Keil and Delitzsch Commentary - Isaiah 53:4

Keil and Delitzsch Commentary - Isaiah 53:4 - 53:4

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Keil and Delitzsch Commentary - Isaiah 53:4 - 53:4

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Those who formerly mistook and despised the Servant of Jehovah on account of His miserable condition, now confess that His sufferings were altogether of a different character from what they had supposed. “Verily He hath borne our diseases and our pains: He hath laden them upon Himself; but we regarded Him as one stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” It might appear doubtful whether אָכֵן (the fuller form of אַךְ) is affirmative here, as in Isa 40:7; Isa 45:15, or adversative, as in Isa 49:4. The latter meaning grows out of the former, inasmuch as it is the opposite which is strongly affirmed. We have rendered it affirmatively (Jer. vere), not adversatively (verum, ut vero), because Isa 53:4 itself consists of two antithetical halves - a relation which is expressed in the independent pronouns הוּא and אֲנַחְנוּ, that answer to one another. The penitents contrast themselves and their false notion with Him and His real achievement. In Matthew (Mat 8:17) the words are rendered freely and faithfully thus: αὐτὸς τὰς ἀσθενείας ἡμῶν ἔλαβε καὶ τὰς νόσους ἐβάστασεν. Even the fact that the relief which Jesus afforded to all kinds of bodily diseases is regarded as a fulfilment of what is here affirmed of the Servant of Jehovah, is an exegetical index worth noticing. In Isa 53:4 it is not really sin that is spoken of, but the evil which is consequent upon human sin, although not always the direct consequence of the sins of individuals (Joh 9:3). But in the fact that He was concerned to relieve this evil in all its forms, whenever it came in His way in the exercise of His calling, the relief implied as a consequence in Isa 53:4 was brought distinctly into view, though not the bearing and lading that are primarily noticed here. Matthew has very aptly rendered נָשָׂא by ἔλαβε, and סָבַל by ἐβάστασε. For whilst סבַל denotes the toilsome bearing of a burden that has been taken up, נָשָׂא combines in itself the ideas of tollere and ferre. When construed with the accusative of the sin, it signifies to take the debt of sin upon one's self, and carry it as one's own, i.e., to look at it and feel it as one's own (e.g., Lev 5:1, Lev 5:17), or more frequently to bear the punishment occasioned by sin, i.e., to make expiation for it (Lev 17:16; Lev 20:19-20; Lev 24:15), and in any case in which the person bearing it is not himself the guilty person, to bear sin in a mediatorial capacity, for the purpose of making expiation for it (Lev 10:17). The lxx render this נשׂא both in the Pentateuch and Ezekiel λαβεῖν ἁμαρτίαν, once ἀναφέρειν; and it is evident that both of these are to be understood in the sense of an expiatory bearing, and not merely of taking away, as has been recently maintained in opposition to the satisfactio vicaria, as we may see clearly enough from Eze 4:4-8, where the עָוֹן שֵׂאת is represented by the prophet in a symbolical action.

But in the case before us, where it is not the sins, but “our diseases” (חָלָיֵנוּ is a defective plural, as the singular would be written חָלְיֵנוּ) and “our pains” that are the object, this mediatorial sense remains essentially the same. The meaning is not merely that the Servant of God entered into the fellowship of our sufferings, but that He took upon Himself the sufferings which we had to bear and deserved to bear, and therefore not only took them away (as Mat 8:17 might make it appear), but bore them in His own person, that He might deliver us from them. But when one person takes upon himself suffering which another would have had to bear, and therefore not only endures it with him, but in his stead, this is called substitution or representation - an idea which, however unintelligible to the understanding, belongs to the actual substance of the common consciousness of man, and the realities of the divine government of the world as brought within the range of our experience, and one which has continued even down to the present time to have much greater vigour in the Jewish nation, where it has found it true expression in sacrifice and the kindred institutions, than in any other, at least so far as its nationality has not been entirely annulled.

(Note: See my Jesus and Hillel, pp. 26, 27.)

Here again it is Israel, which, having been at length better instructed, and now bearing witness against itself, laments its former blindness to the mediatorially vicarious character of the deep agonies, both of soul and body, that were endured by the great Sufferer. They looked upon them as the punishment of His own sins, and indeed - inasmuch as, like the friends of Job, they measured the sin of the Sufferer by the sufferings that He endured - of peculiarly great sins. They saw in Him נָגוּעַ, “one stricken,” i.e., afflicted with a hateful, shocking disease (Gen 12:17; 1Sa 6:9) - such, for example, as leprosy, which was called נֶגַע κατ ̓ ἐξ (2Ki 15:5, A. ἀφήμενον, S. ἐν ἁφῆ ὄντα = leprosum, Th. μεμαστιγωμένον, cf., μάστιγες, Mar 3:10, scourges, i.e., bad attacks); also אֱלֹהִים מֻכֵּה, “one smitten of God” (from nâkhâh, root נך, נג; see Comm. on Job, at Job 30:8), and מְעֻנֶּה bowed down (by God), i.e., afflicted with sufferings. The name Jehovah would have been out of place here, where the evident intention is to point to the all-determining divine power generally, whose vengeance appeared to have fallen upon this particular sufferer. The construction mukkēh 'Elōhı̄m signifies, like the Arabic muqâtal rabbuh, one who has been defeated in conflict with God his Lord (see Comm. on Job, at Job 15:28); and 'Elōhı̄m has the syntactic position between the two adjectives, which it necessarily must have in order to be logically connected with them both.