The Real "Suffering Servant": Decoding a Controversial Passage in the Bible
2009; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0792-3910
Autores Tópico(s)Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
ResumoThe most controversial passage the Hebrew Bible is, arguably, Isaiah 53:1-7. For centuries, Jews and Christians have been debating the meaning of the so-called described these verses. A quick search of material on Internet sites reveals impassioned claims by various Christians who fervently believe the Servant question is Jesus, and equally fervent counterclaims by Jews who believe that the Servant is the Jewish people. As a prophet, the Christian argument goes, Isaiah foresaw the future coming of the Christian messiah who carried our affliction and in his bruises we were healed (Isa. 53:4-5). References to this text are made the New Testament, asserting the claim that Isaiah Chapter 53 prophesied the suffering of Jesus (see John 12:38, and Romans 10:16). Not so, runs the Jewish argument. The prophet makes it clear he is not speaking about future events. Rather, he is repeating an ancient Jewish belief, according to which God's servant is Jacob and, by extension, his descendants, the people of Israel. The implication of the Jewish argument is that the Jews suffer because of the misconduct of the world, and their suffering has a redeeming power for humankind. This may have been true prior to the time of Jesus, Christians might concede, but it is the death of Jesus on the cross that replaces the old Covenant and grants redemption to all people for all time. In centuries past, this kind of polemic often resulted violence, and many Jews suffered for it and even paid with their lives. Thankfully, this is no longer the case, and it is to be hoped that it is a thing of the past. Nevertheless, passions still run high over the question of the Suffering Servant, and the old animus of the polemic still rears its head, as was recently seen Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, considered by many to be anti-Semitic. One thing, how- ever, is clear. Both sides cannot be right. Clearly, Isaiah had someone mind, but we are not told who that someone is. In fact, what we have here is a tangle of issues that has never been resolved by biblical scholars. We are facing here, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous phrase about the Soviet Union, a riddle wrapped up an enigma. To be able to resolve the identity of the Suffering Servant we need to make a bold attempt to shed some light on both the riddle and the enigma; namely, the identity of the author of the text, his time and place, and the wider context of the preceding historical events and their consequence. To begin with, Isaiah Chapter 53 is not the Isaiah after whom the book is named. He is not the Isaiah of Chapters 1 through 39, who talks about world peace at the end of days, or tells us that the young woman [traditionally translated Christian Bibles as the virgin] is with child. Jewish interpretations of the Book of Isaiah have struggled for the past 2,000 years with the question of the identity of the author or authors of the second half of the book, that begins with Chapter 40. For one thing, it is quite clear that the second half refers to events around the time of the return from the Babylonian Exile, more than two centuries after the time of Isaiah. An early example (around the second century C.E.) of the awareness of an author different from the original one is found the Talmud a discussion of the order and authorship of the books of the Bible, which Isaiah is placed after Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Bava Batra 14b). The sages, however, are not comfortable with this arrangement and engage a discussion trying to solve this discrepancy. The question comes into sharper focus the work of medieval Jewish commentators. A century ago, Thomas Kelly Cheyne wrote: Two eminent Jewish rabbis, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Isaac Abravanel, were the first who showed a tendency to disintegrate the Book of Isaiah, but their subtle suggestion had no consequences. (1) Actually, they were preceded by Ibn Gikatilla, who is mentioned by Ibn Ezra his commentary on Isaiah 40:1. …
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