Chapters 40–55 of Isaiah speak often of the Lord’s servant (ʿebed). Usually the servant is plainly the nation of Israel: “thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen” (Isa. 41:8). But four passages describe a servant who seems to be an individual, with a mission to Israel as well as to the nations, and who suffers for others. Since the end of the nineteenth century these passages have been called the Servant Songs.1 The name is modern; nothing in the text marks them off. But the songs do form a sequence, and reading them together shows something that reading them one at a time can hide.
Where the songs are
Scholars agree on where each song begins but not always on where it ends, because the verses that follow a song respond to it.23 The passages below include those verses, so nothing is left out.
| Song | Passage | Who speaks | In the Book of Mormon |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Isa. 42:1–9 | The Lord, about the servant | Not quoted |
| Second | Isa. 49:1–13 | The servant | 1 Ne. 21 |
| Third | Isa. 50:4–11 | The servant | 2 Ne. 7 |
| Fourth | Isa. 52:13–53:12 | The Lord, then a chorus (“we”), then the Lord | 3 Ne. 20:43–45; Mosiah 14 |
How the songs build
Read in order, the songs tell a story. The servant’s suffering grows from song to song: in the first he is gentle and unbroken; in the second he is discouraged; in the third he is beaten and spat upon; in the fourth he dies. His mission grows at the same time: justice for the nations, then the gathering of Israel and light to the Gentiles, then a word for the weary, and finally bearing “the sin of many.” And the songs move from speaking about the servant to letting him speak for himself, and then to the confession of those who finally understand him.
The first song: the gentle servant
Isa. 42:1–9. The Lord presents His chosen one: “Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him.” His mission is to “bring forth judgment to the Gentiles,” but his manner is quiet. He won’t shout in the street, and “a bruised reed shall he not break.” He is also persistent: “He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth.”
The contrast later in the same chapter is deliberate. There the Lord asks, “Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I sent?” (Isa. 42:19). Israel, the servant nation, has failed at its calling; the servant of the song will not.4 Matthew quotes the song in full as fulfilled in Jesus’s quiet ministry of healing (Matt. 12:15–21).
The second song: a light to the Gentiles
Isa. 49:1–13. Now the servant speaks, to the whole world: “Listen, O isles, unto me.” The Lord called him before birth and hid him like a sharpened arrow in a quiver. For the first time the servant admits discouragement: “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought” (verse 4). The Lord answers by enlarging his task. Restoring Israel is “a light thing”; he will also be “a light to the Gentiles… my salvation unto the end of the earth” (verse 6).
This song holds the puzzle at the center of the whole debate. The Lord calls the servant “Israel” (verse 3), yet sends him “to bring Jacob again to him” (verse 5). The servant is Israel, and has a mission to Israel.5
Nephi’s text opens with lines not in the King James Version, addressed to “ye that are broken off and are driven out… that are scattered abroad” (1 Ne. 21:1), and Nephi read the chapter to his brothers as a prophecy of the scattering and gathering of their own family (1 Ne. 22).6 Simeon echoed verse 6 over the infant Jesus: “A light to lighten the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32). And Paul and Barnabas applied the same verse to their own mission: “so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles” (Acts 13:47).
The third song: the servant who listens
Isa. 50:4–11. The servant has “the tongue of the learned,” literally of a disciple, because every morning the Lord wakes his ear to listen. What he hears leads him into suffering: “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting” (verse 6). He does not turn back. He sets his face like flint and trusts that the God who vindicates him is near. The word “servant” doesn’t appear in these verses, but verse 10 refers back to “the voice of his servant.” Jacob read the chapter to the Nephites (2 Ne. 7), and the Gospels describe Jesus being struck and spat upon in the same terms (Matt. 26:67).
The fourth song: the suffering servant
Isa. 52:13–53:12. The longest song begins with the Lord announcing the servant’s exaltation, in words Isaiah elsewhere reserves for God: he will be “exalted and extolled, and be very high” (compare Isa. 6:1). Then a chorus confesses that they despised the servant and took his suffering as God’s punishment, only to realize “he was wounded for our transgressions.” He goes silently “as a lamb to the slaughter,” dies, and is buried; yet afterward “he shall see his seed” and “make intercession for the transgressors.”
This is the song the New Testament quotes most. Jesus applied it to Himself (Luke 22:37), and Philip taught the Ethiopian official from it (Acts 8:32–35). In the Book of Mormon, the risen Savior quoted its opening (3 Ne. 20:43–45), and Abinadi quoted all of chapter 53 in his defense before King Noah’s court and explained it phrase by phrase (Mosiah 14–15).7 The chapter pages for Isaiah 52 and Isaiah 53 comment on the song verse by verse.
Who is the servant?
When the Ethiopian official read the fourth song, he asked Philip, “of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?” (Acts 8:34). Readers have given three main answers.
- Israel as a people. Isaiah calls Israel the servant many times (Isa. 41:8; Isa. 44:1; Isa. 49:3), and the nation did suffer in exile. On this reading, the “we” of chapter 53 are the nations, astonished to learn that the people they despised suffered for their sake. This has been the main Jewish interpretation since at least the Middle Ages, and a Jewish scholar was already arguing for it in the third century.8
- An individual in Isaiah’s world, such as the prophet himself, a persecuted prophet like Jeremiah (who called himself “like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter,” Jer. 11:19), or a suffering king. One proposal ties the songs to King Hezekiah’s near-fatal illness (Isa. 38). It is one theory among many, though it has the merit of placing the songs in Isaiah’s own lifetime.9
- The Messiah. The ancient Aramaic paraphrase of Isaiah, the Targum, begins the fourth song with “my servant the Messiah.”10 The New Testament identifies the servant with Jesus.
Each reading explains some features of the songs and struggles with others. The collective reading fits verse 3 of the second song (“Thou art my servant, O Israel”) but not verse 5, where the servant is sent to Israel, or the fourth song, where he is stricken “for the transgression of my people” (Isa. 53:8), is innocent, and dies and yet lives on.
Latter-day Saints read the songs first of all as prophecies of Jesus Christ, as the Book of Mormon does. But the Restoration is also comfortable with prophecy that is fulfilled more than once, and Nephi taught his people to “liken all scriptures unto us” (1 Ne. 19:23). Read that way, the servant is a pattern. Israel was called to be God’s servant and a light to the nations. Jesus Christ fulfilled that calling perfectly, as the one faithful Israelite who bore the sins of others. And those who follow Him share in the calling, as Paul and Barnabas did when they applied the second song to themselves. The Savior Himself applied the language of the fourth song to a latter-day servant who would be “marred” and healed (3 Ne. 21:10). Latter-day Saints have usually taken that servant to be Joseph Smith; others have read it as Christ, or as the Book of Mormon itself.11 The text does not settle which.
A fifth song?
Some scholars add Isa. 61:1–3 to the list: “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek.” The speaker is not called a servant, but his anointing by the Spirit echoes the first song. Jesus read this passage in the synagogue at Nazareth and announced, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:16–21).
Sources
- Bernhard Duhm, Das Buch Jesaia, Göttinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1892. ↩
- Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40–66: A Commentary, Old Testament Library. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969. ↩
- Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah, Anchor Bible, 3 vols. New York: Doubleday, 2000–2003. ↩
- John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 2 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986–1998. ↩
- Shalom M. Paul, Isaiah 40–66: Translation and Commentary, Eerdmans Critical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. ↩
- Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch, eds., Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, Provo, UT: FARMS, 1998. ↩
- Jeffrey R. Holland, Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997. ↩
- Origen, Against Celsus (Contra Celsum), c. AD 248, book 1, chapter 55. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. ↩
- Scripture Central, “Why Did Isaiah Prophesy of a Suffering Messiah?”, KnoWhy #648, Feb. 17, 2023. ↩
- Bruce D. Chilton, The Isaiah Targum: Introduction, Translation, Apparatus and Notes, The Aramaic Bible 11. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987. ↩
- Scripture Central, “Who is the Servant Spoken of by Christ?”, KnoWhy #215, Aug. 21, 2019. ↩
Further reading
- Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah, Old Testament Library. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.