Servant songs

The servant songs (also called the servant poems or the Songs of the Suffering Servant) are four songs in the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, which include Isaiah 42:1–4; Isaiah 49; ; and –. The songs are four poems written about a certain "servant of YHWH" (עבד יהוה, ‘eḇeḏ Yahweh). Yahweh calls the servant to lead the nations, but the servant is horribly abused by them. In the end, he is rewarded. Some scholars regard Isaiah 61 as a fifth servant song, although the word "servant" (עבד, ‘eḇeḏ) is not mentioned in the passage. This fifth song is largely disregarded by modern scholars; without it, all four fall within Deutero-Isaiah, the middle part of the book, the work of an anonymous 6th-century BCE author writing during the Babylonian Exile. The five songs were first identified by Bernhard Duhm in his 1892 commentary on Isaiah. Menahem ben Hezekiah and Menahem ben Ammiel The Self-Glorification Hymn from Dead Sea Scrolls asserts, from the first-person narrative, a messianic human who has been exalted into heaven with a status above the angels. This figure rhetorically asks "Who bears all griefs as I do? And who suffers evil like me? Who has been despised on my account?" to imply that he has been despised unlike anyone before, modelling himself on the suffering servant from Isaiah's servant songs. Rabbinic Judaism sees this passage, especially "God's Suffering Servant" as a reference to the Jewish nation, not to the king Mashiach. Jewish teaching also takes note of the historical context in which God's Suffering Servant appears, particularly because it speaks in the past tense. The Jewish nation has borne unspeakable injustices, under Assyria, Babylonia, Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, which are all gone, and bears persecution to this day. Jewish scripture in Isaiah speaks in the light, when it says: "But thou, Israel, My servant..." () "Ye are My witnesses, saith the LORD, and My servant whom I have chosen..." () "By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and with his generation who did reason? for he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due.