The words חלי and מכאב of the preceding verse here appear again. He was laden with disease and pains; but these sufferings, the wages of sin, were not inflicted upon Him on account [Pg 282] of His own sins, but on account of our sins, so that the horror falls back upon ourselves, and is changed into loving admiration of Him. _Beck_ remarks: "Properly speaking, they had not become sick or unfortunate at all; this had _a priori_ been rendered impossible by the vicarious suffering of the Son of God; but since they deserved the sickness and calamity, the averting of it might be considered as a healing." But this view is altogether the result of embarrassment. Disease is the inseparable companion of sin. If the persons speaking are subject to the latter, the disease cannot be considered as an evil merely threatening them. If they speak of their diseases, we think, in the first instance, of sickness by which they have already been seized; and the less obvious sense ought to have been expressly indicated. In the same manner, the healing also suggests hurts already existing. But quite decisive is ver. 6, where the miserable condition clearly appears to have already taken place.--According to the opinion of several interpreters, by diseases, all inward and outward sufferings are figuratively designated; according to the opinion of others, _spiritual_ diseases, sins. But even from the relation of this verse to the preceding, it appears that here, in the first instance, diseases and pains, in the ordinary sense, are spoken of; just as the blind and deaf in chap. xxxv. are, in the first instance, they who are naturally blind and deaf.--Disease and pain here cannot be spoken of in a sense different from that in which it is spoken of there. Diseases, in the sense of _sins_, do not occur at all in the Old Testament. The circumstance that in the parallel passage, vers. 11 and 12, the bearing of the _transgressions_ and _sins_ is spoken of, does not prove anything. The Servant of God bears them also in their consequences, in their punishments, among which sickness and pains occupy a prominent place. Of the bearing of outward sufferings, נשא חלי occurs in Jer. x. 19 also. If the words are rightly understood, then at once, light falls upon the apostolic quotation in Matt. viii. 16, 17: πάντας τοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντας ἐθεράπευσεν, ὅπως πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ Ἠσαΐου τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος• αὐτὸς τὰς ἀσθενείας ἡμῶν ἔλαβε καὶ τὰς νόσους ἐβάστασε; and this deserves a consideration so much the more careful, that the Evangelist here intentionally deviates from the Alexandrine version (οὗτος τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν φέρει καὶ περὶ ἡμῶν ὀδυνᾶται). In doing so, "we [Pg 283] do not give an external meaning to that which is to be understood spiritually;" but when the Saviour healed the sick, He fulfilled the prophecy before us in its most proper and obvious sense. And this fulfilment is even now going on. For him who stands in a living faith in Christ, sickness, pain,