Von Cölln in his Biblische Theologie; by Thenius in Wiener's Zeitschrift, ii. 1; by Maurer and Knobel. The latter says: "Those who were zealous adherents of the Theocracy had a difficult position among their own people, and had to suffer most from foreign tyrants." The true worshippers of Jehovah were given up to mockery and scorn, to persecution and the grossest abuse, and were in a miserable and horrible condition, unworthy of men and almost inhuman. The punishments for sin had to be endured chiefly by those who did not deserve them. Thus the view easily arose that the godly suffered in substitution for the whole people.

(d.) The hypothesis which makes the priestly order the subject, has been defended by the author of: Ausführliche Erklärung der sämmtlichen Weissagungen des A. T. 1801.

(e.) The hypothesis which makes the collective body of the prophets the subject, was first advanced by Rosenmüller in the treatise: Leiden und Hoffnungen der Propheten Jehovas, in Gablers Neuestes theol. Journal, vol. ii. S. 4, p. 333 ff. From him it came as a legacy to De Wette (de morte Jes. Chr. expiatoria, p. 28 sqq.), and to Gesenius. According to Schenkel (Studien und Kritiken 36) "the prophetic order was the quiet, hidden blossom, which early storms broke." According to Umbreit, the Servant of God is the collective body of the prophets, or the prophetic order, which is here plainly represented as the sacrificial beast (1) taking upon itself the sins of the people. He finds it "rather strange that the Prophet who, in chap. lxvi. 3 (of course according to a false interpretation), plainly rejects sacrifice altogether, should speak of the shedding of the blood of a man, and, moreover, of a pure, sinless man, in the room of the guilty." The manner in which Umbreit seeks to gain a transition to the Messianic interpretation, although not in the sense held by the Christian Church, has been pointed out by us on a former occasion, in the remarks on chap. xlii. Hofmann (Schriftbeweis, ii. 1 S. 89 ff.) has got up a mixture composed of these explanations which refer the prophecy to the people, to the godly, to the prophetic order, and, if one will, of that also which refers it to the Messiah. He says: "The people as a people are called to be the servant of God; but they do not fulfil their vocation as a congregation of the faithful; and it is, therefore, the work of the

prophets to restore that congregation, and hence also the fulfilment of its vocation.-Prophetism itself is represented not in its present condition only, when it exists in a number of messengers and witnesses of Jehovah, in the first instance in Isaiah himself, but also in the final result, into which the fulfilment of its vocation will lead, when the Servant of Jehovah unites in His person the offices of a proclaimer of the impending work of salvation, and of its Mediator, and, from the shame and suffering attached to His vocation as a witness, passes over into the glory of the salvation realized in Him." In order to render such a mixture possible, everything is tried in order to remove the vicarious character of the sufferings of the Servant of God, since that character is peculiar to Christ, and excludes every comparison. "Of a priestly self-sacrifice of the Servant of God"—says Hofmann, S. 101, 2-"I cannot find anything. The assertion that the words, denote a priestly work, no longer requires a refutation. His vocation is to be the mediator of a revelation of God in words; and although the fulfilment of this vocation brings death upon Him, without His endeavouring to escape, this is not a proof nor a part of His priestly vocation. In just the same case is the assertion that the Messiah appears here as a King also." As long as we proceed from the supposition that the Prophet predicts truth, we are, by that very supposition, forbidden to distribute the property of the one among the many; but that is thus violently set aside. The Rationalistic interpreters have in this respect an easier task. They allow the substitution to stand; but they consider it as a vain fancy. The fact that Hofmann does not recoil from even the most violent interpretations, in order to remove the exclusive reference to Christ, appears, e. g., from his remark, S. 132, that "the chastisement of our peace" designates an actual chastisement, which convinces them of their sin, and of the earnestness of divine holiness, and thus serves for their salvation. Surely Gesenius and Hitzig's explanations are far more unbiassed.

2. Among the interpretations which refer the prophecy to a single individual other than the Messiah, scarcely any one has found another defender than its own author. They are of importance only in so far, as they show that most decidedly does the prophecy make the impression, that its subject is a real person,

not a personification; and, farther, that it could not by any means be an exegetical interest which induced rationalism to reject the interpretation which referred it to Christ. The persons that have been guessed at are the following: King Uzziah, (Augusti), King Hezekiah, (Konynenburg and Bahrdt), the Porphet Isaiah himself (Stäudlin), an unknown prophet supposed to have been killed by the Jews in the captivity (an anonymous author in Henke's Magazin, Bd. i. H. 2), the royal house of David which suffered innocently when the children of the unhappy king Zedekiah were killed at the command of Nebuchadnezzar (Bolten on Acts viii. 38), the Maccabees (an anonymous writer in the Theologische Nachrichten, 1821. S. 79 ff.) Even at this present time, this kind of explanation is not altogether obsolete. Schenkel thinks that "the chapter under consideration may, perhaps, belong to the period of the real Isaiah, whose language equals that of the description of the Servant of God now under consideration, in conciseness and harshness, and may have been originally a Psalm of consolation in sufferings, which was composed with a view to the hopeful progeny of some pious man or prophet innocently killed, and which was rewritten and interpreted by the author of the book, and embodied in it." Ewald (Proph. ii. S. 407) says: “Farther, the description of the Servant of God is here altogether very strange, especially v. 8 f., inasmuch as, notwithstanding all the liveliness with which the author of the book conceives of Him, He is nowhere else so much and so obviously viewed as an historical person, as a single individual of the Past. How little soever the author may have intended it, it was very obvious that the later generations imagined that they would here find the historical Messiah. We are therefore of opinion, that the author here inserted a passage, which appeared to him to be suitable, from an older book where really a single martyr was spoken of.--It is not likely that the modern controversy on chap. liii. will ever cease, as long as this truth is not acknowledged ;-a truth which quite spontaneously suggested itself, and impressed itself more and more strongly upon my mind." These are, no doubt, assertions which cannot be maintained, and are yet of interest, in so far as they show, how much even those who refuse to acknowledge it are annoyed

by a two-fold truth, viz., that Isaiah is the author of the prophecy, and that it refers to a personal Messiah.

At all times, however, that explanation which refers the prophecy to Christ has found able defenders; and at no period has the anti-Messianic explanation obtained absolute sway. Among the authors of complete Commentaries on Isaiah, the Messianic explanation was defended by Dathe, Doederlein (who, however, wavers in the last edition of his translation), Hensler, Lowth, Kocher, Koppe, J. D. Michaelis, v. d. Palm, Schmieder. In addition to these we may mention: Storr, dissertatio qua Jes. liii. illustratur, Tübingen, 1790; Hansi Comment. in Jes. liii., Rostock 1791 (this work has considerably promoted the interpretation, although its author often shows himself to be biassed by the views of the time, and specially, in the interest of Neology, seeks to do away with the doctrine of satisfaction); Krüger, Comment. de Jes. liii., interpret; Jahn, Append. ad Hermen. fasc. ii.; Steudel, Oberv. ad Jes. liii., Tübingen 1825, 26; Sack, in the Apologetik; Reinke, exegesis in Jes. liii., Münster 1836; Tholuck, in his work: Das A. T. im N. T.; Hävernick, in the lectures on the Theology of the Old Testament; Stier, in the Comment. on the second part of Isaiah.

II. THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE MESSIANIC

INTERPRETATION.

The arguments against the Messianic interpretation cannot be designated in any other way than as insignificant. There is not one among them which could be of any weight to him who is able to judge. It is asserted that the Messiah is nowhere else designated as the Servant of God. Even if this were the fact, it would not prove anything. But this name is assigned to the Messiah in Zech. iii. 8-a passage which interpreters are unanimous in referring to the Messiah-where the Lord calls the Messiah His Servant Zemach, and which the Chaldee Paraphrast

1

משיחא ויתגלי

explains by ND "Messiam et revelabitur;" farther, in Ezek. xxxiv. 23, 24, not to mention Is. xlii. 1, xlix. 3, 6, 1. 10. -It is farther asserted that in the Messianic interpretation everything is viewed as future; but that this is inadmissible for grammatical and philological reasons. The suffering, contempt, and death of the Servant of God are here, throughout, represented as past, since in chap. liii. 1-10, all the verbs are in the Preterite. It is the glorification only which appears as future, and is expressed in the Future tense. The writer, therefore, occupies a position between the sufferings and the glorification, and the latter is still impending. But the stand-point of the Prophet is not an actual, but a supposed one,-not a real, but an ideal one. In order to distinguish between condition and consequence, -in order to put sufferings and glorification in the proper relation, he takes his stand between the sufferings and the glorification of the Servant of God, and from that position, that appears to him as being already past which, in reality, was still future. It is only an interpreter so thoroughly prosaic as Knobel who can advance the assertion: "No prophet occupies, in prophecy, another stand-point than that which in reality he occupies." In this, e.g., Hitzig does not by any means assent to him; for he (Hitzig) remarks on chap. lii. 7: "Proceeding from the certainty of the salvation, the Prophet sees, in the Spirit, that already coming to pass which, in chap. xl. 9, he called upon them to do." And the same expositor farther remarks on Jer. vi. 24-26: "This is a statement of how people would then speak, and, thereby, a description of the circumstances of that time." But in our remarks on chap. xi. and in the introduction to the second part, we have already proved that the prophets very frequently occupy an ideal stand-point, and that such is the case here, the Prophet has himself expressly intimated. In some places, he has passed from the prophetical stand-point to the historical, and uses the Future even when he speaks of the sufferings, a thing which appears to have been done involuntarily, but which, in reality, is done intentionally. Thus there occurs in ver. 7, in ver. 10, and, according to the expla

nations of Gesenius and others, also

in ver. 12 while, on the other hand, he sometimes speaks of the glorification in the