Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Isaiah · About this commentary
Who Is Blind but My Servant?
Isaiah 42:10-25
10 Sing to Yahweh a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, you who go down to the sea, and all that is therein, the islands and their inhabitants. · WEB
God compares himself to a woman in labor after a long silence, and then asks who is blinder than his own servant.
Sing to Yahweh a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth Isaiah 42:10.
The response to the Servant Song is a hymn, and its geography runs to the edges — sailors, islands, the desert villages of Kedar, the rock city of Sela. The people asked to sing are the ones furthest from Jerusalem.
Yahweh will go out like a mighty man. He will stir up zeal like a man of war. He will raise a war cry Isaiah 42:13.
The servant who would not raise his voice is followed immediately by a God who shouts. The book puts the two together without comment.
I have been silent a long time. I have been quiet and restrained myself. Now I will cry out like a travailing woman. I will both gasp and pant Isaiah 42:14.
The most startling self-description in Scripture. God compares himself to a woman in labor — and the comparison is about the silence as much as the noise. What is being described is a long, deliberate restraint that ends in something that cannot be held in any longer, and the sound it makes is not a war cry after all.
The divine silence that the exiles experienced as absence is here named as self-control, with a term on it.
I will bring the blind by a way that they don't know. I will lead them in paths that they don't know. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. I will do these things, and I will not forsake them Isaiah 42:16.
Four promises and every one assumes the blindness rather than curing it first. They are led on unfamiliar roads without being given sight for the journey.
Who is blind, but my servant? Or who is as deaf as my messenger whom I send? Isaiah 42:19.
And then the turn that makes this section difficult and honest. The servant of verse one brought justice to the nations; the servant here is the blindest man in the passage. Israel is the servant in both places, and cannot do what the servant is described as doing.
The book never resolves this by choosing. It states both, and the four songs run through the same tension until the last one, where the servant does for the people what the people could not do.
You see many things, but don't observe. His ears are open, but he doesn't listen Isaiah 42:20.
The organs work. It is chapter six's diagnosis restated Isaiah 6:9, and the failure is located after the senses.
Who gave Jacob as plunder, and Israel to the robbers? Didn't Yahweh, he against whom we have sinned? Isaiah 42:24.
The exile is not attributed to Babylon's strength.
It set him on fire all around, but he didn't know. It burned him, but he didn't take it to heart Isaiah 42:25.
A man on fire who has not noticed. It is the chapter's last word on the blindness, and it explains why the comfort of chapter forty had to be announced twice.
settled What this mark means