appears here as a King also." As long as we proceed from the supposition that the Prophet predicts truth, we are, by that very supposition, forbidden to distribute the property of the one among the many; but that is thus violently set aside. The Rationalistic interpreters have in this respect an easier task. They allow the substitution to stand; but they consider it as a vain fancy. The fact that _Hofmann_ does not recoil from even the most violent interpretations, in order to remove the exclusive reference to Christ, appears, _e.g._, from his remark, S. 132, that "the chastisement of our peace" designates an actual chastisement, which convinces them of their sin, and of the earnestness of divine holiness, and thus serves for their salvation. Surely _Gesenius_ and _Hitzig's_ explanations are far more unbiassed. 2. Among the interpretations which refer the prophecy to a single individual other than the Messiah, scarcely any one has found another defender than its own author. They are of importance only in so far, as they show that most decidedly does the prophecy make the impression, that its subject is a real person, not a personification; and, farther, that it could not by any means be an exegetical interest which induced rationalism to reject the interpretation which referred it to Christ. The persons that have been guessed at are the following: King Uzziah, (_Augusti_), King Hezekiah, (_Konynenburg_ and _Bahrdt_), the Prophet Isaiah himself, (_Stäudlin_), an unknown prophet supposed to have been killed by the Jews in the captivity (an anonymous author in _Henke's Magazin_, Bd. i. H. 2), the royal house of David, which suffered innocently when the children of the unhappy king Zedekiah were killed at the command of Nebuchadnezzar (_Bolten_ on Acts viii. 33), the Maccabees (an anonymous writer in the _Theologische Nachrichten_, 1821, S. 79 ff.) Even at this present time, this kind of explanation is not altogether obsolete. _Schenkel_ thinks that "the chapter under consideration may, perhaps, belong to the period of the real Isaiah, whose language equals that of the description of the Servant of God now [Pg 326] under consideration, in conciseness and harshness, and may have been originally a Psalm of consolation in sufferings, which was composed with a view to the hopeful progeny of some pious man or prophet innocently killed, and which was rewritten and interpreted by the author of the book, and embodied in it." _Ewald_ (Proph. ii. S. 407) says: "Farther, the description of the Servant of God is here altogether very strange, especially v. 8 f., inasmuch as, notwithstanding all the liveliness with which the author of the book conceives of Him, He is nowhere else so much and so obviously viewed as an historical person, as a single individual of the Past. How little soever the author may have intended it, it was very obvious that the later generations imagined that they would here find the historical Messiah.