Isaiah 53:10-12, Who is the Servant? (4)

Is the interpretation that Isaiah 53 refers to the Messiah still around today?  Yes.  It is a minority, but yes.  Again, let’s let Viktor Buksbazen speak to this.

In the light of the Crusaders’ atrocities this interpretation took on a semblance of verisimility and found much favor among the majority of Jews, but not among all of them.  Still the original Messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 persisted and survived even to the present day.  It is preserved in Jewish liturgy for the Day of Atonement in a prayer attributed to Eliezer Ha-Kallir (8^th Century A. D.):
”We are shrunk up in our misery even until now!  Our rock hath not come to us; Messiah, our righteousness, hath turned from us; we are in terror, and there is none to justify us!  Our iniquities and the yoke of our transgressions he will bear, for he was wounded for our transgressions: he will carry our sins upon his shoulder that we may find forgiveness for our iniquities, and by his stripes we are healed.  O eternal One, the time is come to make a new creation, from the vault of heaven bring him up, out of Seir draw him forth that he may make his voice heard to us in Lebanon, a second time by the hand of Yinnon.” (Driver & Nenbauer, p.445) 
From the above prayer it is obvious that the Jews of that era believed that the Messiah had already come and were praying that He may come “a second time.”  Some of the medieval scholars who interpreted this passage in an individual sense applied it either to Jeremiah , or to Isaiah, others to Hezekiah, and some to any righteous person who suffers innocently.

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In time the non-Messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 became practically an official dogma among most Jews.  Nevertheless, many learned rabbis have continued to object strenuously to this interpretation as doing violence to the literal and obvious sense of Isaiah 53.  Thus Rabbi Moshe Kohen ibn Crispin (13^th century) complained bitterly that those who interpret Isaiah 53 as referring to Israel do violence to it and to its natural meaning: ‘having inclined after the stubbornness of their own hearts and their own opinion.  I’m pleased to interpret the Parasha (passage) in accordance with the teaching of our rabbis, of the King Messiah … and adhere to the literal sense.  Thus I shall be free from forced and far-fetched interpretations of which others are guilty. (Driver & Nenbauer, p199f.) 

Similar opinions were voiced later by other prominent rabbinical authorities.  However, the collective interpretation of Isaiah 53 remains the dominant one today among the majority of the Jews.  Strangely enough many liberal Christian theologians, whom Delitzsch once called, “the uncircumcised rabbis,” have supported the Jewish position, sometimes out of deference to their Jewish friends, or in line with their own liberal views, which had no place for a suffering Messiah, predicted by the prophets.