If Israel doesn't come up with a different interpretation of the word במה they not only can't claim it means the nation of Israel, since they're not deity according to Judaism, but they have the equally pointy problem of the fact that even if the text isn't speaking of the nation of Israel, it's clearly speaking of a real, suffering, person, whose place of death becomes an altar, a shrine, associated in all cases, with deity.
The weight of the statement above doesn't seem like it could get any worse. But wait. It does.
As the brilliant Jewish sages are aware, and say themselves, never give up just because the exegesis is problematic or hard to understand. For if you work through it, it will reverberate throughout the scripture, and rework other interpretations whose deeper meaning required the diamond freed from the rough exegesis it was encased in.
This is an encased diamond in point.
Once we realize what's being said about the nature of the shrine in Isaiah 53:9, our minds might wander to Isaiah 22, where we encounter another suffering servant, whom, Judaism's nemesis, again, relate to Jesus of Nazareth, and thus to a cross as a shrine related to death where prayer and supplication, worship, are directed.
In Psalm 22:29 (the numbering of the verses may be different in the Jewish text) we read that, "
All who go down to the dust shall bow before him."
This is pretty powerful stuff when we realize that millions and billions of graves ("go down to the dust" represents death) have a cross at their head such that billions and billions of times, already, the one going down to the dust, literally bows before the shrine noted in Isaiah 53:9. And if, realizing the symbiotic relationship between Psalms and Isaiah, we combine parallel verses from the two, we read:
All who go down to the dust shall bow before him . . . They will bow down before you with their faces to the ground and lick the dust at your feet.
Psalms 22:29; Isaiah 49:23.
The shrine in Isaiah 53:9 has the two-fold distinction that not only is it the place of death, and finality, the
ktav ivri tav † (the final Hebrew letter which symbolizes capital judgment
din), but this shrine associated with death, is placed as a shrine above the very place of death, the dust of the grave, so that the one not subject to death, the one who rose from the dust, rose from the grave, stands above the dead as they kneel before him, face down, kissing his feet and praying, that as he rose from the dust, from the grave, he might lift them out too:
All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him since none can keep alive his own soul [save the Savior who can save yours].
Psalms 22:29.
These verses, based on factual interpretation freed from the lying pen of the scribe (Jeremiah 8:8), imply that the shrine representing the death of the divine son becomes a global shrine found from one corner of the earth to the other whereby the dead appeal, with prayer and supplication, to the only man who has ever been freed from the dust, the grave, for he's the divine son of God:
For you will not abandon my soul to the grave, nor will you suffer your devoted one to see decomposition . . . Favor me O God. Behold my affliction prepared for me by those who hate me, O You Who alone raises me above death's portals.
Isaiah 15:10; 9:14.
These verses all transform the final letter in the sacred script of scripture ----
† ----- into the mezuzah at the gates of eternity otherwise known as the hymen of the morgue. Which is surely part and parcel of the Jewish sages' willingness to crucify the text of Isaiah 53:9 so that it can no longer speak a living word to a hearer with circumcised ears; so that it can no longer produce a sight for sore eyes, but instead deliver up a stigmata stigmatized by the astigmatic distortions producing blurred-vision concerning the most important vision in all of the word of God.
John