The arguments against the Messianic interpretation cannot be designated in any other way than as _insignificant_. There is not one among them which could be of any weight to him who is able to judge. It is asserted that the Messiah is nowhere else designated as the Servant of God. Even if this were the fact, it would not prove anything. But this name is assigned to the Messiah in Zech. iii. 8--a passage which interpreters are unanimous in referring to the Messiah--where the Lord calls the Messiah His Servant _Zemach_, and which the Chaldee Paraphrast explains by משיחא ויתגלי "_Messiam et revelabitur_;" farther, in Ezek. xxxiv. 23, 24, not to mention Is. xlii. 1, xlix. 3, 6, l. 10.--It is farther asserted that in the Messianic interpretation everything is viewed as _future_; but that this is inadmissible for grammatical and philological reasons. The suffering, contempt, and death of the Servant of God are here, throughout, represented as past, since in chap. liii. 1-10, all the verbs are in the Preterite. It is the glorification only which appears as future, and is expressed in the Future tense. The writer, therefore, occupies a position between the sufferings and the glorification, and the latter is still impending. But the stand-point of the Prophet is not an actual, but a supposed one,--not a real, but an ideal one. In order to distinguish between condition and consequence,--in order to put sufferings and glorification in the proper relation, he takes his stand between the sufferings and the glorification of the Servant of God, and from that position, that appears to him as being already past which, in reality, was [Pg 328] still future. It is only an interpreter so thoroughly prosaic as _Knobel_ who can advance the assertion: "No prophet occupies, in prophecy, another stand-point than that which in reality be occupies." In this, _e.g._, _Hitzig_ does not by any means assent to him; for be (_Hitzig_) remarks on chap. lii. 7: "Proceeding from the certainty of the salvation, the Prophet sees, in the Spirit, that already coming to pass which, in chap. xl. 9, he called upon them to do." And the same expositor farther remarks on Jer. vi. 24-26: "This is a statement of how people would then speak, and, thereby, a description of the circumstances of that time." But in our remarks on chap. xi. and in the introduction to the second part, we have already proved that the prophets very frequently occupy an ideal stand-point, and that such is the case here, the Prophet has himself expressly intimated. In some places, he has passed from the prophetical stand-point to the historical, and uses the Future even when he speaks of the sufferings,--a thing which appears to have been done involuntarily, but which, in reality, is done intentionally. Thus there occurs יפתח in ver. 7, תשים in ver. 10, and, according to the explanations of _Gesenius_ and others, also יפגיע in ver. 12 while, on the other hand, he sometimes speaks of the glorification in the