neilgodfrey wrote:Does anyone here know where I can locate studies that argue what/who might have been the contemporary reference for Isaiah's Servant as an individual? Most discussions I can find acknowledge the Servant is alternately depicted as a collective (Israel) and as an individual person. What I would like to understand is who was in the author's mind if indeed he did sometimes speak of a single person as the Servant.
I strongly recommend:
The Jewish Gospels
https://books.google.com
Daniel Boyarin - 2012 -
Makes the case that the conventional understandings of Jesus and the origins of Christianity are wrong: that Jesus' core teachings were not a break from Jewish beliefs and that Jesus was embraced by many Jews as the Messiah ..
Boyarin is a Talmudic scholar and Orthodox Jew and he goes over Isaiah 53.
The Messiah is the Servant of Isaiah 53. In Isaiah 20:3 God refers to "my servant Isaiah." And Isaiah 49(JPT) says:
1. listen closely, you nations, from afar; the Lord called me from the womb,
3. And He said to me, "You are My servant, Israel,”
5. And now, the Lord, Who formed me from the womb as a servant to Him, said to bring Jacob back to Him, and Israel shall be gathered to Him, and I will be honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God was my strength.
6. And He said, "It is too light for you to be My servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the besieged of Israel, but I will make you a light of nations, so that My salvation shall be until the end of the earth."
But Isaiah distinguishes himself, the “servant Israel”, from Israel itself by immediately adding: “the Lord, Who formed me from the womb as a servant to Him, said to bring Jacob back to Him, and Israel shall be gathered to Him” (49:5-6).
As in Zechariah 11, where Zechariah prophetically envisions himself as the Good Shepherd, it appears that in Isaiah 49, Isaiah propheticially envisions himself as the Servant who plays a Messianic role, not only of gathering Israel to God, but of being a light to the nations.
So in Isaiah 49 that leads into 53, the servant is definitely the Messiah, not Israel.