These verses are poetic but also literal in their description of physical harm. Certainly Christ was “wounded,” “bruised,” and “striped” as his life ended. Although the KJV “stripes” seems to suggest Jesus’s flogging, other translations usually render the Hebrew chaburah as “wounds,” a more generic, though still appropriate term. Perhaps the KJV translators were reading into their selection of terms their New Testament knowledge. Isaiah specialist Avraham Gileadi interprets this passage as “he was pierced for our transgressions,” which also seems to inform the translation with New Testament knowledge.
For a time during the early 1990s, there was much excitement about a reconstructed passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls that apparently discussed a Messianic figure who would be (or was) put to death. Further scholarship, however, now indicates that this reading was probably erroneous:
“Rediscovered” among the unpublished fragments of the scrolls when they first became available late in 1991, 4Q285 frag. 5 of The War of the Messiah created a flurry of excitement and generated front-page headlines all over the world. Line 4 of the fragment is ambiguous in the original Hebrew, which is written without vowels. According to the vowels mentally supplied by the Hebrew reader, 1.4 could say either “they (the enemy) will put the Leader of the community to death” or “the Leader of the community will have him (the enemy leader) put to death.” The Leader of the community is a messianic figure known from other Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, following the first option, fragment 5 appeared to be describing the execution of a messiah, and the obvious parallels to Jesus of Nazareth were drawn.
The excitement has since died down. After a whirlwind of research activity and a number of critical assessments, scholarly consensus has rejected the first option and settled on the second. Even the primary exponent of the “dying messiah” interpretation, Robert Eisenman, has publicly recanted, saying that in fact he never really believed it in the first place.
Although the “pierced” Messiah is not present in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they nevertheless appear to preserve the same belief in an Atoning Messiah as do the Nephites. John A. Tvedtnes notes:
A messianic scroll from Cave 11, called 11QMelch or 11Q13 by scholars, casts Melchizedek in a divine saving role similar to that given to Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus is compared to Melchizedek in Hebrews 5:6, 10; 6:20; 7:1, 10–11, 15, 17, 21. Melchizedek, whose name can mean “legitimate king,” is the archetypical king in the Old Testament and is therefore a fitting symbol of the Messiah.…
Other portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls are even stronger in their support of the view that a knowledge of a savior-messiah was had in ancient Israel. An Aramaic scroll, 4Q246, is of particular interest because it contains concepts found in the angel Gabriel’s announcement of Christ’s birth in Luke 1 and even parallels some of the language of that chapter.