The reading tradition reflected in our Masoretic Text separates 49.7 off from 49.1-6. Additionally, 49.7 begins with a ‘speaker marker’ (‘Thus says YHWH…’) that has evidently been regarded as a gentle separator of what follows from what has gone before.
Nevertheless, the content of 49.7 all but clamors to be read in relationship with verses 1-6.
The chapter’s first section presents the servant of YHWH protesting his own fatigue and incapacity for large tasks.
And (YHWH) said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’
But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God.’
Isaiah 49.3-4 (NRSV)
Curiously, YHWH’s response is to inform his servant of the even larger mission that lies before him.
And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength—he says, ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’
Isaiah 49.5-6
The displacement of the ‘tribes of Jacob’ as the be-all and end-all of the servant’s commission in favor of a greater mission to illuminate ‘the nations’ is so radical a departure from expectation that the translator of Septuagint Isaiah will not abide it. The Greek translation of Hebrew Isaiah was executed for the sake of Greek-speaking Jewish communities in Egypt at about 150 years B.C.E. The individual charged with the monumental task of rendering the Hebrew Isaiah scroll in Greek evidently can not bring himself to disparage the mission of YHWH’s servant to dispersed Jews. Instead of the Hebrew text’s vision of the servant’s restoration of Israel as a ‘small thing’, the Septuagint translator offers us:
καὶ εἶπέν μοι Μέγα σοί ἐστιν τοῦ κληθῆναί σε παῖδά μου τοῦ στῆσαι τὰς φυλὰς Ιακωβ καὶ τὴν διασπορὰν τοῦ Ισραηλ ἐπιστρέψαι·
And he said to me, ‘It is a great thing for you to be called my servant so that you may set up the tribes of Iakob and turn back the dispersion of Israel.’
Isaiah 49.6 (NETS, emphasis added to reflect emphasis in Greek text)
Returning to the Hebrew text, verse 7—the indication of a new paragraph notwithstanding—appears to address the conundrum that is established when a global commission is laid upon such weary shoulders. After all, it is not merely the case that the servant has protested his own exhaustion, admittedly alongside his confidence that YHWH’s provision is sufficient (v. 4). It is also the case that the servant in his profound identification with Jacob’s exiled tribes cannot claim much credibility among the nations whom his exertions are meant to enlighten.
Notwithstanding, the prophet has YHWH adumbrate yet another Isaianic reversal of fortunes that will implicate the servant’s exhaustion and his lack of credibility among gentiles.
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)
One senses here the innate tension between restoration of a lost and longed-for stasis, on the one hand, and the incursion of an entirely new arrangement, on the other. The prophet intuits a reversal so profound that the servant cum Israel will soon stand at the very head of the now submissive nations.
Yet the tensions are felt in multiple directions rather than just one. If it seemed for a moment that restoration of Jacob/Israel was too small a matter, it now appears that Jacob is to be quite grand as kings and princes stand to honor her and bow to submit to her.
What is more, the relationship between the illumination of the nations and their submission to Jacob/Israel is a complex matter, one that I think plays a part in a wider argument that the gentile nations’ reconfigured and submissive relationship to Israel is intended for their well-being and is therefore to be welcomed by them.
In the light of such a complex and radical promise, it is no wonder that Isaiah’s recurring plea is that little Jacob should forget the former things and open heart and mind to a new thing. The prophet’s imagined future, it would seem, could not exist without the remembered past. Yet neither can it remain defined by what Israel has known thus far. Or experienced. Or been.
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