Parallels between Isaiah’s Servant Songs and the Portrayal of the
Prophet Jeremiah
The servant songs in Isaiah are some of its most distinguished texts, portraying
a suffering figure with eminent importance. There are several close coincidences
of those poems with specific texts in Jeremiah. Some of them form “exclusive
links,” meaning that they occur only in these passages. I the following I will
present the most relevant ones:
Isa 49:1 “YHWH called me from the womb.”
Jer 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
Isa 42:6; 49:6 “I make you . . . a light for the nations.”
Jer 1:5 “I make you a prophet for the nations.”
Isa 53:7, 8c “(he . . .) like a lamb led to slaughter . . .
he was cut off from the land of the living”
Jer 11:19 “I was like a tame lamb led to the slaughter . . .
let us extirpate him from the land of the living.”
Isa 53:6 “YHWH has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him”
Jer 15:11 “I have imposed enemies on you”
Isa 53:8a “By oppression and judgment he was taken away”
Jer 15:15 “Don’t take me away by your forbearance”
Ulrich Berges interprets the portrayal of the servant in Isaiah as a theological
climax, a kind of ultimate, late development. According to him, it would be
strange if the author of Jeremiah, reading Isaiah, had not also picked up the
idea of YHWH’s servant becoming an אשׁם. As a result, he sees Jeremiah as the
older text and the servant in Second Isaiah as an elaboration of the presentation
of the prophet Jeremiah.
But the reverse direction is just as feasible, namely, to perceive in
Jeremaih an expansion of Isaiah’s portrayal of YHWH’s servant.
Indications for this are:
·
the addition of אלוף, “tame,” for the lamb (Jer 11:19)
·
the extension of time for the calling, with בטרם, “before,”
instead of “from the womb” (Jer 1:5);
·
the change from “objective” formulations in the third
person (in Isa 49:1; 53:6) to personal statements in the first person for YHWH
(yet also in Isa 42:6);
·
the difference between passive voices (“he was cut
off, . . . he was taken away”) and cohortative (“let us”), imperative (“don’t
take”) in Jer 11:19; 15:15.
The distribution of these texts in Jeremiah is also significant: Jer 1
outlines his vocation; Jer 11 and 15 are the first and second confessions.
Together they shape the profile of the prophet Jeremiah at prominent positions,
namely at the beginning of the book, at the start of the major block Jer 11-20,
and therein again in Jer 15, after God’s definitive refusal to listen to any
plea from Jeremiah for the people. This can be perceived as a deliberate technique
for the characterization of Jeremiah, especially in Jer 11 and 15, which both
use the servant-motif after others have attacked the prophet.
This would also account for the more radical presentation in Jeremiah.
In my view, it is hard to imagine that the author of Isaiah’s servant songs,
knowing the similar expressions in Jeremiah, would have eased them—with the
result that YHWH’s servant appeared as a milder version of the prophet
Jeremiah. The literary differences show above are better explained if we assume
that, as Leene wrote, “Jeremiah read Isaiah”—meaning that the author of
Jeremiah too over the respective motifs from Isaiah to present Jeremiah as a personification
of YHWH’s servant, and that he elaborated them to make his prophet appear as
the nearly perfect example for this figure. The biographical background of
Jeremiah allows imagining in a realistic way what in Isaiah remains on the
level of a literary description. (Georg Fischer, “Can Jeremiah Quote Deutero-
or Trito-Isaiah? Its Impact on the ‘Unity’ Movement in Isaiah Studies,” in Unity
in the Book of Isaiah, ed. Benedetta Rossi, Dominic S. Irudayarai, and Gina
Hens-Piazza [Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 732; London: T&T
Clark, 2024], 160-62)
