Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2003-2004
Session #4

Scripture Forum
Session #4
Goucher College
January 9, 2004

Introduction to the discussion:

   At this point in the program, the group is still looking at texts that underlie the Passion accounts in the Gos-pels. The text to be discussed in this session is Isaiah 53. (The group was provided with this text in two English translations [the NRSV and JPS], in Hebrew, and in Greek. It was noted that in translating the more obscure parts of this text, the JPS translation takes its cue from Jewish commentators to a greater degree than does the NRSV translation.)
   Because scientific study of a text undertaken by people trained in seminary or the academy usually has little to do with the way congregants and students understand a text when they first approach it, partici-pants were asked to take a few minutes to note some of the ways in which they believe congregants or students would be likely to understand Isaiah 53.

The discussion begins:

• Jewish responses:
• Congregants would groan over another passage from Isaiah ("I never understand Isaiah; who's he talking about?"), and they would find this text "supremely irrele-vant." [Much later in the discussion there was an objection to the text's being cate-gorized as "supremely irrelevant," so it was then described as "not a particularly impor-tant theological text."]
• People have never seen this text and they never will.
• What Jews are familiar with is what is in the liturgy. This text is not part of the liturgy, and it's not hard to speculate on why this passage is not a haftarah [a reading from the prophetic books that follows the reading from the Torah].
• Jews could come to be familiar with this text through discussion with Christians.
• This text is presented to high school students so that they can deal with the claims of Christian missionaries. The text
  is presented from a historical perspective
  in which it is explained that the suffering servant is Israel.
• Question: Do students resonate with the process at work here, that something is initiated that allows for the prospering of the servant and his offspring?
• Response: No, the text is not presented in that kind of depth.
• Another response: Students don't have the resonance of the Jews as a suffering people.
• Christian responses to the original question:
• Some young people would have the notion that being despised and suffering are things to be attained. The abuse of this notion, especially in Roman Catholic piety, is more harmful than helpful.
• Congregants would read this passage as being about Jesus without any assistance from clergy.
• Congregants would understand this text in terms of the crucifixion and would not understand why other people couldn't see that.
• Pentecostals would see the first four verses of the text as being about faith healing.
• Students who don't know this text (and many don't) would think of it as being about God being very cruel to somebody.

A free-flowing discussion begins at this point:

• This text is like a "mini-Job chapter": Bad things happen to good people, and you have to have hope.
• This text is not used as a haftarah because of its use as a proof-text for Jesus. It's easier just to avoid the text altogether.
• The rabbis didn't avoid all the proof-texts; some of the Christian proof-texts are used as haftarot.
• One Jewish participant thinks that not using this text was intentional because the rabbis were very sensitive to how the text would be read.
• Another participant suggested that, even though the text did not work liturgically, people might still have been familiar with it because when the texts were chosen people studied more.
• There is nothing redemptive in this text. You
  want a haftarah to end with a happy thought.
  The Hebrew text is not exactly coherent, which would be another reason for not using it.
• It is difficult to connect this text with a Torah passage. Connections are made, for example, by using specific words for links, or names mentioned in the text are connected with names in Torah.
• It was pointed out that a connection has been made between this text and Moses. The follow-
  ing passage was read from Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity, by Donald Juel (p. 123):

   R. Simlai expounded: Why did Moses our teacher yearn to enter the land of Israel? Did he want to eat of its fruits or satisfy himself from its bounty? But thus spake Moses, "Many precepts were commanded to Israel which can only be fulfilled in the land of Israel. I wish to enter the land so that they may all be fulfilled by me." The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him, "Is it only to receive the reward (for obeying the commandments) that thou seekest? I ascribe it to thee as if thou didst perform them"; as it is said "Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bare the sins of many, and made intercession for the trans-gressors." "Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great" -- it is possible (to think that his portion will be) with the (great of) later generations and not former generations; therefore there is a text to declare, "And he shall divide the strong," i.e., with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who were strong in Torah and the commandments. "Because he poured out his soul unto death" -- because he surrendered himself to die, as it is said, "And if not, blot me, I pray thee, etc." "And was numbered with the transgressors" -- because he was numbered with them who were condemned to die in the wilderness. (b. Sotah 14a) [Footnote: The translation is from the Soncino edition of the Babylonian Talmud, ed. Epstein.]


• The theological view is classic, used over and over again by the rabbis.
• The story of the Ten Martyrs is part of the peni-tential prayers on Yom Kippur, and the story of the binding of Isaac is read on the second day of Rosh ha-Shanah. The rabbis don't have any problem with death as vicarious atonement.
• Question: Because of the liturgical placement of the text, I cannot hear it without thinking about Jesus, or apart from vicarious atonement, but is this text about vicarious atonement?
• Response: What about v. 10? ["Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the LORD shall prosper."]
• Objection to the response: Look at v. 10 in the JPS translation. ["But the LORD chose to crush him by disease, That, if he made himself an offering for guilt, He might see offspring and have long life, And that through him the LORD's purpose might prosper."]
• Another response: Look at verse 8. ["By a per-version of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgres-sion of my people."]
• Objection to the response: What is described in
  v. 8 are the consequences that follow; vicarious atonement is an overlay.
• Question: To what extent is vicarious atonement part of Judaism?
• The answer to that question is not cut and dried. The midrashim and the poetic interpretation of the binding of Isaac, in which Isaac dies and is resurrected, suggest an element of vicarious atonement.
• Initial mention was made of a link between vicarious atonement and the "merits of the fathers" [zekhut avot; the notion that the pious deeds of ancestors, particularly Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, secure blessings for their descend-ants], but later in the discussion it was stated categorically that "merits of the fathers" is not vicarious atonement. What the "fathers" did was not vicarious atonement but making the covenant possible. What happened to the scapegoat on Yom Kippur was vicarious atonement.
• One commentary asserts that Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu [Lev. 10] were guiltless and died for the sins of the people. The notion of vicarious atone-ment is there in Judaism, but Jews don't talk about it.
• A Jewish participant spoke of a statement in the siddur [the prayer book] which asserts that it is remembering what Isaac did in submitting to the binding that gives the Jew the right to stand before God and pray every day.
• What Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob went through is not vicarious atonement.
• The whole book of Leviticus is vicarious atone-ment. Isaiah 53 is a core concept in Judaism, but when it was taken over by Christians it became diminished in Judaism. Vicarious atonement, re-demptive suffering are especially emphasized in Judaism when Jews suffer.



• How Isaiah 53 functions at Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church:

   (1) This text is read liturgically on Good Friday. The emotional valence of the text is profound: The sanctuary has been stripped (the night before) and a large wooden cross has been brought in; the Good Friday service is stark and somber; and the church is cold and dimly lit. This is an incredibly powerful moment to hear Isaiah 53 read, followed by a reading of the Gospel.
   (2) The text is one of the most exquisite pieces in Handel's Messiah, which is also part of the mix.
   (3) To church members of a certain age, texts like Isaiah 53 were important in the (Vietnam) anti-war movement. By baptism a Christian is identified with Christ (see citations below*). A Christian, therefore, is to be in the world as Jesus was in the world, being faithful to what God has revealed to us in Jesus. As a consequence, a Christian may be despised and rejected for doing good. (Repeat: This is a consequence of doing good; one does not do good in order to suffer.) Isaiah 53 was a text of consolation for anti-war protesters who suffered the consequences of their actions.
   *"Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father,
so we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4 [Paul]). "When you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead" (Colossians 2:12 [not Paul]).
   Questions based on the above: Is it possible
for Isaiah 53 to be about Jesus without fore-shadowing Jesus? Can we recover from this text meaning that is authentic to the Christian proc-lamation without attaching supersessionism to it? As a post-resurrection person, where do I look for the meaning and significance of what God did in Jesus?
   This text is a template that illuminates the experience of the risen Christ and helps Christians understand the theology of what Jesus was about. Recovering this text for Christianity is a big chal-lenge.
• In the Baptist liturgy, this text would be read and then followed by the hymn "O Sacred Head Sore Wounded." If you start by looking for texts that explain what happened [and find Isaiah 53], that's valid. If you start by looking at Isaiah as a fore-shadowing of what happened, that's not valid.
• Jewish response: If you want to find an associa-tion with Jesus that is not foreshadowing, you need to find an independent meaning of the text. What you want to do you cannot do.
• Christian response to the response: [What we want to do] we cannot do alone, which is one of the reasons we have Jewish-Christian dialogue.
• The text explains suffering in this world and divine justice, and [Jews] can take it as a template. Christians can also take this text as a template by saying, "We have an example of somebody this happened to." Christians have Jesus; Jews have Job.
• We don't have any interpretations of Isaiah 53 in Judaism that don't know the Christian interpre-tation.



• Another Christian participant wants to ask, not what this text says about the crucifixion, but what it says about the God who acted in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
• Response: Jesus isn't the only point of the revela-tion. It's possible to do want you want to do in a responsible way.
• Question: How would you approach the task? What would be the content?
• Response: Suffering was not something new. Jesus was not the first person who died. We would need to show the larger picture.



• When we use these texts liturgically we need to address supersessionism directly in context before we take the texts any further theologically. We're talking about various definitions of atonement without defining what we mean. It would be interesting to explore how Christians and Jews differ in their understandings of sacrifice. Do we read this text and the binding of Isaac as human sacrifice?
• Sacrifice is not vicarious atonement. It is way to reestablish relationship with God. It is a gift that you have to pay for.
• The original meaning of atonement is apotheosis.
• A sin offering doesn't require blood. There is a sliding scale fee all the way down to grain. Sacri-fice is not vicarious in the normative process of
  sin and guilt offerings; it is vicarious only on Yom Kippur.
• The discussion then turned (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) to the custom of kapporos, a ritual per-formed between Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur. In this ritual the sins of the individual are symboli-cally transferred to a live fowl (a rooster for a man and a hen for a woman), which is swung around the head (while the individual says the appropriate words), ritually slaughtered, and given to the poor to be eaten. Money given to the poor may be sub-stituted for the fowl. [Note that this custom is neither biblical nor rabbinic in origin.]
• That ritual does get back to an original concept: Sin was physical.
• Question about the scapegoat: Does the goat bear the sin or does the goat become sin?
• The burning of chametz ("leaven") before the
  start of Passover and the tashlikh ceremony on Rosh ha-Shanah, in which people turn out their empty pockets or empty bread crumbs out of their pockets over moving water, symbolically casting away their sins, incorporate some of the notions being discussed.
• We cannot read the text without hearing all the voices. How would a "neutral person" understand the text?
• One participant then mentioned "korban," another word for "offering" that occurs in Leviticus (Va-yikra') and Numbers (Bemidbar), pointing out that the verbal form means "to draw near," i.e., to draw near to God and restore relationship.
• That is Jesus' purpose in atonement theology.



• Question: What do v. 4 -- "struck down by God"
  -- and v. 10 -- "it was the will of the LORD" -- reveal about God?
• An adherent of an Eastern religion reading this text would think that Jews and Christians are crazy. There is a profound divide here, a watershed notion that can't be bridged: that Christ died for the sins of man and the only way to atone for sins is through Jesus.
• The divide has to do with the transformational power Christians attach to God's will being mani-fest in one person taking on the sins of the world, thereby changing the world.
• As far as Judaism is concerned, the concept is not fallacious; the identity of the person is fallacious.
• Isaiah 53 is used by the rabbis, but with no sense of the Christian usage and only incidentally.
• We need to understand that Christian midrash is as valid as Jewish midrash, that we draw meaning from a text to say what Judaism is, what Chris-tianity is, and who God is.
• There are some parallels in how we go about doing interpretation, but the actual meaning we get from the text -- God's working through a person's death to take away the sins of the world -- has a con-trast so stark that we are unintelligible to each other.
• You got the idea right but the person wrong. It's not unintelligible. Jews understand atonement; it's incarnation that Jews don't understand.
• Ignaz Maybaum is the only Jewish thinker who tried to use Isaiah 53 to interpret what happened to the Jewish people, but his thinking is not accepted by other Jews.
• How are we made right with God? How do we
  make it right as individuals and communities?
  This is where the divide is between Judaism and Christianity. The ideas are not so different, but the way we work this out is different.
• One Jewish participant suggested that this is a crucial text for Christians, and Christians want Jews to think that it is an important text. Two Christian participants immediately responded: No.
• The discussion about sacrifice and atonement is extremely relevant [as opposed to "supremely irrelevant"] and important.
• But that discussion, from the Jewish standpoint,
  is not based on this text, which is an important point.

Final thoughts:

• One participant suggested putting up a list of Jewish and Christian metaphors of atonement,
  or a list of Christian metaphors of atonement (which are categorized by theologians) and asking for a Jewish response. This has been designated as a task for a future session.
• There was a reference to the "transformational power of suffering." This was followed by the statement that Isaiah 53 was not a particularly important text until it began to be used in 14th-century iconography, perhaps because of a need to seek for meaning in the midst of the trauma of suffering in the bubonic plague.
• Question: Are there any Jews around the table who think that Judaism has a theology of suf-fering?
• Question: Did Judaism ever have a theology of suffering?
• Response: No. Perhaps this is a weakness in Judaism. Judaism has a response to suffering:
  You can learn from it, but nothing explains it.
• The ennoblement of suffering is a perversion
  of what the suffering of Christ is about. Peter explains that if you do what you're supposed to do, you may suffer, and in that way you are like Christ; but you don't seek suffering ("For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps" 1 Peter 2:19-21.).

Return to Index

Who We Are :: What We Do :: Events Calendar
Clergy and Educators :: Scholars' Corner :: Newsletter
Information Resources :: Get Involved :: Home

The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies
956 Dulaney Valley Road, Baltimore, MD 21204
410.494.7161 / fax: 410.494.7169
email: Info@icjs.org