🕊️WEB · Isaiah 53:3
What does Isaiah 53:3 mean?
"He was despised, and rejected by men; a man of suffering, and acquainted with disease. He was despised as one from whom men hide their face; and we didn’t respect him."
— Isaiah 53:3 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Who has believed our message? To whom has the arm of Yahweh been revealed?
For he grew up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no good looks or majesty. When we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised, and rejected by men; a man of suffering, and acquainted with disease. He was despised as one from whom men hide their face; and we didn’t respect him.
Surely he has borne our sickness, and carried our suffering; yet we considered him plagued, struck by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray. Everyone has turned to his own way; and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Explanation
Isaiah 53:3 describes a figure the prophet calls the "suffering servant" — someone marked by rejection, sorrow, and affliction to such a degree that people instinctively turned away from him rather than look upon him. The verse says plainly that this individual was despised, avoided, familiar with grief and sickness, and held in such low esteem that those around him treated him as beneath notice or respect. There's no ambiguity in the language: this is a description of a person society scorned and pushed to the margins.
Isaiah wrote this passage, part of what scholars call the fourth "Servant Song" (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), likely in the 8th century BC, though many scholars note that chapters 40-55 address the exilic or post-exilic community of Judah. The original audience would have understood this as a prophetic oracle about a servant figure whose identity was debated even in ancient times — some Jewish interpreters saw it as representing the nation of Israel itself, suffering in exile, while others saw it as pointing to an individual figure, perhaps a prophet or a coming redeemer. The "we" in the verse signals that the prophet speaks on behalf of a community confessing their own failure to value this servant rightly.
Theologically, this verse sits at the heart of one of the most significant passages in the Hebrew Bible, one that early Christians read as a striking prophetic portrait of Jesus Christ centuries before his birth. The Gospels and New Testament writers (see Matthew 8:17, John 12:38, Acts 8:32-35)
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