Isaiah 53:5

The context

Isaiah 53:5 belongs to the fourth Servant Song, running from 52:13 through 53:12. The song opens with God speaking about the servant, then shifts at 53:1 into a first-person plural confession. Verses 4 through 6 are that confession: the speakers acknowledge that the servant carried what belonged to them.

The shift in person is the passage's engine: the speakers are not describing a stranger's misfortune but naming their own guilt as the cause of his suffering, after the fact.

The words

Mĕḥōlāl, traditionally "wounded" or "pierced," comes from a root that elsewhere means to profane as well as to wound. Some translators render it "pierced," others "wounded"; the related languages do not settle it. The traditional rendering is defensible; certainty about the precise injury is not.

Mĕdukkāʾ, "crushed," is from a root meaning to beat or bruise. Mûsār, "chastisement," is the ordinary word for discipline, the training a teacher gives. Applied to the servant it is jarring: the discipline that produced peace was borne by one who had not earned it.

Two nouns name what was borne: pešaʿ, transgression or rebellion, and ʿāwōn, iniquity — guilt as well as the act. Two name the result: šālôm, peace in the sense of wholeness and right relation, and rĕpūʾâ, healing.

"By his wounds we are healed" uses a plural noun for wounds and a first-person plural verb: the healing belongs to the community speaking, and the grammar does not say whether it is bodily.

What this passage establishes

The servant's suffering is substitutionary in structure: the community's guilt is named as the cause, the servant's suffering as the means of its peace. The text neither softens nor distributes the exchange; that is the plain sense of the sentence.

What it does not establish

It does not name the servant. The song never identifies him. A collective reading — Israel, or a remnant — and an individual reading are both defended; the difficulty for the collective reading is that the servant is distinguished from the people who confess. The identification is left to later texts.

It does not settle whether "healed" means physical recovery. Matthew 8:17 quotes the preceding verse about bearing infirmities in the context of physical healings, which cuts both ways: the song was read as touching bodily suffering, yet the quotation is applied to illness rather than atonement. Isaiah's own context is guilt and peace.

It does not supply a theory of atonement. The verse gives images — bearing, wounding, discipline, peace — not a mechanism. Later theories, penal substitution and Christus Victor among them, draw on this text without being adjudicated by it.

How the church has read it

The New Testament applies this song to Jesus repeatedly, and Acts 8 records an Ethiopian official reading it and asking of whom the prophet speaks. Both Luther and Calvin commented on the chapter, Calvin treating the substitution as its heart. Modern scholarship has reopened the question of the servant's identity.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

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• How would you respond to Victor Stenger's assertion that religious argument leads universally to dismal failure and untold suffering?
• If God is all-good, why does God allow natural disasters, i.e. earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis?
• Christians make assertions; atheists just ask for evidence. What Old Testament evidence is there that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah?
• If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, why does he permit starvation, child molestation, rape, torture and genocide? And don't tell me the victims suffer for Adam and Eve's sin!
• Your all-powerful God created the devil and evil - simply to set up "the fall." He did this KNOWING that most souls would ultimately suffer eternal punishment. You call this a good God? I call it evil.
• If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, why does he permit starvation, child molestation, rape, torture and genocide? And don't tell me these victims are suffering for Adam's sin.

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.