The application of the prophecy to the evangelic history is plain and appropriate.  Here is no double sense; no figurative language but what is sufficiently intelligible to every reader of every country.  The obscurities (by which I mean the expressions that require a knowledge of local diction, and of local allusion) are few, and not of great importance.  Nor have I found that varieties of reading, or a different construing of the original, produce any material alteration in the sense of the prophecy.  Compare the common translation with that of Bishop Lowth, and the difference is not considerable.  So far as they do differ, Bishop Lowth’s corrections, which are the faithful result of an accurate examination, bring the description nearer to the New Testament history than it was before.  In the fourth verse of the fifty-third chapter, what our bible renders “stricken” he translates “judicially stricken:”  and in the eighth verse, the clause “he was taken from prison and from judgment,” the bishop gives “by an oppressive judgment he was taken off.”  The next words to these, “who shall declare his generation?” are much cleared up in their meaning by the bishop’s version; “his manner of life who would declare?” i. e. who would stand forth in his defence?  The former part of the ninth verse, “and he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death,” which inverts the circumstances of Christ’s passion, the bishop brings out in an order perfectly agreeable to the event; “and his grave was appointed with the wicked, but with the rich man was his tomb.”  The words in the eleventh verse, “by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many,” are, in the bishop’s version, “by the knowledge of him shall my righteous servant justify many.”

It is natural to inquire what turn the Jews themselves give to this prophecy.* There is good proof that the ancient Rabbins explained it of their expected Messiah:+ but their modern expositors concur, I think, in representing it as a description of the calamitous state, and intended restoration, of the Jewish people, who are here, as they say, exhibited under the character of a single person.  I have not discovered that their exposition rests upon any critical arguments, or upon these in any other than in a very minute degree.

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* “Vaticinium hoc Esaiae est carnificina Rabbinorum, de quo aliqui Judaei mihi confessi sunt, Rabbinos suos ex propheticis scripturis facile se extricare potuisse, modo; Esaias tacuisset.”  Hulse, Theol.  Jud.  P. 318, quoted by Poole, in loc.

+ Hulse, Theol.  Jud. p. 430.
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The clause in the ninth verse, which we render “for the transgression of my people was he stricken,” and in the margin, “was the stroke upon him,” the Jews read “for the transgression of my people was the stroke upon them.”  And what they allege in support of the alteration amounts only to this, that the Hebrew pronoun is capable of a plural