Acts 8:30,31

Acts 8:30-31. Understandest thou what thou readest? The last division of the prophecy of Isaiah contains a description of the ‘servant of the Lord.' A famous enemy of Christianity has complained that Jesus Christ brought on His own crucifixion by a series of preconcerted measures, merely to give the disciples who came after Him the triumph of an appeal to the old prophecies, and especially to the 53d chapter of Isaiah, which the eunuch was reading when Philip accosted him.

So clear, indeed, here is the correspondence between the prophecy and the history of the Passion, that in this 53d chapter we seem rather to be reading a history of the past than a prediction of something which was to take place in the far future. Jews in modern times have tried, but with a total want of success, to refer the ‘servant of the Lord,' spoken of in the famous passage, now to Hezekiah, now to Jeremiah, now to Isaiah himself, sometimes to the people Israel collectively. But some of their best and most esteemed teachers, despairing of finding any other key to the prophecy, admit honestly that Messiah is here spoken of. This, for instance, is the interpretation of R. Solomon Jarchi in the twelfth century, and of R. Isaac Abarbanel in the fifteenth century, whose names stand among the very highest and most esteemed of Jewish divines and commentators.