The Individuated, Messianic Servant of OG Isaiah 41–45

Abstract

The study examines the servant oracles of Isaiah 41–45, which in the MT present a collectivist, national understanding of the figure, but in the OG are rendered so that the servant is individuated, both in the sense that he is granted clearly the quality of individuality, and in the sense that he is distinguished clearly from the collective nation he serves. The servant is also thereby rendered messianic, as Israel’s eschatological rule is transferred to this individual, along with God’s epithet, ‘your king’, and as intertextual references identify this figure as one and the same with the Davidic king of Isaiah 9 and 11. Thus OG Isaiah 41–45 attests the emergence of individualist interpretation of the servant well before the common era. These chapters also show the place of messianism in the Septuagint and in second century Alexandria.