Isaiah 53 isn’t about the coming messiah. You are back filling it with a Christian interpretation that is a misinterpretation. Don’t read it with “Jesus colored” glasses on.
. . . This is extremely disingenuous since the Masoretic Text, which everyone here is using to interpret Isaiah, is already a Jewish "interpretation" of the text. You're using Jewish colored glasses (when you use the Masoretic text) as though that's the sole meaning of the consonants, or the authorized meaning Isaiah intended. But that's not correct, since adding the points, to justify Jewish tradition, is the quintessence of using your own pretense, or tradition, as the foundational meaning of a formerly (before adding the punctuation) more flexible text.
For those unfamiliar with the ruse, Isaiah wrote with Hebrew consonants only, no punctuation, such that you have to bring a particular idea of what he's saying to the text in order to determine where word breaks, sentence breaks, punctuation and page breaks go. Even small differences can make an enormous difference in how the text is read. So some Jewish scholars, over a thousand years ago, decided, since Gentiles don't really understand Hebrew, and particularly biblical Hebrew, they would add punctuation to the text based on a Jewish interpretation of the text, such that the Gentiles would assume that was the only way to read the text, since that's how English, or German, or some non-Hebrew language functions.
To this day, most Christians assume the Masoretic text, from which their "Old Testament" is translated to English, is the lowest common denominator of Isaiah's intent. Nothing is further from the truth. The Masoretic text is a Jewish interpretation of the text. And a particular Jewish interpretation of the text, a Pharisaical Jewish interpretation of the text, i.e, the interpretation of the text that led to the crucifixion in the first place.
We're talking pretty deceptive practices here.
John
