The Servant, Immanuel, and the Reach of the Book

No prophetic book has been read more intently by Christianity, and the reason lies chiefly in Deutero-Isaiah. Its four Servant Songs portray a servant of the Lord who suffers, is despised and rejected, is wounded for our transgressions, and bears the sins of many, a figure the New Testament and the whole Christian tradition read as a prophecy of the suffering and death of Christ. In their original setting these songs are more plausibly read as describing the prophet, or the people of Israel personified, and Jewish interpretation has generally understood the servant as Israel; the two readings have been debated for two millennia.

First Isaiah supplied other seams mined by later readers: the Immanuel prophecy of a child to be born, taken up in Matthew's nativity; the vision of a shoot from the stump of Jesse on whom the spirit of the Lord rests; and the picture of a future peace in which the wolf lies down with the lamb and nations beat their swords into ploughshares.

A persistent legend, reflected in the letter to the Hebrews and elaborated in the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah, holds that the prophet was martyred under the wicked king Manasseh by being sawn in two. Between the historical prophet, the exilic poet of the servant, and the martyr of legend, Isaiah names one of the deepest wells from which the later traditions drew.