Why Isaiah Leads with the Arm

Isaiah 52:10 announces that “the LORD has made bare His holy arm before the eyes of all the nations,” and only after this does the text move into the Servant passage in Isaiah 52:13–53:12. That sequence itself seems worth pausing over. Why does the prophet foreground the Arm before introducing the Servant?

Across Isaiah, the “arm of the LORD” functions as a fairly stable motif. It consistently refers to YHWH’s own power at work, often highlighted by the absence of any helper or intermediary (e.g., Isa 40:10; 51:9; 59:16; 63:5). In several of these texts, deliverance is explicitly attributed to YHWH alone, a point many commentators have noted in discussions of Isaianic agency (cf. Childs; Seitz).

If that background is kept in view, the Servant’s appearance in Isaiah 52:13–53:12 reads less like the introduction of a new agent and more like a disclosure of how the already-proclaimed divine action takes shape. The movement of the passage is from declaration to manifestation: first, the claim that YHWH’s saving power will be openly revealed; then, the portrayal of a figure marked by rejection, suffering, and weakness. The progression seems to steer the reader away from assuming a heroic individual later elevated by God.

Isaiah 53:1 presses the issue further: “To whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?” The question does not directly ask who the Servant is, but whether divine power can be recognized when it appears in an unfamiliar form. A number of scholars have suggested that the tension of the Servant song lies precisely here, not simply in the fact of suffering, but in the way YHWH’s own saving action is disclosed through it (e.g., Blenkinsopp; Goldingay).

Read along these lines, the Arm motif functions as a kind of interpretive key within Isaiah 52–53. It frames how the Servant is to be understood rather than being explained by the Servant. The disclosure of the Arm invites a reconsideration of how power and deliverance are imagined in the text, shifting attention away from earlier displays of dominance toward divine agency manifested in vulnerability.

How far this sequencing should be carried when thinking about agency and revelation elsewhere in Isaiah, or more broadly across the canon, is an open question. But within Isaiah 52–53 itself, the priority given to the Arm appears to play a significant role in shaping the reader’s encounter with the Servant.