What Does Isaiah 53:9 Mean?

(9) **And he made his grave . . .**—Literally, *one *(or, *they*)* assigned him a grave **. . .*** The words are often interpreted as fulfilled in our Lord’s crucifixion between the two robbers and his burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It has to be noted, however, (1) that this requires an inversion of the clauses; (2) that it introduces a feature scarcely in harmony with the general drift of the description; (3) that the laws of parallelism require us to take the “rich” of one clause as corresponding to the “wicked” of the other, *i.e., *as in the sense of the wrongfully rich, the oppressors, as in Psalm 49:6; Psalm 49:16; Psalm 73:3-5. Men assigned to the Servant not the burial of a saint, with reverence and honour (such, *e.g., *as that of Stephen, Acts 8:2), but that of an unjust oppressor, for whom no man lamented, saying, “Ah lord! Ah my brother! Ah his glory!” (Jeremiah 22:18), and this *although *(not “because”) he had done no violence to deserve it. (Comp. Job 16:17.) The rendering “because” has been adopted as giving a reason for the honourable burial which, it has been assumed, the words imply. It may be questioned, however, when we remember Isaiah’s words as to Shebna (Isaiah 22:16), whether he would have looked on such a burial as that recorded in the Gospels, clandestine, and with no public lamentation, as an adequate recognition of the holiness of the victim. The point of the last two clauses is that they declare emphatically the absolute rectitude of the sufferer in act, his absolute veracity in speech.