pothesis
is ver. 3, where the Servant of God is designated as the Saviour of the
poor and afflicted, which, in the first instance, are no other than the
better portion of the people; as well as other reasons, which we shall
bring out in commenting upon chap. liii. by which section the
hypothesis is altogether overthrown.

According to _De Wette_ (_de morte expiat._ p. 26) and _Gesenius_, [Pg
206] the subject of the prophecy is the collective body of the
prophets. Substantially, _Umbreit_ too (_Der Knecht Gottes_, Hamburg
1840) adheres to this interpretation. He rejects the explanation which
refers it to Christ in the sense of the Christian Church, and on p. 13
he completely assents to _Gesenius_, by remarking that he could not
find in the prophets any supernatural, distinct predictions of future
events. The Prophet, according to him, formed to himself, by his own
authority, an "ideal of a Messiah," the abstraction of what he saw
before his eyes in the people, especially in the better portion of
them, but chiefly in the order of the prophets, and then persuaded
himself that this self-invented image would, at some future period,
come into existence as a real person. "The highest ideal of the
prophetic order, viewed as teaching, is represented in the unity of a
person." "We find the prophets as a collective body in the [Hebrew:
ebd], but chiefly, the prophets who, in future only, on the regained
paternal soil, are, in some person, to reach the highest perfection."

This hypothesis of the collective body of the prophets violently severs
the prophecy before us, and the parallel passages from those passages
of the second part in which Israel is spoken of as the Servant of God.
It is quite impossible to point out anywhere in the Old Testament, and
especially in the second part of Isaiah, an analogous personification
of the order of the prophets as the Servant of God. The reference to
chap. xliv. 26: "That establisheth the word of His servant, and
performeth the counsel of His messengers; that saith of Jerusalem: She
shall be inhabited, and of the cities of Judah: They shall be built,
and I will raise up the walls thereof," is, in this respect, altogether
out of place, inasmuch as the servant of the Lord, in that verse, is
not the collective band of the prophets, but Isaiah himself, just as in
chap. xxiii. The parallelism between the servant of the Lord and His
messengers is not a _synonymous_, but a _synthetic_ one, just as,