Canter Bridge

Deep into one of the densest of Isaiah’s ‘servant songs’, the second paragraph reveals that YHWH’s servant is everybody’s slave.

Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, ‘Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’

Isaiah 49.7 (NRSV, emphasis added)

The italicized phrase turns the structure of the now familiar ‘servant of YHWH’—עבד יהוה—in a direction that context has anticipated but vocabulary has thus far not reached. Jacob/Israel, who belongs to the Redeemer of Israel, Israel’s ‘Holy One’, is also the עבד משלים: the servant/slave of rulers.

Israel’s vocation is a heavy load to bear.

Clearly, this servitude is temporary, but context suggests that it is of longue durée. Kings and princes shall stand in honor and prostrate themselves in abjection. Eventually. But not just yet.

Meanwhile, the servant of YHWH is ‘deeply despised, abhorred by nations, the slave of rulers’.

Convenient as it is for the reader to seek her repose in Jacob’s destination, the text demands that we contemplate the long, anguished road that in due course finally arrives there.

No one would choose this vocation, this identity, this forlorn victimhood. It is assigned, not by some impersonal force of nature or history, but by YHWH, who claims to cherish his servant and in this same passage to comfort and have passion upon his people (v. 13).

No wonder, then, the servant’s protest in the paragraph that already brightens the horizon, or perhaps rather darkens it.

‘But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’

Isaiah 49.14 (NRSV)

Every interpretive maneuver that levels the paradox of this servant of YHWH and of rulers betrays it instead.