Analysis Of Isaiah 53

Schipper’s conclusion that while Isaiah 53 need not always and alone be interpreted as a text about disabilities, to obscure the Servant’s experience is in some ways dishonest to the text. Moreover, there are practical consequences of an interpretation history that excludes disability from the Suffering Servant’s narrative. As Schipper puts it, “While we cannot know why scholars tend to neglect the servant’s disability, we do know that his neglect contributes to the creation of world and characters without disability.” The apparent absence of named and known individuals with disabilities in the Hebrew Bible can lead to the, false, perception that the biblical world is “full of imagery of disability but free of people with disabilities.” Such
Isaiah 53 becomes a text about cultural experience of disability. There are not many first-hand accounts of lived experience with disability, and while the Suffering Servant is a constructed personality it still becomes one of the closest examples of the Biblical text witnessing to the pain and sin that comes from societal discrimination against disabled persons. In a time of rising hate crimes against various people groups, being able to theologically reflect on a biblical passage about a hate crime—and for the blame to not rest on the individual being harmed, but on the ones doing the harm, can have great pastoral traction for individuals facing
Schipper notes that it is not that the Servant has never been considered to have disabilities; on the contrary, many interpreters throughout history have noticed it and then simply walked away from the observation. Yet the desire to perceive the Servant as an able-bodied sufferer, despite the equally if not more clear evidence of disability, is an example of how the ‘cult of normalcy’ has pervaded Biblical interpretation. This cult rears its head when a different body (or, interpretation) is introduced. To deal with the difference, “Devices of assimilation and exclusion are produced to standardize relations and eliminate infractions. These congeal into what can be called the cult of normalcy…demarcating and policing the borders of a "normal" way of being.” This does not have to be an explicit, malicious policing but rather implicit bias informed by Scripture’s own difficult witness to disability, and interpretation history’s own interpretive choices. Acknowledging the presence of disability imagery, yet continually rejecting it for favor of a non-disabled reading, demonstrates the discomfort with giving disability a prominent place in