Isaiah 53:4

Surely he hath borne &c.] Render:

Surely it was our sicknesses that he bore

and our pains that he carried.

The emphasis of contrast lies on the words ourand hein both lines. To "bear" sickness is not to take it away (although that will be the effect of vicarious bearing of it) but simply to endure it (as Jeremiah 10:19). In Matthew 8:17 the words are applied to our Lord's miracles of healing, but the prophet's meaning plainly is that the Servant endured in his own person the penal consequences of the people's guilt.

yet we did esteem &c.] Rather, while we accounted him stricken &c. The subject "we" is strongly emphasised, and the clause is circumstantial, introducing the people's false estimate of the Servant as a concomitant of the main statement of the verse. "Stricken" is the expression used when God visits a man with severe and sudden sickness (Genesis 12:17; 1 Samuel 6:9), especially leprosy, which was regarded as preeminently the "stroke" of God's hand (Job 19:21; 2 Kings 15:5; Leviticus 13:3; Leviticus 13:9; Leviticus 13:20) and the direct consequence of sin. That the Servant is pictured as a leper is suggested by several particulars in the description, such as his marred and disfigured form, and his isolation from human society, as well as the universal conviction of his contemporaries that he was a special object of the divine wrath; and the impression is confirmed by the parallel case of Job, the typical righteous sufferer, whose disease was elephantiasis, the most hideous form of leprosy. It has to be-borne in mind, of course, that the figure of the Servant is in some sense an ideal creation of the prophet's mind, so that the leprosy is only a strong image for such sufferings as are the evidence of God's wrath against sin.