King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Isaiah 53
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Who hath our report? and to whom is the arm of ? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of , and afflicted. But he was wounded for our , he was bruised for our : the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and hath laid on him the of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his : he is brought as to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his . He was taken from prison and from : and who shall declare his generation? for he was out of the land of the living: for the of my people was he stricken. And he made his with , and with the rich in his ; because he had done no , neither was any deceit in his . Yet it pleased to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his an for , he shall see , he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his , and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my servant many; for he shall bear their . Therefore will I divide him a with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his unto : and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he the of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
Christians read this chapter differently
- How does the death of Jesus save? · Isaiah 53
Every view at its strongest, with who holds it and what it has to answer for.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.
All of Isaiah