The Battle for YHVH | 203the king of Israel, in accordance with the primal covenant, is now none other
than YHVH Himself (52:7 et al.).”^125 The passage that many consider the strongest
evidence for identifying the servant with the collective of Israel (“You are my
servant, Israel in whom I glorify myself,” 49:3), Buber uses in support of his own
view of the servant as a part, but not the totality, of Israel:
If the saying really was directed to Israel, there was no need to say: “Thou
art Israel.” If, however, what is meant by the servant is a person, but a person
standing in a quite peculiarly close relationship to Israel, it is fairly evident
that God speaks to him: “Thou art the Israel in whom I glorify myself.” The
paradox of the two “servants” cannot be dissolved or dispelled. It is intended
to be a paradox. In it we recognize the supposition necessary in order that Isa-
iah’s messianic prophecy should be transformed into the Messianic mystery
of Deutero-Isaiah.^126A shift of emphasis here transforms the servant into yet another version of the
doctrine of the remnant: Ezekiel’s individualized remnant that reduced the pen-
itent community into a collection of penitent individuals is now concentrated
even further, to become a remnant of one person. The suffering-bearing servant
of YHVH stands in for the people as a whole.
Mystery remains as to the exact identity of this remnant servant. Buber notes
passages in which the servant appears to be the prophet himself, and others in
which this identification is rendered impossible (e.g., the report of the servant’s
death at 53:9). Because nothing here suggests a miraculous individual resurrec-
tion, Buber proposes the following solution:
The substance of the servant is more than a single human person without,
however, having a corporate character. Here we infer that this person takes
shape in many likenesses and life-ways, the bearers of which are identical in
their innermost essence, but no supernatural event, no resurrection of the
dead leads from one of these figures to the next. It seems to me that we are
able to take the remarkable phrase ‘in his deaths’ (v. 9) quite literally: it is not
a single death that comes upon the servant on his way, he goes from death to
death, and to new life again.^127Stretching beyond the life span of any individual, people across time and space
participate in the life of this servant. Each recognizes that they must endure suf-
fering for the sake of the great work of YHVH; each transforms this suffering
from a passive endurance to an action for God’s sake; each participates in the
liberation of the oppressed peoples, contributing to the divine order and the re-
demption of history. “Deutero-Isaiah” felt himself to be one of these figures, the
one to whom the mystery of the concealment and future revelation of the whole
future series was revealed. This vision leads Buber, despite his misgivings about
the style and direction of this figure, to anoint him “in truth a prophet, a nabi.”^128