Till now he has spent his strength only in the bosom of his own people, which is always inclined to fall away from Jehovah and from itself:  heedless of reproach and suffering he has laboured unweariedly in carrying out the behests of his Master and has declared His word.  All in vain.  He has not been able to avert the victory of heathenism in Israel, now followed by its victory over Israel.  Now in the exile Jehovah has severed His relation with His people; the individual Hebrews survive, but the servant, the people of Jehovah, is dead.  Then is the Torah to die with him, and truth itself to succumb to falsehood, to heathenism?  That cannot be; truth must prevail, must come to the light.  As to the Apostle Paul the Spirit is the earnest of the resurrection of those who are born again, so to our author the Torah is the pledge of the resurrection of Israel, the justification of the servant of Jehovah.  The final triumph of the cause, which is God’s, will surpass all expectations.  Not only in Israel itself will the Torah, will the servant of Jehovah prevail and bring about a regeneration of the people:  the truth will in the future shine forth from Israel into the whole world, and obtain the victory among all the Gentiles (xlix. 6).  Then it will appear that the work of the servant, resultless as it seemed to be up to the exile, has yet not been in vain.

It is surely unnecessary for me to demonstrate how uncommonly vivid, I might say how uncommonly historical, the notion of the Torah is as here set forth, and how entirely incompatible that notion is with “the Torah of Moses.”  It might most fitly be compared with the Logos of the prologue of John, if the latter is understood in accordance with John x. 35, an utterance certainly authentic, and not according to Philo.  As Jesus is the revelation of God made man, so the servant of Jehovah is the revelation of God made a people.  The similarity of their nature and their significance involves the similarity of their work and of their sufferings, so that the Messianic interpretation of Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12 is in fact one which could not fail to suggest itself. 1

****************************************** 1.  The personification is carried further in this passage than anywhere else, and it is possible that the colours of the sketch are borrowed from some actual instance of a prophet-martyr:  yet the Ebed Jahve cannot have a different meaning here from that which it has everywhere else.  It is to be noted that the sufferings and death of the servant are in the past, and his glorification in the future, a long pause lying between them in the present.  A resurrection of the individual could not be in the mind of the writer of Isaiah xl seq., nor do the details of the description, lii. 12 seq., at all agree with such an idea.  Moreover, it is clear that liv. 1-lvi. 8 is a kind of sermon on the text lii. 13-liii. 12; and there the prophecy of the glorification of the servant has reference to Zion.  See Vatke, p. 528 seq. *******************************************