the heart of the phenomenal or actual Israel, an indestructible Being having these divine attributes or endowments, present in the outward Israel in all ages, powerful and effectual because really composed, if I can say so, of divine forces, who cannot fail in God's purpose, and who as an inner power within Israel by his operation causes all Israel to become a true servant" (compare Davidson, Old Testament Prophecy, 435-36).
Now it seems to me that Davidson is more effective in his destructive than in his constructive work. One must confess that he presents real difficulties in the way of holding to a personal Servant as the prophet's conception. But on the other hand when he tries to replace that by a more adequate conception, I do not think he conspicuously succeeds.
The greatest of the Servant-passages (it seems to me) presents more than can be successfully dealt with under the conception of the Servant as the ideal Israel. The very great emphasis on vicarious suffering in Isaiah 53 simply is not answered by theory. Words would not leap with such a flame of reality in describing the suffering of a personification. The sense of sin back of the passage is not a thing whose problem could be solved by a glittering figure of speech. There it surges-the movement of an aroused conscience-and the answer to it could never be anything less than a real deed by a real person. My own feeling is that if language can express anything it expresses the fact that the prophet had a real personal Servant in view.
But what of the difficulties Davidson suggests? Even if the answer were not easy to find, one could rest on the total impression the passages make. One cannot vaporize a passage for the sake of placing it in an environment in which one believes it belongs. As Cheyne in other days said, "In the sublimest descriptions of the Servant I am unable to resist the impression that we have the presentment of an individual, and venture to think that our general view of the Servant ought to be ruled by those passages in which the enthusiasm of the author is at its height."
The first thing we need to remember in dealing with the difficulties Davidson has brought forth is the timelessness of prophecy, and the resulting fact that every prophet saw the future as if lying just on the horizon of his own time. As prophets saw the day of Yahweh as if at hand, so it seems to me Deutero-Isaiah saw the Servant: each really afar off, yet each really seen in the colors of the present. Then we must remember that the prophets did not relate all their conceptions. They stated truths whose meaning and articulation they did not understand. They were not philosophers with a Hegelian hunger for a total view of life, and when we try to read them from this standpoint we misjudge them. Then we must remember that the prophet may here have been lifted to a height of prophetic receptivehess where he received and uttered what went beyond the limits of his own understanding. To be sure there was a point of contact, but I see no objection to the thought that in a place of unique significance and importance like this, God might use a man to utter words which reached far beyond the limits of his own understanding. In this connection some words of Professor Hermann Schultz are worth quoting: "If it is true anywhere in the history of poetry and prophecy, it is true here that the writer being full of the spirit has said more than he himself meant to say and more than he himself understood."
(4) The Psychology of the Prophecy.
This does not mean that something may. not be said about the connection of the Servant-passages with the prophet's own thought. Using Delitzsch's illustration, we can see how from regarding all Israel as the servant the prophet could narrow down to the godly part of Israel as experience taught him the faithlessness of many, and it ought not to be impossible for us to see how all that Israel really meant at its best could have focused itself in his thought upon one person. Despite Davidson's objection, I can see nothing artificial about this movement in