The Imagery of the Substitute King Ritual in Isaiah's Fourth Servant Song

Abstract

Interpreters have long struggled over the imagery that supplies the background for the fourth Servant Song (Isa 52:13-53:12).1 For those who have seen the Servant as a personification of corporate Israel, the imagery has been problematic both because it is intensely individual and because Israel appears to be the beneficiary of the Servant's suffering. Those who have seen the Servant in royal or messianic terms have had difficulty finding precedent for a suffering king or messiah in Israelite theology. Attempts to identify the Servant with a prophet, whether Deutero-Isaiah or Moses, have likewise struggled to make sense of all of the diverse elements of the Servant Songs and have not been sufficiently persuasive to bring about a consensus. Additionally, it has been questioned what role the concept of vicarious suffering serves in either the text or the worldview. Finally, these issues are complicated by obscure references such as being with the rich in his death (v. 9) and seeing seed and prolonging days (v. 11), and are bogged down in the larger questions concerning the interrelationship of the Servant Songs and their role within the canonical book of Isaiah.2 It is my thesis that the imagery, background, and obscurities of the fourth song can be adequately resolved when the passage is read in light of the substitute king ritual motifs known from Mesopotamia as early as the Isin period (early second millennium) and as late as Alexander the Great. A peripheral awareness of the potential in this comparison has been evident in the literature for some time. The most substantial work was done in 1958 by J. Scharbert, who addressed the relationship between the Suffering Servant and ancient Near Eastern texts,3 On good evidence, Scharbert rejected the idea that Isa 53 represented an actual substitute king ritual. he observed that the reasons for the substitution were different, that the victim in the sarpuhi texts was not a willing victim, and that there was no sin-guilt-atonement matrix in the rituals. Nor was he convinced that the Assyrian victim was actually killed. In the end he concluded that Isa 53 could not be considered an actual case of a substitute king ritual because the magical worldview that was the premise on which the rituals were based stood in stark contradiction to the sophisticated theological foundation of the Servant Song.4 These are all valid concerns if the question is whether an actual substitute king ritual is being represented in Isa 53. M. A. Beek took up the topic in 1966 but dismissed the relationship in a brief paragraph because he saw no king in Isa 53 and doubted the death of the servant.5 B. Janowski explored the relationship between the substitute king rituals in Mesopotamian and Hittite texts and the substitution rituals in Israel (particularly Lev 16) but did not bring Isa 53 into the discussion.6 Elsewhere he indicates that the relationship between the substitute king ritual and Isa 53 could be traced, but he does not do so.7 A. R. W. Green, explored the sarpuhi in the context of human sacrifice but likewise did not bring Isa 53 into his investigation.8 Even as recently as 1998, a summary of the major work done on the concept of Stellvertretung in Isa 53 found no cause to mention the substitute king rituals.9 In the thesis developed here it is suggested not that the Isaiah text represents an actual substitute king ritual but that the motifs of those rituals provide a background for the theological points that the author of the song wishes to make to his audience. The extant texts are concentrated in seventh-century Neo-Assyrian documents connected to the reigns of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. We will first examine what is known of the substitute king ritual and then compare that to the textual data in the fourth Servant Song. I. Substitute King The substitute king materials received their earliest major treatment by Rene Labat, and the Assyrian texts have been most thoroughly addressed by J. …