If there is one passage in the entire Hebrew Bible that generates more heat than light in the prophecy-fulfillment debate, it is Isaiah 52:13-53:12 — the so-called Fourth Servant Song. Christians claim it is a breathtakingly precise prediction of Jesus' crucifixion, written seven hundred years before the event. Most Jewish interpreters since the Middle Ages say it describes the nation of Israel suffering in exile among the nations — though, as we will see, the older rabbinic literature also reads parts of it of the Messiah, of Moses, and of the righteous sufferer. Scholars have been arguing about it for centuries, and the argument shows no signs of stopping.
Here is what I want to do in this article: walk you through the full history of interpretation, examine the actual text in its literary context, and explain why the critical scholarly consensus — which is not the Christian reading — is what it is. I am not going to pretend I do not have a position. I do. But I am going to show my work, cite specific scholars and specific arguments, and let you see why I land where I land.
The Text in Its Literary Context
Before we get to interpretive history, we need to talk about context — because context is precisely what gets stripped away in apologetic presentations of this passage.
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 does not exist in a vacuum. It sits within a larger section of the book of Isaiah — chapters 40-55 — that scholars call "Deutero-Isaiah" or "Second Isaiah." The standard critical view, dominant in the field since the late nineteenth century, is that these chapters were written by an anonymous prophet during the Babylonian exile (roughly 540s BCE), not by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem who authored much of chapters 1-39. This is relevant because the historical context of the exile shapes the meaning of the text.
And here is the critical point that must be understood before anything else: the word "servant" appears repeatedly throughout Deutero-Isaiah, and in multiple passages the servant is explicitly identified as Israel. Isaiah 41:8 — "But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen" (World English Bible). Isaiah 44:1 — "Yet listen now, Jacob my servant, and Israel, whom I have chosen." Isaiah 44:21 — "Remember these things, Jacob and Israel; for you are my servant." Isaiah 45:4 — "For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel my chosen." Isaiah 48:20 — "Yahweh has redeemed his servant Jacob."
That is five explicit identifications of the servant as Israel in the chapters leading up to the Fourth Servant Song. Five. The text names its servant, repeatedly and by name. That is real textual data, and it is data the Christian reading has to reckon with: the burden of proof falls heavily on anyone who wants to argue that the servant in chapter 53 is suddenly a different figure from the servant in chapters 41, 44, 45, and 48 — that the same author, writing to the same audience, using the same term, switched referents without telling anyone.
But I am not going to pretend this settles the question, because it does not. Honesty requires putting the strongest counter-evidence on the table, and the strongest is Isaiah 49:5-6. In that passage the servant has a mission directed at Israel. "Now Yahweh, he who formed me from the womb to be his servant, says to bring Jacob again to him, and to gather Israel to him... 'It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel. I will also give you as a light to the nations.'" Read plainly, the servant here is sent to gather and restore Israel — and an agent who acts upon Israel is hard to identify as Israel without contradiction. This is the single best argument for an individual reading of the servant, and it is why a number of serious critical scholars have never accepted that "servant" means "the nation" everywhere it appears.
There is a wrinkle. Isaiah 49:3 does say "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified" — which looks like it nails the servant down as the nation. But the word "Israel" in 49:3 has been questioned: it is missing from one medieval Hebrew manuscript (Kennicott 96), and some critics have treated it as an early scribe's explanatory gloss, since it sits awkwardly two verses before a servant whose job is to restore Israel. It stands in the rest of the manuscript tradition and in the Septuagint ("You are my slave, Israel," in the NETS translation), and most commentators keep it. Childs builds on it: at 49:3, he argues, an individual "has been designated as Israel." I flag this not to make the problem disappear by editorial fiat — that would be exactly the kind of move I criticize apologists for — but because the reader deserves to know the textual situation, including how thin the case for deleting the word is. So: the servant-as-Israel identifications are strong, but the relationship between the individual and collective dimensions of the servant is a real interpretive problem, not a solved one.
H.G.M. Williamson, in his study Variations on a Theme: King, Messiah and Servant in the Book of Isaiah, traces the servant motif through the entire book and shows how the concept develops and transforms across the different layers of the text — the royal/Davidic promises being, in his reading, progressively "democratized" and reapplied, with the servant figure emerging out of that process. Williamson is himself a Christian who affirms that Jesus legitimately fulfills the servant portrait as a canonical development (in his phrase, Jesus "fulfils, but does not thereby exhaust" the prophecy). I cite him here not as a witness against the Christian reading — he is not one — but for the narrower, well-established point that the servant language in the book grows out of the identity of Israel and shifts across the text's compositional history. That developmental picture is common ground; what one builds on it is where scholars part ways.
The Septuagint (2nd Century BCE)
The earliest translation of Isaiah into another language is the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation produced by Jewish translators in Alexandria, Egypt, beginning in the third century BCE with the Torah; the translation of Isaiah is usually dated to the middle of the second century BCE. The LXX version of Isaiah 53 is interesting precisely because it does not clearly identify the servant as the messiah. The translation is somewhat free in places and makes certain interpretive choices — for example, it turns the Hebrew "sicknesses" of 53:4 into "sins" ("This one bears our sins and suffers pain for us"), while at 53:10 it has the Lord wishing "to cleanse him from his blow" — softening the affliction rather than heightening it (NETS) — but it does not add any messianic titles or make any explicit connection to a future anointed king.
This matters because the LXX is our earliest witness to how Jewish readers understood the text. If there had been a well-established, pre-Christian messianic reading of Isaiah 53, we might expect the LXX translators — who were not shy about interpretive translation — to reflect it. They did not. The translation is ambiguous enough to support multiple readings, which is exactly what you would expect if there was no fixed consensus about the passage's referent at that time.
The great Isaiah scroll from Qumran — 1QIsaiah-a — preserves the text of Isaiah 53 in a Hebrew manuscript dating to approximately 125 BCE, making it our oldest surviving Hebrew copy. The text is remarkably close to the Masoretic text that Jews use today, with some minor variants (the most notable being a possible addition of "light" in 53:11 — "he will see light and be satisfied" — which also appears in the LXX and may represent the original reading).
But having the text is not the same as having an interpretation of the text — though, as we will see, a variant can sometimes carry one. The Qumran community preserved Isaiah 53, but what did they think it meant? We do not have a Qumran pesher (commentary) on this specific passage. The most ambitious attempt to find a pre-Christian "suffering messiah" in the scrolls is Israel Knohl's The Messiah Before Jesus. It is worth being precise about what Knohl actually argues, because it is routinely garbled. Knohl's thesis is not primarily a reading of Isaiah 53 at all. He argues, on the basis of the so-called Self-Glorification Hymn (a fragmentary text associated with the Hodayot/Thanksgiving Scroll), for a pre-Christian model of a catastrophic messiah — an exalted figure who is also rejected, suffers, is killed, and is raised after three days — which he tries to anchor in a historical individual, Menahem the Essene. Whatever one makes of it, it is a reconstruction of a messianic pattern, not a demonstration that anyone at Qumran read the Fourth Servant Song as a passion prediction. And it is contested at the foundations: his reconstruction of the partially preserved hymn is not widely accepted, and most specialists do not think the fragments will bear the weight he puts on them.
John J. Collins, the leading authority on messianism in the scrolls, surveys the relevant texts in The Scepter and the Star and concludes that there is no clearly attested pre-Christian Jewish concept of a suffering, dying, and rising messiah at Qumran — and, more pointedly, that the Targum, the most explicitly messianic ancient reading of the passage, "systematically subverts the references to the suffering of the servant" (a pattern we are about to see). Anyone can check this against Géza Vermes's standard translation, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English: no surviving Qumran text identifies the servant of Isaiah 53 with a dying-and-rising messiah.
The more modest candidates deserve naming too, because they are the serious ones. An Aramaic fragment, 4Q541, says of a priestly figure that he "will atone for the children of his generation," and that his enemies "will invent many [lie]s and fictions against him" (in Collins's translation). The great Isaiah scroll reads 52:14 with one extra letter — "I have anointed" where the Masoretic text has "marred" — which W. H. Brownlee took as a messianic variant built into the scroll itself. And Martin Hengel, in a long essay on the "effective history" of Isaiah 53 before Christianity, argued that the passage was more influential in pre-Christian Judaism than is usually allowed. Collins weighs 4Q541 at length and is not persuaded: its figure "does not atone by his suffering and death, as is the case with Isaiah's servant." His verdict on the corpus as a whole is that "the alleged allusions to a suffering messiah in the Scrolls disappear under examination."
What we can say is that the Qumran community, despite its intense messianic speculation and its detailed scriptural interpretation, did not produce any surviving text that clearly reads Isaiah 53 as a prediction of a dying and rising messiah. Given how many interpretive texts they did produce, this silence is significant. It is not proof that they never read it messianically — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — but it is a notable gap in the apologetic case.
Now we get to what is perhaps the most fascinating — and most misrepresented — piece of evidence in the entire debate. The Targum Jonathan is an Aramaic paraphrase of the Prophets, which reached its present form around the fourth or fifth century CE but contains traditions that may go back to the first or second century. Bruce Chilton, its modern translator, distinguishes an early Tannaitic framework from the later Amoraic, Babylonian layer that completed it.
The Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is explicitly messianic. It begins: "Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper." The servant is identified as the messiah in the opening line. Christian apologists cite this often, and the most thorough of them, Michael Brown, does not hide what follows. He tells his readers that the Targum reads the passage of the Messiah "as a warring, victorious king, even to the point of completely twisting the meaning of key verses" (Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 3). His argument is subtler than "the Jews once agreed with us." It is that the messianic reading "must have been quite prominent when the Targum was being formed, since it would have been much easier to not add the explicit reference to the Messiah (in 52:13) rather than to virtually rewrite the verses that seemed to contradict the expected role of the Messiah."
That is a fair argument, and its premise can be granted: the targumist plainly knew a messianic reading of the passage, and valued it enough to keep it while rewriting the verses around it. The question is what kind of messiah, and for that it is worth seeing exactly what the Targum does with the suffering. What it does cuts against the Christian reading.
The Targum systematically transfers the suffering away from the messianic figure, and it does so in two directions at once. The negatives in the Hebrew — the affliction, humiliation, sickness, and lowly appearance of the servant — are redistributed onto Israel and the people (their suffering in exile), while the language of punishment and destruction is reassigned to the wicked Gentile nations, who are handed over to judgment. The messiah in the Targum does not suffer. He does not bear anyone's sins. He does not get wounded for anyone's transgressions. What he keeps is intercession. In the Targum's 53:4 he prays for our sins, and they are forgiven for his sake; at 53:6 the Lord is pleased to forgive the sins of all for his sake; and at 53:12 he hands his life over to death — which Chilton reads as the Messiah having "risked his very life for the sake of his ministry," not as a death — and prays for the sins of many, so that the transgressors are pardoned for him. Chilton locates the Messiah's efficacy partly in the content of his message and partly in "God's personal acceptance of his prayer." Beyond that, he is glorified, exalted, and triumphant. The pain that the Hebrew puts on the servant is split between Israel (who bears the humiliation and affliction) and the wicked nations (who bear the punishment) — and the messiah, freed of the suffering, rebuilds the temple and reigns.
Take a concrete example. Isaiah 53:3 in the Hebrew (JPS 1917) reads: "He was despised, and forsaken of men, a man of pains, and acquainted with disease." The Targum does not let that fall on the messiah; the contempt and lowliness are redirected onto Israel and the nations rather than onto the messianic figure. Isaiah 53:5 in the Hebrew — "But he was wounded because of our transgressions, he was crushed because of our iniquities" (JPS 1917) — becomes in the Targum a statement about the temple being profaned because of Israel's sins, and the messiah is the one who rebuilds it, not the one who gets wounded. (A word on translation: JPS 1917 renders the Hebrew verb in 53:5 "wounded," as do the KJV and the ASV, while the World English Bible — the version this site quotes by default — reads "pierced," as does Young's Literal Translation. "Pierced" is the rendering the crucifixion-prophecy argument leans on hardest, since it conjures nails and a spear, and it is a defensible but interpretively loaded choice, which is why I quote JPS 1917 here. The Hebrew meḥolal (H2490) means pierced or wounded; the same consonants also spell a different verb, "to profane," which is how the Targum turns the wounded servant into a profaned sanctuary. The word does not single out crucifixion, and reading the cross out of it is a downstream theological move, not something the lexeme requires.)
This is extraordinary. The Targum gives us a Jewish messianic reading of Isaiah 53 — and it is the opposite of the Christian messianic reading. The same passage. The same word "messiah." A completely different theological conclusion. The Targum shows that you can read Isaiah 53 as messianic without concluding that the messiah suffers and dies vicariously. The messiah gets the glory. Everyone else gets the pain. Chilton analyzes this Targumic reading in detail in The Isaiah Targum (1987): the chapter is developed to refer to the Messiah, "but in no sense can the Messiah ... be said to suffer." He also warns against reading it simply as anti-Christian polemic. The Targum makes no attempt to deny that the Messiah "hand[ed] over his soul to the death" (53:12), as a translator bent on refuting Christians probably would have; "it would appear that such Christian claims were not in mind." So the Targum is evidence that "messianic" does not automatically mean what Christians think it means, rather than a rebuttal written against them.
So the Targum is actually evidence against the Christian reading, not for it. It shows that when ancient Jewish interpreters did read the passage messianically, they did not see what Christians see. They saw a triumphant messiah, not a suffering one. That is the answer to Brown. Grant him that the messianic reading was prominent. What was prominent was a messiah whose suffering had been reassigned to others, and the targumist preferred rewriting the verses to leaving the suffering on him. Brown's own phrasing gives the rest of the answer: the verses were rewritten because they "seemed to contradict the expected role of the Messiah." The Hebrew of 52:13 says only "my servant"; the targumist supplied "the Messiah" and then bent the passage to fit a messiah he already expected. That is evidence of what some Jews expected of a messiah, not of what Isaiah wrote.
The Babylonian Talmud (5th-6th Century CE)
The Talmud, in Sanhedrin 98b, contains a well-known passage in which various rabbis suggest names for the messiah. One answer, given in the name of "the Rabbis" collectively, is that the messiah's name is "the leper of the house of Rabbi" (Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, in the Davidson translation; the older Soncino translation has "the leper scholar"), based on Isaiah 53:4 — "surely he has borne our sickness and carried our suffering." This is a messianic reading that does connect the messiah to the suffering described in Isaiah 53.
Apologists cite this, and Brown makes the rabbinic messianic readings central to his case: "as many rabbis recognized through the ages," he writes, the individual of Isaiah 53 "was the Messiah." But there are a few problems with using it as evidence. First, the Talmud is a compendium of multiple opinions, many of which contradict each other. The fact that one answer among several identifies the messiah with the figure of Isaiah 53 does not make it the Talmud's settled reading; the same Talmud reads Isaiah 53:12 of Moses (Sotah 14a) and 53:10 of anyone "in whom the Holy One, Blessed be He, delights" (Berakhot 5a). The same passage offers several other names for the messiah based on different scriptural texts, and the Talmud makes no effort to harmonize them. Second, the Talmudic discussion is recorded five centuries after Jesus. It cannot be used to establish pre-Christian expectations without independent corroboration. Third, even this reading does not develop the full Christian theology — it does not describe a substitutionary atonement, a death on a cross, a resurrection on the third day, or any of the specific theological claims Christianity makes about Isaiah 53.
The Talmud is not alone. Ruth Rabbah 5:6, in one of Rabbi Yoḥanan's six readings of Ruth 2:14, takes Boaz's "dip your loaf in the vinegar" of the messianic king: "these are the afflictions, as it is stated: 'He was pained by our transgressions' (Isaiah 53:5)." Midrash Tanhuma (Toldot 14) proves the Messiah's greatness from 52:13: "He shall be exalted above Abraham ... lifted up above Moses." These readings are real, and Brown is right to cite them. They are also all later than the New Testament, and none has the Messiah die, let alone die to atone for others. In Ruth Rabbah the afflictions belong to a king whose kingship is taken from him for a time and then restored; in the Tanhuma the servant's exaltation is his reign.
Rashi and the Medieval Jewish Response (11th Century CE)
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki — Rashi — writing in eleventh-century France, consolidated and systematized the collective Israel interpretation of Isaiah 53. In Rashi's reading, the suffering servant is the Jewish people, suffering in exile among the nations. The "we" who speak in 53:1-6 are the nations of the world, who look upon Israel's suffering and finally realize — at the time of redemption — that Israel's suffering was not punishment for Israel's own sins but was somehow bound up with the sins of the nations themselves.
Christian apologists argue that Rashi's reading is late, and Brown's version of the argument is the strongest. He concedes that the Christian writer Origen records Jews reading the passage of Israel. But apart from "one passing reference in Midrash Rabbah (where part of one verse is interpreted with reference to the righteous)," he writes, "a specific identification of Isaiah 53 with Israel is not found in any Rabbinic literature until almost one thousand years after Jesus." As a claim about the rabbinic texts, that is largely true, and it is worth conceding. Rashi was certainly aware of Christian claims, and his reading of Isaiah 53 may well have been sharpened by them.
Two things follow from the concession, and neither is what Brown needs. First, the rabbinic corpus has no settled reading of the passage at all. As we have seen, it reads its verses of the Messiah, of Moses and of the righteous sufferer, so the absence of the Israel reading from it is not the presence of a Christian one. Second, the rabbis are not the only Jewish witnesses. Around 248 CE, eight centuries before Rashi, Origen reports a disputation in which his Jewish opponent "replied, that these predictions bore reference to the whole people, regarded as one individual, and as being in a state of dispersion and suffering" (Contra Celsum 1.55). And the reading is grounded in the text itself — in those five explicit identifications of the servant as Israel that I cited at the beginning of this article. Rashi systematized a reading that Jews were already making; he did not fabricate it.
The "Israel Can't Be the Servant Because Israel Isn't Innocent" Objection
This is the most common objection to the collective Israel reading, and it deserves a careful response. The argument goes: Isaiah 53 describes a servant who is innocent, who "had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth" (53:9), who suffers unjustly for the sins of others. But Israel is not innocent. The Hebrew Bible is relentless in condemning Israel's sins. Therefore, the servant cannot be Israel.
Its strongest form, as Brown puts it, adds two more points. The Torah promised that Israel would be smitten "for their own sins, not for the sins of the nations," and Israel's suffering brought "judgment rather than healing" on the empires that inflicted it. And 53:8 says the servant was "stricken for the disobedience of my people," which, Brown argues, "in context must refer to Israel," whether God or the prophet is speaking. Origen pressed the same verse against his Jewish opponents in the third century: "how is the man said to be led away to death because of the iniquities of the people of God, unless he be a different person from that people of God?"
The objection is understandable, but it has two answers, and the first concerns the speaker.
Who speaks in 53:1-6 is disputed; some critics hear the exiled community itself. But on the reading Rashi made standard, the passage is spoken by the nations — the "kings" and "many nations" mentioned in 52:15 who are astonished by the servant's exaltation. The nations are describing their perception of the servant. They previously assumed that the servant's suffering was deserved — that he was "struck by God" (53:4). Now they realize they were wrong. The servant's suffering was connected to their transgressions, not to the servant's own sins.
This is the nations' realization, expressed in the nations' voice. It does not require that Israel be literally sinless in an absolute theological sense. It requires that the nations, who had despised and dismissed Israel, come to understand that Israel's suffering in exile was not simply divine punishment for Israel's wickedness but was bound up with the broader drama of divine purpose among the nations.
Rashi's answer to "my people" is the one the strong form of the objection has to meet. His servant is not the whole nation without distinction but "My servant, Jacob, [i.e.,] the righteous among him" (on 52:13). At 53:8 he keeps the nations as the speakers — "the heathens ... will say this at the end of days" — so that "my people" is the speaking nation's own: "because of the transgression of my people, this plague came to the righteous among them." The innocence of 53:9 is, for him, the refusal "to accept idolatry" under persecution. That is a coherent collective reading of every verse the objection cites, including the one Origen and Brown press hardest. It does not prove the collective reading right. It does mean the objection cannot settle the question.
The Individual-Prophet Reading
There is a third option that should be mentioned: some scholars argue that the suffering servant is an individual historical figure — not the messiah, but the prophet Deutero-Isaiah himself, or perhaps some other specific person. This reading takes the individual language of the passage seriously (the servant appears to be a single person in many verses) while avoiding the messianic identification that the text itself does not make.
Williamson, in the "Israel, the Servant and the Nations" chapter of Variations on a Theme, traces how the servant role first given to Israel becomes, after Israel's failure to respond, in 49:1-6 a role for the prophet himself, or for the prophet together with a group around him. On that account the individual language grows out of the servant-Israel theology rather than standing apart from it. This kind of layered, developmental reading is characteristic of modern critical scholarship, which recognizes that biblical texts often have complex compositional histories and that a passage can mean different things at different stages of its literary development. To be fair to Williamson, he draws the opposite practical conclusion from the one I am building toward: for him the developmental trajectory of the servant motif sets the stage for Jesus to read his own mission in its light, and he affirms that christological fulfillment as a legitimate canonical development. I am borrowing his compositional analysis, not his theology. The point I want is only that the individual language in the passage is real and has to be accounted for — a point on which scholars who disagree about almost everything else can agree.
Brevard Childs belongs here too, though not as a simple opponent of the Israel reading. In his Isaiah commentary (Old Testament Library), Childs — working from his canonical, final-form approach — reads the servant of chapter 53 as an individual figure who carries Israel's title. "I am not suggesting that collective Israel has been replaced by an individual prophetic figure," he writes; "the servant always remains Israel, but Israel is now understood ... as embodied in a suffering, individual figure." Part of his reasoning is exactly the tension I flagged earlier: the servant has a mission to Israel (cf. 49:5-6), which makes a flat servant-equals-Israel equation hard to sustain in the final shape of the book. Childs is also, as a confessing Christian interpreter, willing to identify that servant with Jesus at the level of the canon's theological witness. So he is a useful corrective in two directions at once: against the assumption that "critical" automatically means "collective Israel," and against the assumption that reading the servant as an individual is somehow a uniquely apologetic move. It is not. It is a mainstream critical option.
The individual-prophet reading has the advantage of accounting for the personal, individual language in Isaiah 53 without requiring the messianic identification that the text never explicitly makes. The servant is never called "messiah" in Isaiah 53. He is never called "son of David." He is never described as a king. He is never said to establish a political kingdom. The messianic identification is imported from outside the text, not generated by it.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
To put this together: we have a passage — Isaiah 52:13-53:12 — that describes a servant who suffers and is eventually vindicated. The immediate literary context identifies the servant as Israel at least five times, even as 49:5-6 pulls in the other direction by giving the servant a mission to Israel. The earliest translation (LXX) does not read it messianically. The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the text but offer no surviving messianic interpretation, and Collins, the leading specialist, finds no pre-Christian suffering-and-rising messiah there, though 4Q541 and a variant in the Isaiah scroll keep the question open for some. The Targum Jonathan reads it messianically but transfers the suffering away from the messiah, leaving him an intercessor. The Talmud and the midrashim contain several readings connecting the messiah to the passage, alongside readings of Moses and the righteous. Rashi systematizes the collective Israel reading.
And here I have to be honest about the shape of the scholarly landscape rather than flattening it to fit my conclusion. Critical scholarship is not unanimous for the collective Israel reading. It is genuinely divided between a collective (Israel) reading and an individual reading — the individual line runs through serious names like Mowinckel, C. R. North, and R. N. Whybray, and it is a fully mainstream critical option, not a fringe or apologetic one. The collective-Israel reading is dominant in medieval and later Jewish interpretation — Rashi and those who followed him — more than it is a settled verdict of modern criticism. What critical scholars across that internal divide do overwhelmingly reject is the specifically Christian reading: that Deutero-Isaiah was predicting the vicarious atoning death and bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. On the collective-versus-individual question they argue; on "this is a coded prediction of the Christian gospel" they do not, because nothing in the passage's own setting generates that framework. That is the consensus that actually exists, and it is narrower and more honest than "they all think it's Israel."
Even the most explicit ancient messianic reading — the Targum, which names the servant "my servant the Messiah" — does not support the Christian reading, because it does not apply the suffering to the messianic figure. The Targum shows that "messianic reading" and "Christian reading" are not synonyms. You can identify the servant as the messiah and still conclude that the messiah does not suffer. The Jews who produced the Targum did exactly that.
One more scholar belongs in this summary: Morna Hooker. Her study Jesus and the Servant (1959) is often cited loosely, so it is worth being careful about what she actually argued — because it is not what apologists, or for that matter careless critics, sometimes claim. Hooker's book is not principally an argument about whether the Old Testament servant "is" collective Israel. Its subject is the New Testament: against Joachim Jeremias, and broadly in line with C. K. Barrett's skepticism, she argued that the Servant Songs of Deutero-Isaiah were far less formative for early Christology than scholars had assumed — that the church did not simply find a ready-made "suffering servant messianism" lying in the text and apply it. The relevant point I take from her is therefore a methodological one: the early church's application of Isaiah 53 to Jesus was a creative theological interpretation, not an obvious or inevitable reading the text hands you on its surface. That is a claim about how Christians used the passage, and it stands. I do not cite Hooker as a witness for any particular identification of the Old Testament servant — that is not the question her book set out to answer.
The Christian reading of Isaiah 53 requires you to detach the servant from the five explicit identifications as Israel in the surrounding chapters, then identify the servant as the messiah despite the absence of any messianic title or royal language in the passage, then read the servant's vicarious suffering — which the text does describe, and which Rashi applies to Israel — as the once-for-all atoning death of one man, and finally connect the passage to the specific historical events of Jesus' crucifixion. Each of these steps involves an interpretive choice that is not demanded by the text itself. Taken together, they constitute a reading that is possible — in the sense that you can make the words fit if you are sufficiently motivated — but that is not the most parsimonious reading of the passage in its literary and historical context.
The reading that requires the fewest leaps is one that stays inside Deutero-Isaiah's own world — whether you land on the servant as exilic Israel, destined for vindication and restoration, or on the servant as an individual figure (the prophet, or another sixth-century person) bound up with that national drama. My own weight is on a corporate or corporate-individual reading, because of those five identifications and the exilic setting; but I want to be clear that the individual reading is a respectable competitor, and the honest verdict against the Christian reading does not depend on settling that internal Jewish-versus-individual question. What both of these in-context readings share is that they account for the passage without importing a theological framework — the incarnation, a Roman crucifixion, a bodily resurrection on the third day, and a single death atoning for the world — that the author of Deutero-Isaiah could not have had in mind. Vicarious suffering, by contrast, is in the poem. At 53:10 the servant's soul is made "an offering for sin" (the Hebrew is ʾāšām (H817), a guilt offering), and at 53:12 "he bore the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors." Rashi reads that of Israel: the servant "was chastised with pains so that all the nations be atoned for with Israel's suffering." How strongly the poem means it is disputed among critics — R. N. Whybray denied that it teaches vicarious suffering at all, and Bernd Janowski argues that it does — but the idea is there in the text to be argued about. The framework is not in the text. That framework, not the choice between Israel and an individual servant, is what gets read into the text from the outside.
That is one writer's assessment. But it is an assessment grounded in the text, in the history of interpretation, and in the work of scholars who have spent their careers on this material. The forced choice is this: do you read Isaiah 53 in its own context, with its own literary signals, on its own terms? Or do you read it as a prediction, written for events nearly six centuries later, by the lights of people who were already convinced that Jesus was the messiah and were searching the scriptures for confirmation? The first approach is scholarship. The second is apologetics. (A Christian may still read the poem canonically, as Childs and Williamson do, as a portrait that Jesus fulfils — but that is a declared theological reading, not a claim about what the prophet foresaw.) They are not the same activity, and they do not lead to the same conclusions.
