Servant of the Lord

I. In the Old Testament

a. The ‘Servant Songs’
B. Duhm’s commentary on Isaiah (1892) distinguished four passages which have since been regarded as the ‘Servant Songs’: Is. 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12. Some scholars (e.g. S. Mowinckel) have gone so far as to assign these passages to a separate author and period from the surrounding text. Modern scholarship is generally agreed, however, that they are an integral part of Isaiah 40ff., with many echoes in neighbouring passages. The term ‘servant’ ({eb≈ed≈ occurs as frequently outside Duhm’s selected passages as within them (e.g. Is. 41:8f.; 43:10; 44:1f., 21; 45:4; 48:20), with reference to the nation of Israel. It is also used in the OT for individuals in a close relationship with God, such as the Patriarchs, prophets and kings, and particularly Moses and David (e.g. Gn. 26:24; Ex. 14:31; Dt. 34:5; 2 Sa. 7:5; Is. 20:3; Am. 3:7). But in the ‘Servant Songs’ a distinctive conception of ‘servanthood’ comes into sharper focus, so that without divorcing these passages from their context most scholars continue to speak of a ‘Servant figure’ as a distinct element in the prophet’s message; and the most distinctive element in this figure is that of obedient, undeserved suffering, leading to death, as the means of taking away the sin of his people and ‘making many to be accounted righteous’.
For a fuller treatment of the character and mission of the Servant in the context of the message of Is. 40ff., see *Messiah, I. b. 1.

b. The identity of the Servant
The following are the main lines of interpretation suggested.
1. Collective. The explicit description of Israel as God’s ‘servant’ both in the ‘Servant Songs’ (Is. 49:3) and in the surrounding text leads many to regard the Songs as a description of the prophet’s ideal for Israel, identifying the Servant either as the nation as a whole or, more probably, a pious remnant within the nation, with a mission to Israel (49:5f.), involving suffering to redeem the whole nation (53:4–6, 8, 11f.).
2. Individual. The language about the Servant is often strongly individual, describing the birth, suffering, death and eventual triumph of what is apparently a person rather than a group. Various historical identifications have been proposed, such as Moses, Jeremiah, Cyrus, Zerubbabel or the prophet himself. But the traditional interpretation, Jewish and Christian, is that the Servant is an ideal individual figure of the future, God’s agent in redeeming his people, i.e. the *Messiah. In later Palestinian Judaism this was the dominant interpretation (Hellenistic Judaism was apparently more favourable to a collective interpretation), so that the *Targum of Jonathan on Is. 53, while clearly embarrassed by the idea of Messianic suffering to the extent of drastically reconstructing the text to eliminate this implication, still explicitly identifies the Servant as the Messiah (see text in Zimmerli and Jeremias, The Servant of God2, pp. 69–71; and for other early Jewish interpretations, ibid., pp. 37–79).
3. Cultic. Some Scandinavian scholars find the background to the Servant in the Babylonian myth of the dying and rising god *Tammuz and its associated liturgy. The Servant would then be a mythological concept rather than a historically identifiable figure or group. The existence of such myth and ritual in Israel is, however, highly debatable.
4. ‘Corporate personality’. Interpretations 1 and 2 above reflect important characteristics of the texts: both collective and individual aspects are clearly present in the Servant figure. Most scholars today tend, therefore, to look for an exegesis similar to H. W. Robinson’s concept of ‘corporate personality’, i.e. the recognition that in the OT an individual (e.g. king or father) may represent and embody the group of which he is the head, so that he both is that group and yet can also be placed over against it as its leader. So the Servant is Israel (49:3), he sums up in himself all that Israel represents, and yet he is an individual with a mission to Israel (49:5f.) and his experiences on their behalf are the object of the nation’s interest (53:1–6). The close juxtaposition of 49:3 and 49:5f. shows that these two aspects of the Servant are inseparable. The individual character of the Servant is most clearly expressed in 52:13–53:12, so that in this passage ‘what began as a personification (has) become a person’ (Rowley), and here all the emphasis is on the vicarious nature of his suffering as a substitute for his people. But this role is only possible because he is Israel, as its representative head.

II. In the New Testament
Some recent scholarship (esp. M. D. Hooker; also C. K. Barrett, C. F. D. Moule) has argued that the Servant figure was a minor element in the NT understanding of Jesus’ redemptive work, and that the OT ground for his role of suffering and rejection was found rather in the ‘son of man’ of Dn. 7. It is pointed out that relatively few formal quotations from Servant passages occur in the NT, and that several of these quotations are of parts of the Songs which do not speak explicitly of suffering, or at least of redemptive suffering.
It is not legitimate, however, to restrict consideration to formal quotations, as allusive references are if anything even more impressive evidence of the influence of the Servant figure, and even where the words alluded to are not directly concerned with redemptive suffering, it is hard to believe that these passages could be referred to with no thought of their most distinctive theme and of its relevance to the mission of Jesus. Above all, it is indisputable that Is. 53 is by far the clearest indication of Messianic suffering in the OT, so that even if no explicit allusions to the Servant occurred, it would be very likely that this was the main source (together with certain psalms and parts of Zc. 9–13) of the repeated conviction that the Messiah must suffer, because ‘it is written’ of him. No such role of Messianic suffering is explicit in Dn. 7, nor did contemporary Jewish exegesis find it there.
In fact the explicit evidence of the influence of the Servant figure (esp. Is. 53, where the redemptive element is emphatic) is far from negligible.

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a. In the teaching of Jesus
Is. 53:12 is explicitly quoted in Lk. 22:37. There are further clear allusions to Is. 53:10–12 in Mk. 10:45 and 14:24. Mk. 9:12 probably echoes Is. 53:3, and other possible allusions have been found in Mt. 3:15 (cf. Is. 53:11), Lk. 11:22 (cf. Is. 53:12; not a very likely allusion) and in the use of paradidosthai (‘be delivered’) in Mk. 9:31; 10:33; 14:21 (cf. Is. 53:12). In addition the voice at Jesus’ baptism (Mk. 1:11), outlining his mission in terms of Is. 42:1, must have influenced Jesus’ thinking.
Note the concentration in these allusions on Is. 53, and particularly on vv. 10–12 where the redemptive role of the Servant is most explicit. In Mk. 10:45 and 14:24 in particular the vicarious and redemptive character of Jesus’ death is stressed, in terms drawn from Is. 53.

b. In the rest of the New Testament
The actual title ‘servant’ (pais) is confined to Peter’s speech in Acts 3:13, 26 and the prayer of the church in Acts 4:27, 30, but the influence of the Servant figure is clear also in 1 Pet. 2:21–25; 3:18, suggesting that it featured prominently in Peter’s understanding of Jesus’ mission. Paul’s explanations of Christ’s redemptive work often contain ideas, and sometimes verbal allusions, which suggest that he too saw Jesus’ work foreshadowed in Is. 53. (See e.g. Phil. 2:6–11; Rom. 4:25; 5:19; 8:3f., 32–34; 1 Cor. 15:3; 2 Cor. 5:21.) The use of ‘lamb of God’ by John (1:29, 36) also probably shows the influence of Is. 53:7. Heb. 9:28, ‘to bear the sins of many’, echoes Is. 53:12.
There are also a number of formal quotations from Servant passages, with reference to Jesus and the gospel, viz. Mt. 8:17; 12:18–21; Jn. 12:38; Acts 8:32f.; Rom. 10:16; 15:21. None of these is with specific reference to Jesus’ redemptive work, and some focus on other aspects of his mission, but all testify further to the early church’s conviction that the Servant figure, and particularly Is. 53, was a divinely ordained pattern for the Messianic mission of Jesus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. For the whole article: W. Zimmerli and J. Jeremias, The Servant of God2, 1965 (= TDNT 5, pp. 654–717).For section I: H. W. Robinson, The Cross of the Servant, 1926, reprinted in The Cross in the Old Testament, 1955, pp. 55–114; I. Engnell, BJRL 31, 1948, pp. 54–93; C. R. North, 4, 1948; J. Lindblom, 4, 1951; H. H. Rowley, The Servant of the Lord, 1952, pp. 1–88; S. Mowinckel, He That Cometh, 1956, pp. 187–257; H. Ringgren, The Messiah in the Old Testament, 1956, pp. 39–53.For section II: J. L. Price, Int 12, 1958, pp. 28–38; C. K. Barrett in A. J. B. Higgins (ed.), New Testament Essays in memory of T. W. Manson, 1959, pp. 1–18; O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament, 1959, pp. 51–82; M. D. Hooker, Jesus and the Servant, 1959; B. Lindars, New Testament Apologetic, 1961, pp. 77–88; C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, 1967, pp. 82–99; R. T. France, TynB 19, 1968, pp. 26–52, and Jesus and the Old Testament, 1971, pp. 110–132; J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology, 1, 1971, pp. 286–299.