Canter Bridge

It is too easy from a comfortably remote position to criticize the versification of the Hebrew Bible that is a legacy of Middle Ages scholarship. Usually, close inspection throws up considerations that explain the decisions that were made, even when they do not entirely justify them.

Still, the bifurcation of the fourth ‘servant song’ and its collocation across two chapters (Isaiah 52.13—53.12) is an indefensible tragedy. The piece simply must be read as a unity.

When one does so—happily, the editors of the NRSV and other modern Bibles encourage the reader in this direction—a number of high-level observations become possible. I deal with just one of them in this moment.

The opening line is breathtaking in its identification of YHWH’s servant with one of the key components of YHWH-elevating vocabulary in Isaiah.

In the light of the trauma that YHWH’s servant endures in the subsequent verses, it was perhaps necessary to clarify from the outset that the adventure ends well. Nevertheless, the terms of the exaltation represent a stunning application of Isaianic YHWH descriptors to the servant himself.

I refer here to ירום ונשא (‘he shall be exalted and lifted up’). Apart from ‘the Holy One of Israel’, the language of רם ונשא is the Isaiah tradition’s preferred language for specifying YHWH’s incomparability. The two words are applied to YHWH’s throne in what I consider to be programmatic fashion in the generative vision at 6.1. After dozens of instances in which the two terms (and even more often, one or the other) is artfully maneuvered, רם ונשא becomes something very near to an alternative name for YHWH himself.

For thus says the high and lofty one (כי כה אמר רם ונשא) who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Isaiah 57.15 (NRSV, emphasis and interpolated Hebrew text added)

The climactic and most famous fourth servant song—a designation that is unfortunate chiefly for its marginalization of servant motifs that fall outside of their arbitrarily drawn lines—thus declares in its opening syllables a remarkable elevation of the servant. It seems to me best to see this as an inclusion of YHWH’s servant within the counsel or purpose (עצה) of YHWH himself.

The suffering of the servant is then made all the more astonishing, not least his unenviable plight of being crushed by YHWH himself, because it sits so uncomfortably alongside the opening declaration that YHWH’s servant occupies YHWH-like conceptual altitudes and acquires via an eventual elevation YHWH-like majesty (if this is how the yiqtol + v-qatal + v-qatal sequence in 52.12 imply).

No wonder, then, the enduring fascination across religious boundaries of this irrepressibly evocative poem.