis to keep Jews from noticing its resemblance to Jesus.

Weight: The deliberate-excision claim is not well evidenced, and this exhibit does not repeat it as established fact — responsible apologetics on both sides should stop asserting motive without documentation. What can be stated as a plain textual observation, independent of anyone's intent: the annual haftarah cycle runs continuously through Isaiah 40–66 for the weeks of consolation following Tisha B'Av, and 52:13–53:12 is the one passage skipped in that sequence, jumping from 52:12 directly to 54:1. That the passage is skipped is a fact; why is not established, and Singer is on solid ground rejecting the excision theory as unproven.

Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 52:13

הָא יַצְלַח עַבְדִּי מְשִׁיחָא יְרוּם וְיִסְגֵּי וְיִתְקוֹף לַחֲדָא

"Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper; he shall be exalted and extolled, and he shall be very strong." The Targum inserts מְשִׁיחָא ("the Messiah") directly into the text at the opening of the passage — an explicit, unambiguous identification of the servant as the Messiah, from the earliest layer of rabbinic biblical interpretation available. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) and multiple midrashim, including Midrash Tehillim and Midrash Tanchuma, independently apply the same passage to the Messiah. Even medieval rabbis who explicitly rejected the Christian application — Ibn Ezra and Alshech among them — acknowledged that the messianic reading had been the dominant earlier Jewish position.

The Honest Caveat

The Targum's evidence needs to be stated precisely, not overclaimed. While it identifies the servant as the Messiah without hesitation, it systematically reworks the passage's suffering language, reassigning affliction to Israel or to the nations and reserving triumph for the Messiah alone. Where the Hebrew of 53:9 has the servant's grave "with the wicked," the Targum has him instead handing the wicked over to Gehenna. The Messiah of the Targum builds the Temple, subdues nations, and teaches Torah — a conquering figure, not a dying one.

This means the Targum is strong, early evidence that the servant of Isaiah 53 was read as an individual Messiah in the oldest surviving Jewish interpretation — directly answering Objection 5's claim that Israel has always been the reading. It is not, by itself, evidence that early Judaism broadly expected a suffering, dying Messiah; that argument has to be made from the Hebrew text on its own terms, not from the Targum's paraphrase, since the Targum's own author plainly found the suffering language difficult enough to rework rather than translate directly.

Isaiah 4:2 — צֶמַח יְהוָה, the Branch of Yahweh

בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִהְיֶה צֶמַח יְהוָה לִצְבִי וּלְכָבוֹד

"In that day the Branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious." Walter C. Kaiser Jr.'s entry on צֶמַח in the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (ed. Gleason Archer, R. Laird Harris, and Bruce Waltke) reads this construction — Branch of Yahweh — as presenting the Messiah as the Son of Yahweh: a sprout belongs to, and shares the nature of, the source it springs from. The same root sm-ch appears in David's own last words, "he has not made it grow?" (2 Samuel 23:5), and in Psalm 132:17, "There I will make the horn of David to bud [tsemach]" — both tying the growth-word to the Davidic covenant specifically before Isaiah ever applies it to a coming individual.

Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15 · Zechariah 3:8, 6:12 — The Branch as a Name

Jeremiah makes the royal identification explicit: "I will raise unto David a righteous Branch [צֶמַח צַדִּיק]... and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS" (23:5–6; repeated 33:15). Zechariah then uses "the Branch" as a standing title: God's servant "the Branch" (3:8), and "a man whose name is the Branch... he shall build the temple of the LORD" (6:12). Targum Jonathan translates Zechariah's and Jeremiah's "Branch" passages by inserting מְשִׁיחָא — "Messiah" — directly into the text, the same move it makes at Isaiah 52:13. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b), in a passage listing the Messiah's names, states plainly that his name is "the Branch," citing Zechariah 6:12. The identification of tsemach with the Messiah is not a Christian imposition; it is the reading of the earliest rabbinic sources available.

Isaiah 53:2 — כַּשֹּׁרֶשׁ, as a Root Out of Dry Ground

וְכַשֹּׁרֶשׁ מֵאֶרֶץ צִיָּה

Where Isaiah 4:2 and the Jeremiah/Zechariah "Branch" texts emphasize legitimacy and sonship — a shoot that belongs to its source — Isaiah 53:2 uses the companion word שֹׁרֶשׁ for the opposite emphasis: obscurity, hiddenness, a root pushing up out of ground that should not sustain growth at all. It is the same organic image-family Isaiah already used for David's line in 11:1 (נֵצֶר מִשָּׁרָשָׁיו, "a branch out of his roots") and 11:10 (שֹׁרֶשׁ יִשַׁי, "the root of Jesse"). The servant of chapter 53 is not introduced with a new botanical metaphor; he is introduced with the back half of the same one Isaiah has already used for the Davidic king three chapters earlier.