Isaiah 53:10

How this passage is read within its own context.

On the critical reading, the asham vocabulary is real but establishes only that the Servant's death is described in cultic, substitutionary terms — not that it predicts Jesus specifically. The Greek tradition renders the term more loosely (in the sense of 'concerning sin'), and a consistently sacrificial reading of the Servant's death is not the mainstream of pre-Christian Jewish interpretation, so appeals to it as settled background overstate the evidence. On this view the NT writers drew on an existing sacrificial vocabulary to interpret Jesus' death after the fact, rather than matching a forecast supplied in advance. The correspondence is theologically significant but is retrospective interpretation, not fulfilled prediction.

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

On the messianic-fulfillment reading, Isaiah 53:10 uses the technical Levitical term asham (the guilt offering of Leviticus 5:14-6:7) to describe the Servant's life given for the guilt of others, giving this line the most explicitly sacrificial vocabulary in the fourth Servant Song. Jesus' saying that he came to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28) and Paul's claim that Christ redeemed believers from the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13) are read as the fulfillment of that sacrificial pattern. Because the OT text here reaches for actual cultic terminology rather than generic suffering language, defenders regard it as a specific, substitutionary forecast that Christian atonement theology then claims as realized. The later shadow-and-fulfillment argument about the Levitical offerings in Hebrews is cited in support.