More Insights from the book Rabbi Izaak M.

Monday, 11 October

The rabbis, for at least the last two thousand years (before that I don’t know) have been interpreting the Suffering Servant poem in Isaiah 53 as applying to themselves. Jews, collectively, are God’s Suffering Servant, they say; we Jews are suffering as punishment for our sins.

This book makes a very clear and obvious point I had never thought of: Isaiah specifically says the Suffering Servant is innocent. He has neither done nor said anything wrong. (v. 9) He is specifically not suffering for his sins. (The Prophet Daniel, in a passage I posted recently, makes the same point, saying Messiah will be cut off, but not because of Himself.)

This one verse undoes the traditional Jewish interpretation of the entire chapter.

More than that; it shows the misinterpretation to be willful, downright dishonest, insincere, because somebody among these scholars, all these thousands of years, has got to have noticed the huge contradiction. In fact, they must virtually all have noticed it. What sort of thing is this, to believe God inspired the Scriptures, and then be willing to twist them?!

P.S.) The Suffering Servant is innocent, has done nothing wrong. What sort of a man should or could that be, never to have sinned?