IS ISAIAH 53:9a A FALSE PROPHECY?

 This verse appears in one of the so-called Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah, an Old Testament prophecy describing the coming Messiah. The first half reads as follows:

        He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

        and with the rich in his death.

Taken as prose, it is a false prophecy since in actuality Christ was assigned a grave with a rich man (i.e. Joseph of Arimathaea) and died with the wicked (i.e. the two thieves). So how can that discrepancy be resolved, or should it be resolved in the first place? Oswalt expresses a warning to us before proceeding by stating that “we should not press the text to say more than it does. There are more than enough connections with the life and ministry of Christ in this poem to force any on it.” Nevertheless, it would be satisfying if this additional passage matched the later historical events a little more closely.

Before beginning, we must keep in mind that this verse, like most of those in the OT prophecies, is written as poetry instead of in prose. And as such, it is an example of what is called poetic parallelism of thought. In other words, each of the two lines echoes the idea of the other. But in actual practice, this parallelism can take diverse forms, as will be demonstrated below.

I first consulted several modern translations, to see if they could shed any light on the subject. Most of them rendered the verse in much the same manner as above. However, the note in the Jerusalem Bible expressed the opinion that the second line could be alternatively translated as “in his death he is with evil-doers.” If that refers to Jesus visiting Hell, then I suppose that might fit the NT circumstances. The Message paraphrase combines the two lines into one prose statement: “He was buried like a criminal in a rich man's grave.” That would also fit the Gospel picture even if the sentence doesn't make complete sense logically.

At this point, I began with comments found on the internet and then consulted the scholarly resources in my own library to see what they had to say on the subject. Here is a selection of the ideas gleaned from those sources:

    1. “They meant his grave to be with the wicked,

        but he was with the rich in his death.” (Delitzsch)

Many other commentators, especially of earlier generations, ascribed to this interpretation. It is a variation on what is called antithetic parallelism in which the second line provides the same meaning as the idea in the first line through providing a contrasting example. However, in this case it doesn't at all do that since both the subject and the object, or the subject and the verb need to be contrasted at the same time, which is not the case here. And even more damning to this approach is that the second line does not begin with “but” at all, as is almost always the case with antithetic parallelism, but with “and” instead. In addition, Delitzsch added “he was” to his translation, neither word of which is in the Hebrew original.” Oswalt, for one, rejects this approach, also adopted by the NIV, for basically the same reason.

However, Wolf is an example of a modern commentator who takes this approach and has an interesting detail to add which seems to confirm it. He points out that while “wicked” is plural, fitting the two thieves crucified with him, “rich” is singular, i.e. Joseph of Arimathaea. “This is an unexpected change in number because the words are in parallel lines.” This same difference in number is present in the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea.

    2. Another possible tack to take is to alter the wording in the text so that it makes better sense as synonymous parallelism. Thus, Whybray states, “...that the burial places of rich men and criminals should have been identical is highly improbable, and makes the lines meaningless [as is].” He therefore mentions several possible emendations of the text so that “rich man” becomes doers of evil, demons, or the rabble. And for another emendation, Albright changes bemot aw (“in his death”) to bamato (his burial mound”).

    3. Some have proposed that words got accidentally or purposely transposed during the transmission of the text over the years. Thus, the original read:

    “He was assigned a death with the wicked

    and with the rich in his grave.” (StudyLight.org)

This is an easy solution, but there is no manuscript evidence to support it, so it remains highly speculative. Unfortunately, some commentators on the internet just start out with this slightly revised translation and don't bother to explain to their readers that it isn't what the Hebrew text really says.

    4. And, of course, there are also the critics and Jewish commentators who use this verse to deny the Christian interpretation of it as a prediction of Christ's death and burial. Their problem is that, even if one were to disregard this particular verse, the Suffering Servant Songs as a whole provide a number of other striking parallels to the historical circumstances of the last days of Christ's life on earth, as Oswalt explains above.

    5. Taking 53:9 as synonymous parallelism and recasting it in literal prose to discern the overall idea instead, the combined meaning would be that in the circumstances surrounding his death and burial, he will be associated with the extremes of society. And that was certainly true in the case of Christ.

Bible Study Tools proposes this same general approach, but adds that there were wicked men (i.e. the soldiers) watching over the tomb for three days. I personally doubt that one can label the soldiers wicked just because they were following orders from their superiors. After all, it was a Roman soldier at the cross who made the confession that Jesus was the Son of God (Matthew 27:54). I would reject this particular variation as unlikely.

But there is one problem with taking the synonymous parallelism approach which is brought out by several commentators – there is generally a closer relationship between the parallel elements in the two lines. Thus, “wicked” and “rich” make a very poor synonymous pair. So this general approach only makes sense if the two terms form what is called a merism, a listing of two extremes which are to be understood as including everything in between as well. In this case, then, the more precise meaning would be to express all strata of society, not just the two extremes.

Another illustrative example of this sort of interpretation is seen in passages such as Proverbs 1:8:

    “Hear, my child, your father's instructions, and

    do not reject your mother's teaching.”

Although “father” and “mother” do not seem to be particularly synonymous concepts and could even be considered as opposites, considering them together as one unit, i.e. “parents,” makes perfect sense.

However, there is another problem with Approach #5. Technically speaking, these two lines of poetry cannot be called synonymous since some of the elements are completely missing in the second line:

    He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and

                                with the rich in his death.

Missing elements do appear in Hebrew poetry quite often, and such a poetic form is called “incomplete parallelism.” The problem is that in this case, there are actually two such elements missing in the second line, both the subject (“he”) and the verb (“was assigned”). That is rather rare since it results in a very unbalanced poetic pair in terms of line length and number of stressed syllables.

    6. R.E. Brown points out that the Septuagint version of this verse reads, according to Barrick: “I will give the wicked in place of [anti] his burial and the rich [pl.] in place of his death, which presumably refers to God's retributive putting to death the Servant's wicked opponents in place of him.” This completely changes the meaning of the verse to the point where it says nothing which would correlate to the NT facts regarding Christ's death and burial. As far as I am aware, no commentator or translator has utilized this later Greek version to alter the Hebrew text.

    7. Since none of the above approaches is entirely satisfying, there is one more possibility to mention. Another common poetic form in the Bible is called synthetic parallelism. These are cases in which the author purposely, in order to add variety to a passage, simply broke up a prose statement into two lines so that it appeared as two lines of poetry. In these cases, one should not even attempt to look for parallel elements in each line, but read it as a simple prose sentence.

The problem with this last approach is that although it preserves the Hebrew text without changing it, it does not literally predict what happened to Christ.