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1. People have debated whether the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 is an individual or a collective. An important piece in this debate is Isaiah 53:8, which uses the Hebrew word lamo. Lamo often means “to them.” Jewish interpreters who believe that Isaiah 53 is collective—about the nation of Israel—appeal to lamo to support their point. They translate the phrase to mean, “because of the transgression my people, a blow to them.”
But Gesenius, on page 302, cites passages in which the suffix mo can be singular: Isaiah 44:15; Job 20:23; 22:2; 27:23; and Psalm 11:7. The Holladay entry on my Bibleworks cites Genesis 9:26 as another example in which mo means “him.”
I think it makes sense to interpret mo as singular in Isaiah 53:8, for that very verse uses singular verbs and suffixes when speaking of the Suffering Servant. Does that have any bearing as to whether the Suffering Servant was an individual or a group of people? Not really, for the nation of Israel in the Hebrew Bible is often described using individual terminology (as a woman, for instance).
Gesenius also makes another point: the Septuagint translates the part where the Masoretic Text has lamo as “to death.” For Gesenius, the Hebrew was originally la-mavet (“to death”), and the tav fell off in the course of textual transmission, leaving lamed, mem, vav. And so, presumably for Gesenius, the text should read, “because of the transgression of my people, a blow to death.” (At the same time, the LXX of Isaiah 53:8 doesn’t use a word for “blow”, but it says that the Servant was led to death.)
2. In my reading of Jacob Neusner today, I discovered a mistake that I’ve been making: I’ve been calling divisions of the Mishnah “tractates”, rather than “divisions.” Tractates are sections of the divisions.
