[200] Epistle to the Romans, viii., 31 ff.
[201] Though Cheyne takes _His Servant_ in ver. 10 to be, not the Servant, but the prophet.
[202] _Kindlers of fire_ is the literal rendering. But the word is not the common word to kindle, and is here used of wanton fireraising.
We are now arrived at the last of the passages on the Servant of the Lord. It is known to Christendom as the Fifty-third of Isaiah, but its verses have, unfortunately, been divided between two chapters, lii. 13-15 and liii. Before we attempt the interpretation of this high and solemn passage of Revelation, let us look at its position in our prophecy, and examine its structure.
The peculiarities of the style and of the vocabulary of ch. lii. 13-liii., along with the fact, that, if it be omitted, the prophecies on either side readily flow together, have led some critics to suppose it to be an insertion, borrowed from an earlier writer.[203] The style--broken, sobbing and recurrent--is certainly a change from the forward, flowing sentences, on which we have been carried up till now, and there are a number of words that we find quite new to us. Yet surely both style and words are fully accounted for by the novel and tragic nature of the subject, to which the prophet has brought us: regret and remorse, though they speak through the same lips as hope and the assurance of salvation, must necessarily do so with a very different accent and set of terms. Criticism surely overreaches itself, when it suggests that a writer, so versatile and dramatic as our prophet, could not have written ch. lii. 13-liii. along with, say, ch. xl. or ch. lii. 1-12 or ch. liv. We might as well be asked to assign to different authors Hamlet's soliloquy, and the King's conversation, in the same play, with the ambassadors from Norway. To aver that if ch. lii. 13-liii. were left out, no one who had not seen it would miss it, so closely does ch. liv. follow on to ch. lii. 12, is to aver what means nothing. In any dramatic work you may leave out the finest passage,--from a Greek tragedy its grandest chorus, or from a play of Shakespeare's the hero's soliloquy,--without seeming, to eyes that have not seen what you have done, to have disturbed the connection of the whole. Observe the juncture in our prophecy at which this last passage on the Servant appears. It is one exactly the same as that at which another great passage on the Servant was inserted (ch. xlix. 1-9), viz., just after a call to the people to seize the redemption achieved for them and to come forth from Babylon. It is the kind of climax or pause in their tale, which dramatic writers of all kinds employ for the solemn utterance of principles lying at the back, or transcending the scope, of the events of which they treat. To say the least, it is surely more probable that our prophet himself employed so natural an opportunity to give expression to his highest truths about the Servant, than that some one else took his work, broke up another already extant work on the Servant and thrust the pieces of the latter into the former. Moreover, we shall find many of the ideas, as well as of the phrases, of ch. lii. 13-liii. to be essentially the same as some we have already encountered in our prophecy.[204]