The Suffering Servant — Isaiah 52:13–53:12
Five stanzas with a confession at the centre. An Ethiopian asked whom they described; a Nephite prophet had already answered, and died for it.
“Of Whom Speaketh the Prophet This?”
A treasurer from Ethiopia, reading this chapter in his chariot, asked what every reader of it asks sooner or later: “of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?” (Acts 8:32–35).
It is still a fair question, because Isaiah does call Israel “my servant” (49:3), and many Jewish readers take this Servant to be the nation. Does the song allow it? The Servant is stricken “for the transgression of my people” (53:8), so he and the people are two parties, and he “had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth” (53:9) — while Isaiah opened his book calling Israel “a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers” (1:4). So who is he? The Book of Mormon answered the eunuch’s question over a century before Philip did, in a king’s court, and the man who answered it was burned.
Five Stanzas, and “We” at the Centre
The song begins at 52:13; the chapter break falls three verses late. Its fifteen verses fall into five stanzas of three verses each, and the Chiasmus Exchange sets them out as a mirror (chiasmusxchange.com):
Isaiah 52:13–53:12 — five stanzas
A (52:13–15) — my servant “shall be exalted and extolled”
B (53:1–3) — “a tender plant”; “we esteemed him not”
C (53:4–6) — “he hath borne our griefs … the iniquity of us all”
B′ (53:7–9) — “as a lamb to the slaughter”; cut off and buried
A′ (53:10–12) — “my righteous servant”; “a portion with the great”
The frame is his exaltation, the inner pair his life and his death, and the centre a confession.
Is it a true chiasm? The site’s own editors admit they have been “swimming in deep water” with this passage, and that its shape may follow “the changing voices rather than the chiastic parallels.” Fair enough — but the five stanzas are not in dispute, and the voices are the point: the LORD speaks in the outer stanzas (“my servant”), and in between a group speaking as “we” makes a confession.
How often does each party appear at the centre? In the King James text of 53:4–6 the Servant is referred to seven times (he, him, his) and the speakers ten times (we, our, us), alternating, often inside a single line: “he hath borne our griefs.”
Then something happens that most readers never notice. After verse 6 the word “we” never appears again — not once in the last six verses. The confessors fall silent, and in the very next verse the Servant is silent too: “yet he opened not his mouth.” The grammar performs the exchange.
Pierced, Crushed, and Healed by One Stripe
Verse 5 is the centre of the centre, and every line of it holds both parties:
Isaiah 53:5 — synonymous parallelism
he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed.
The blows land on him; the peace and the healing land on us.
“Wounded” is meholal, pierced; “bruised” is meduka, crushed; “chastisement” is musar, chastening or correction. And “stripes” is singular, so that Young’s Literal Translation reads “by his bruise there is healing to us.” One wound, and a whole people healed.
Now read verse 10 beside it: “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief.” “Bruise” is the same verb as verse 5, daka, and “put him to grief” is heheli, from chalah, to be sick — Young’s renders it “He hath made him sick.” What the Servant carried for us in verses 4 and 5 is exactly what comes down on him in verse 10.
How could that please the LORD? The verse answers itself: “he shall see his seed.” The pleasure was in what the suffering would buy, and the Son chose it too, “the will of the Son being swallowed up in the will of the Father” (Mosiah 15:7).
Griefs That Were Sicknesses — How Alma Read Verse 4
English readers hear “griefs” and “sorrows” as feelings, but the Hebrew words are physical. “Griefs” is choli, the ordinary word for sickness and disease. “Sorrows” is makob, pain. Young’s gives the verse as “Surely our sicknesses he hath borne, And our pains — he hath carried them.”
Matthew read it that way. After Jesus “healed all that were sick,” he wrote: “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses” (Matthew 8:16–17). So did a prophet in Zarahemla about eighty years before Christ:
“And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people. … that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”
“The word … which saith.” Alma is quoting a text. No Old Testament verse says it as plainly as Isaiah 53:4, and Alma gives the words beneath the English, pains and sicknesses, where the King James Bible Joseph Smith read in 1829 said “griefs” and “sorrows.” Then he supplies the reason Isaiah leaves unstated. Why carry sickness and pain he had not earned? “That he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people.” Isaiah tells what He bore; Alma tells why.
Elder David A. Bednar, teaching from these verses: “There is no physical pain, no spiritual wound, no anguish of soul or heartache, no infirmity or weakness you or I ever confront in mortality that the Savior did not experience first” (“Bear Up Their Burdens with Ease,” April 2014). Isaiah 53 covers sin, and it covers the hospital bed too.
All We like Sheep, and One Lamb
The centre stanza ends with a flock and the next opens with a lamb: we are the sheep that wandered, and he is the lamb that did not. Verse 6 begins and ends with the same Hebrew word, kullanu, “all of us,” and the King James keeps the frame: “ALL we like sheep … the iniquity of us ALL.” Every straying sheep is inside the verse, and all of it lands on one man.
The English hides a second link between those two verses:
Isaiah 53:6 and 53:12 — one Hebrew verb, paga
“the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (hiphgia)
“and made intercession for the transgressors” (yaphgia)
The verb means to fall upon, and also to plead for someone. Our iniquity fell on him; then he stepped in for us.
He pleaded on the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And he pleads still, as “the advocate with the Father”: “Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin” (D&C 45:3–5).
And the silence of verse 7? Before Pilate “Jesus yet answered nothing; so that Pilate marvelled” (Mark 15:3–5). Think who was silent: the boy who had astonished the doctors in the temple could have answered every charge and turned their own law against his accusers, and did not.
The Priests Asked About Feet; Abinadi Answered with the Servant
In King Noah’s court the priests questioned Abinadi “that they might cross him,” and one asked what Isaiah 52:7–10 meant: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings” (Mosiah 12:19–24). Their quotation ended with the arm: “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm.” Abinadi’s answer begins with the same arm: “Yea, even doth not Isaiah say: Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” (Mosiah 14:1).
The priests asked about the messengers; he answered with the One the messengers announce, reciting the whole Fourth Servant Song. Then he joined lines Isaiah had left apart. “Who shall declare his generation?” asks 53:8, since a man cut off young leaves no descendants. “He shall see his seed,” says 53:10. Abinadi put them side by side:
“And who shall be his seed? … all those who have hearkened unto their words, and believed that the Lord would redeem his people … these are his seed, or they are the heirs of the kingdom of God.”
The prophets are his seed too: “Are not the prophets, every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression … I say unto you that they are his seed” (15:13). And then he walks the priests straight back to their own verse. These seed “have published peace,” and “O how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet!” — and most beautiful of all are the feet of “the founder of peace, yea, even the Lord” (15:14–18).
That is the answer to the priests. Israel had become “a seed of evildoers”; the Servant would have a seed of his own. King Benjamin’s people heard it too: “ye shall be called the children of Christ … this day he hath spiritually begotten you” (Mosiah 5:7). Those who take his name are accounted his seed, and they are his.
Now hold Abinadi to his own definition. A prophet who opened his mouth and did not fall into transgression is the Servant’s seed, and after three days in prison he died by fire, “having sealed the truth of his words by his death” (Mosiah 17:20). One young priest in that room, Alma, “believed the words which Abinadi had spoken” (17:2). The Servant saw his seed in that court on the day the court killed his prophet.
The Lamb of Chapter 53 and the Winepress of Chapter 63
Isaiah’s pictures of the Messiah seem to pull apart. One is a king on “the throne of David” (9:7); one is a lamb led to the slaughter; and one is a warrior in red: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me” (63:3). Which is he? Both. Many in Jesus’ day looked for the king and missed the lamb; the mortal Messiah came as the lamb, and the millennial Messiah comes as the king. Two comings resolve it.
Nor is the winepress only judgment. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland read Isaiah 63:3 as the Atonement itself: “I speak of the Savior’s solitary task of shouldering alone the burden of our salvation” (“None Were with Him,” April 2009). The lamb of chapter 53 and the treader of chapter 63 did one work, ALONE (see Red in His Apparel).
Key References
- Mosiah 14–15 — Abinadi’s recital of Isaiah 53, then his exposition: the Father and the Son, the seed, the beautiful feet.
- Alma 7:11–13 — pains and sicknesses.
With Your Own Name in the Pronouns
Who are the “we” of Isaiah 53? The people who hid their faces and esteemed him not. The confession starts there, and so can yours. Read verses 4 through 6 again with your own name where the text says “our” and “we.” Surely he hath borne my griefs; he was wounded for my transgressions; the LORD hath laid on him my iniquity.
Is that too personal a way to read a prophecy about all mankind? Alma did not think so. He said the Savior would know “according to the flesh” how to succor his people, and flesh is lived one person at a time; the Savior was born, suffered, and died as an individual, and his atonement reaches each person the same way.
The chapter that describes the loneliest man in scripture ends with a crowd: his seed, his portion with the great, the many he justified. You can be one of them.
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