The Song of the Suffering Servant

The Suffering Servant is described in four passages in the Book of Isaiah, in the part of the book (chapters 40–55) that scholars call Second Isaiah, or Deutero-Isaiah, because it does not come from the eighth-century B.C. prophet Isaiah but was written after the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C. Deutero-Isaiah includes four servant poems: Isaiah 42:1–7, 49:1–6, 50:4–9 and 52:13–53:12. The last of these is the most famous:

He was despised and rejected by men;

A man of suffering, and acquainted with grief:

And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;

He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;

Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions.

He was bruised for our iniquities;

The chastisement for our peace was upon him,

And by his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

We have turned, every one, to his own way;

And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and he was afflicted,