Link to this page

https://gebible.app/messianic-prophecies/catalog/isaiah-53-9-266

Messianic Prophecies

Isaiah 53:9

This passage comes from the wider catalog — a broader, more lightly curated list than the core set. Both readings are shown as peers; GEBible takes no side.

Show this passage in

WEB

Isaiah 53:9

They made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Read in context

Show the surrounding verses

Surely he has borne our sickness and carried our suffering; yet we considered him plagued, struck by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray. Everyone has turned to his own way; and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, yet when he was afflicted he didn’t open his mouth. As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he didn’t open his mouth.

He was taken away by oppression and judgment. As for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living and stricken for the disobedience of my people?

They made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it pleased Yahweh to bruise him. He has caused him to suffer. When you make his soul an offering for sin, he will see his offspring. He will prolong his days and Yahweh’s pleasure will prosper in his hand.

After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light and be satisfied. My righteous servant will justify many by the knowledge of himself; and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him a portion with the great. He will divide the plunder with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death and was counted with the transgressors; yet he bore the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

The fulfillment reading

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

On the messianic-fulfillment reading, Isaiah 53:9's affirmation that the Servant was innocent of any wrongdoing and free of deception is applied to the declarations of Jesus' innocence at his trial and execution, including Pilate declaring that he found no grounds to condemn Jesus (John 18:38) and the crucified criminal stating that Jesus had done nothing to deserve his sentence (Luke 23:41). Proponents note that innocence is attested from multiple independent vantage points — a Roman governor, a condemned criminal, and a centurion — corresponding to the comprehensive blamelessness Isaiah describes. Some read the verse's two aspects, the absence of any violent deed and the absence of false speech, as answering to two charge-types (sedition and blasphemy) of which they take Jesus to be acquitted. On this view the convergence of testimony matches the Servant's declared innocence.

The counter-reading

How this passage is read within its own context.

On the critical reading, the innocence clause functions to underscore the injustice of the Servant's death, and its correspondence to the Gospel innocence-declarations is genuinely thematic. Critics observe, however, that the innocence clause is grammatically joined to the burial clause by 'although,' forming a single sentence, so counting burial and innocence as separate prophecies splits one statement at its conjunction. They further hold that the two-charge mapping is an apologetic construction read back from the prophecy: critical scholarship treats the trial narratives as theologically shaped and the precise legal charges as historically uncertain. On this view no clean two-count indictment in the trial accounts maps clause-for-clause onto Isaiah 53:9.

How the New Testament uses this passage

Each entry names how the New Testament author draws on the passage — a direct quotation, an allusion, an echo, or a typological reading. An echo or an allusion is not the same as a prediction; the label says which is which.

  • Luke 23:41 Echo

    Luke 23:41 and John 18:38 assert Jesus' innocence in wording that resonates with Isaiah 53:9's blamelessness clause but neither quotes nor cites it; the relationship is a thematic echo.

  • John 18:38 Echo

    Luke 23:41 and John 18:38 assert Jesus' innocence in wording that resonates with Isaiah 53:9's blamelessness clause but neither quotes nor cites it; the relationship is a thematic echo.