half of the Book of Isaiah, and our minds are taken back to such passages as, " Behold My servant, whom I uphold; Mine Elect, in whom My soul delighteth. I have put My Spirit upon Him; He shall bring forth judgment unto the Gentiles. . . . It is a light thing that thou sJiouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light of the Gentiles, that thou mayest be My salvation unto the end of the earth"[1] But it is perhaps particularly to Isa. liii.
"the crown of all Old Testament prophecy," as it has been well called that our thoughts are directed by the introduc tion of this title of Messiah in our prophecy to the innocent and absolutely holy One who is wounded for our trans gressions, bruised for our iniquities, who pours out His soul unto death as an atonement for sin to the "Righteous Servant " through the knowledge of whom the many are justified, or " made righteous," and in whose redeeming work Zechariah, like Isaiah himself and all the other prophets, saw the solution of the great moral problem, how those morally defiled, as Joshua was represented to be in his filthy garments, ca/i be acquitted and justified by a holy God, and how " the iniquity of the land shall be removed " in one day.
But the designation, " My Servant " stands here in combination with another well-known Messianic title, which in the visions of Zechariah is turned into a proper name of the promised Deliverer " My Servant the Branch" [2]
- ↑ Isa. xlii. 1-6, xlix. 6.
- ↑ Kimchi's comment on the words " My Servant the Branch " is: " This is Zerubbabel "; but the interpretation thus proposed is (as shown in a note by Dr. Alexander McCaul in his translation of Kimchi's Commentary) untenable. "Kimchi here follows Rashi in interpreting My servant the Branch of Zerub babel. Their reason for this probably was that if they acknowledged the person thus designated in this chapter to be the Messiah, they must have made the same admission in the parallel passage, chap. vi. 12; and by so doing they would have admitted that Messiah was to be a priest as well as a king. " Perhaps they also saw some polemical danger in this chapter, in connecting the promise of the Messiah with the promise occurring in the next verse, To remove the iniquity of that land in one day, which would seem to favour the Christian doctrine that the Messiah by one offering perfected for ever them that are sanctified (Heb. x. 14). But, however that be, the interpretation which
