The next two verses (8, 9) describe how the Servant's Passion was fulfilled. The figure of a sick man was changed in ver. 5 to that of a punished one, and the punishment we now see carried on to death. The two verses are difficult, the readings and renderings of most of the words being very various. But the sense is clear. The Servant's death was accomplished, not on some far hill top by a stroke out of heaven, but in the forms of human law and by men's hands. It was a judicial murder. _By tyranny and by judgement_,--that is, by a forced and tyrannous judgement,--_he was taken_. To this abuse of law the next verse adds the indifference of public opinion: _and as for his contemporaries, who of them reflected that he was cut off from_, or _cut down in, the land of the living_,--that in spite of the form of law that condemned him he was a murdered man,--that _for the transgression of my people the stroke was his_? So, having conceived him to have been lawfully put to death, they consistently gave him a convict's grave: _they made his grave with the wicked, and he was with the felon in his death_, though--and on this the strophe emphatically ends--he was an innocent man, _he had done no harm, neither was guile in his mouth_. Premature sickness and the miscarriage of justice,--these to Orientals are the two outstanding misfortunes of the individual's life. Take the Psalter, set aside its complaints of the horrors of war and of invasion, and you will find almost all the rest of its sighs rising either from sickness or from the sense of injustice. These were the classic forms of individual suffering in the age and civilisation to which our prophet belonged, and it was natural, therefore, that when he was describing an Ideal or Representative Sufferer, he should fill in his picture with both of them. If we remember this,[230] we shall feel no incongruity in the sudden change of the hero from a sick man to a convict, and back again in ver. 10 from a convict to a sick man. Nor, if we remember this, shall we feel disposed to listen to those interpreters, who hold that the basis of this prophecy was the account of an actual historical martyrdom. Had such been the case the prophet would surely have held throughout to one or the other of the two forms of suffering. His sufferer would have been either a leper or a convict, but hardly both. No doubt the details in vv. 8 and 9 are so realistic that they might well be the features of an actual miscarriage of justice; but the like happened too frequently in the Ancient East for such verses to be necessarily any one man's portrait. Perverted justice was the curse of the individual's life,--perverted justice and that stolid, fatalistic apathy of Oriental public opinion, which would probably regard such a sufferer as suffering for his sins the just vengeance of heaven, though the minister of this vengeance was a tyrant and its means were perjury and murder. _Who of his generation reflected that for the