certain, and, at all events, we cannot draw any inference from the language of Nehemiah as to that of Isaiah. The Ellipses: "the true cause of His death," "the importance and fruit of His death," "the salvation lying behind it" (_Stier_), are very [Pg 292] hard, and the sense which is purchased by such sacrifices is rather a common-place one, little suitable to this context, and to the relation to chap. lii. 15.--"_For He was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people, whose the punishment._" The reason is here stated why the Servant of God receives so glorious a reward; why, after He has been removed to God, a generation so infinitely great is granted to Him. _He has deserved this reward by His having suffered for the sins of His people, as their substitute._ The first clause must not be separated from the second: "for the transgression," &c. For it is not the circumstance, that the Servant of God suffered a violent death at all, but that for the sin of His people He took it upon Him, which is the ground of His glorification. נגזר "to be cut off" never occurs of a quiet, natural death; not even in the passage, quoted in support of this use of the word, viz., Psa. lxxxviii. 6; Lam. iii. 54, but always of a violent, premature death. The cognate נגרז also has, in Psa. xxxi. 23, the signification of extermination. למו, poetical form for להם, refers to the collective עם. Before it, the relative pronoun is to be understood: for the sin of my people, whose the punishment, _q.d._, whose property the punishment was, to whom it belonged. _Stier_ prefers to adopt the most violent interpretation rather than to conform and yield to this so simple sense, which, as he says, could be entertained only by that obsolete theory of substitution where one saves the other from suffering. Several interpreters take the suffix in למו as a Singular: "on account of the transgression of my people, punishment was to Him." And passages, indeed, are not wanting where the supposition that מו designates the Singular, has some appearance of probability; but, upon a closer examination, this appearance everywhere vanishes.[7] Moreover, as we have already remarked, it is, on account of the sense, inadmissible to separate the two clauses.--By עמי "my people," the hypothesis of the non-Messianic interpreters is set aside, that in [Pg 293] vers. 1-10 the _Gentiles_ are speaking. It is a single people to which the speakers belong, the covenant-people, for whose benefit the atonement and substitution of the Servant of God were, _in the first instance_, intended (comp. σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὑτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν, Matth. i. 21) yea, were, to a certain degree, exclusively intended, inasmuch as the believing Gentiles were received into it as adopted children. It is a forced expedient to say: every single individual of the Gentiles, or of their princes, says that the Servant of God has suffered for the sin of His people, hence also for His own. And just as