Canter Bridge

For an exhibition of the artistic complexity of Isaiah’s ‘servant of the Lord’, one need look no further than the book’s 42nd chapter.

By the time we cross the border into this section, the book called Isaiah has recently informed us that this servant is in some fashion Jacob/Israel:

But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend (Isaiah 41:8 ESV)

Now the text bolts down that reality by offering strikingly similar descriptions of YHWH’s engagement with the servant at the beginning and end of chapter 2. In between, the prophetic voice calls its audience to new sight, audition, and understanding and simultaneously insists that no population has been as blind or so deaf as this Jacob, this Israel, this servant.

It is present to begin where this chapter does, with the description of a servant most favored by YHWH himself.

Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. (Isaiah 42:1 ESV)

It has become a commonplace that the term הן—the same can be said of its longer form הנח—urgently draws our attention to what follows immediately. The words is often translated ‘Behold!’ or ‘(Now) look!’.

What one is meant to consider with particularly focussed attention is ‘my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in home my soul delights.’ The servant, we read, is the  beneficiary of a very special endowment, YHWH’s own spirit placed upon him (נתתי רוחי עליו). We are probably invited to consider this spirit, placed by YHWH upon the servant as the thing that will empower him for the audacious task of taking YHWH’s judgement to the ends of the earth, where it is eagerly awaited. It is the authorization that guarantees that the servant’s efforts, which the text suggests are long and exhausting, will indeed make the blind see and release captives from their slave-making darkness.

Again, the text, this time with particular words highlighted:

Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. (Isaiah 42:1 ESV)

The chapter’s oddly present tension consists in the fact that the servant himself—one must not let hold of the fact that the servant is somehow Jacob/Israel—is as blind as they come.

Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see! Who is blind but my servant, or deaf as my messenger whom I send? Who is blind as my dedicated one, or blind as the servant of the LORD? He sees many things, but does not observe them; his ears are open, but he does not hear. (Isaiah 42:18–20 ESV)

Now empowered by YHWH’s spirit resting upon him, the servant is both the opener of blind eyes and—at least in recent memory if not in the moment—a very blind man. He is both restored restorer and blind giver of sight, both the one who administer’s YHWH’s life-giving justice and the one most in need of such ministration.

Such rhetorical tension is perhaps not meant to be entirely resolved. Isaiah is not in the business of pandering simple truths.

But it is at least cast in new light a few verses later when the text takes up the theme of Jacob/Israel again, this time without explicitly labeling this people as ‘the servant’. It seems to be intent on describing the human causality behind the people’s blindness and to insist that Jacob’s restorer has until now been known to the people as their plunderer. That is, there are really only two protagonists on the stage, no matter how deliriously confusing the whirl of defeat and exile might have seemed.

The voice is no longer cast in YHWH’s first person, but rather in the illuminating narrative of an unidentified third person:

But this is a people plundered and looted; they are all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons; they have become plunder with none to rescue, spoil with none to say, ‘Restore!’ Who among you will give ear to this, will attend and listen for the time to come? Who gave up Jacob to the looter, and Israel to the plunderers? Was it not the LORD, against whom we have sinned, in whose ways they would not walk, and whose law they would not obey? So he poured on him the heat of his anger and the might of battle; it set him on fire all around, but he did not understand; it burned him up, but he did not take it to heart. (Isaiah 42:22–25 ESV)

Within the bounds of a complex and polyvalent set of images, causality is brought down to its simplest possible declaration: YHWH plundered Jacob/Israel because the people were so stubbornly rebellious.

I wish to draw attention now to the last of the verses just quoted, this time underscoring the words that ring with evident fitness alongside the description of YHWH’s giving of his spirit to his servant in the chapter’s first verse:

So he poured on him the heat of his anger and the might of battle (וישפך עליו חמה אפו ועזוז מלחמה); it set him on fire all around, but he did not understand; it burned him up, but he did not take it to heart. (Isaiah 42:25 ESV)

The relationship of YHWH to the servant/Jacob/Israel, the nature of the two admittedly distinct verbs of transference, and the preposition עליו (upon him) as a mediating element suggest to me that we have in this chapter a double vision of Jacob/Israel. That nation has lived for a considerable and pain-ridden time as the object of YHWH’s wrath because of it stubborn rebellion.

At the same time, Jacob/Israel now has a restorer, in contrast to the assertion in verse 2 that ‘they have become plunder with no one to rescue, spoil with none to say “Restore!”.’

It is YHWH who, when he restores his people, does not merely return them to a less inconvenient status quo, but rather turns that people into the world-wide agent of his restorative passion.

Israel, Jacob, the servant of YHWH …

These are one and the same, at least at the core of things if not in the reverberating force of the image in its uncontainable search for wider pertinence. Israel, Jacob, and the servant of YHWH are seen here with double vision.

From one angle, they are the hopeless, friendless objects of the ‘heat of YHWH’s anger’ (v. 25). Turn the kaleidoscope, and they become YHWH’s chosen, the delight of his soul, his newly commissioned redemptive agents who labor under the resiliating power of YHWH’s own spirit (v. 1).

The book called Isaiah will have more—much more—to say about YHWH’s servant. Not a word of it makes sense if the book’s 42nd chapter falls first from our grasp.