Arguably, the famous ‘parting of the ways’ between synagogue and church—between those Jewish communities that did not see in Jesus of Nazareth a reason for altering the evolving trajectory of Israel and those who saw it as that and more—can be mapped over a handful of biblical texts. If so, then the famous Servant Song that is Isaiah 53 (more precisely, 52.13-53.12) must figure prominently among its peers in such a collection.
Yet our too fast and our contextually inattentive readings of this text blind us to veiled allusions and subdued connections with other Isaianic texts.
Take, for example, the Song’s brief survey of the Servant’s unpromising origins in 53.2. Though not the beginning of the poem, it is the first reversion to incipience after an opening series of three verses (52.13-15) that capture midpoints and endings as a kind of orientational prelude.
53.1-2 then remarks upon the inscrutable divine purpose that is at work in this enigmatic Servant figure before moving on to address whence he comes.
Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
Isaiah 53:1-2 (NRSV)
The horticultural and/or arboreal imagery and the reference to an unpromising substratum cannot fail to remind the careful reader of the ‘holy seed’ that remains after the tree that is Israel has been felled at the end of the books’ Vision of Visions in chapter six. Nor the branch of the Lord (צמח יהוה) at the outset the vision in Isaiah 4, with its parallel assurance about the ‘fruit of the land’. Nor should we miss allusion to the Spirit-saturated branch that grows from Jesse’s similarly fallen tree in 11:1.
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
Isaiah 11:1-2 (NRSV)
This metaphorical allusiveness binds the fourth Servant Song to those earlier references to new and tender life that springs eventually from the detritus of disaster. In doing so, it also normalizes the intense personification or personalization of the fourth Song, since chapter 11 moves in quite similar directions although without the emphasis on the Servant’s unattractiveness or YHWH’s odd crushing of him that we find in chapter 53.
Admittedly, the detail of dry ground (ארץ ציה) appears for the first time here as the matrix of new life. But that hardly distances the overall impression that this fourth Servant Song traffics on the notion of destroyed antecedents to life and/or unpromising conditions for its renewal.
The Servant motif appears to be cut from the same cloth as early metaphors for a New Israel, springing up precisely where reasonable hope had been abandoned.
Canter Bridge 
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