What’s actually in this verse

Hebrew has more than one word for moral failure, and this verse uses two of them deliberately. A 'transgression' is a crossing over — a visible act, a line passed. An 'iniquity' reaches further inward: what is bent or warped in the person, the disposition beneath the deed.

The verse gives each its own wound.

'Pierced' is a surface broken from outside — the kind of damage that can be pointed to. 'Crushed' is something collapsing from within. A pierced thing still holds its shape. A crushed thing does not.

If the pairing is intentional — transgression met by piercing, iniquity met by crushing — then the verse is doing something more exact than listing two sins and two sufferings in parallel. It is matching the nature of the harm to the nature of the wrong. The outward act draws the outward wound; the inner corruption draws the destruction that goes all the way through.

In ordinary language these two words occupy opposite ends of a sequence. A wrong is committed, peace breaks down, punishment follows, and eventually — perhaps — peace is restored. Punishment is not the peace; at best it precedes it. The two cannot occupy the same moment.

Yet the verse does not say 'punishment, and afterward peace.' It says 'the punishment that brought our peace.' The punishment is the mechanism. The same event that by every ordinary reckoning ruptures peace is here named as the thing that produced it.

The verse does not pause to reconcile this. It states 'pierced,' it states 'crushed,' it states 'punishment,' and then without slowing down it says 'our peace.' The paradox is compressed into a single phrase and left standing.

A doctor's error and a correct second opinion occupy the same chart. The symptoms did not change. What changed is the interpretation of who is sick and why.

The observers in verse 4 had made their diagnosis: "we considered him plagued, struck by God, and afflicted." They read his condition as a verdict against him—God's hand pressing down on a man who had earned it. The reading was confident. It was also, by verse 5's first word, wrong.

"But he was pierced for our transgressions." The 'But' does not introduce a different event. It reinterprets the same suffering the observers thought they had already understood. And the reinterpretation runs in exactly the opposite direction: what they read as God's judgment falling on him was in fact bearing their iniquities, carrying what belonged to them.

That is what gives "by his wounds we are healed" its particular weight. Without verse 4, the claim is remarkable. With it, the claim is a correction—the healing is discovered in the very suffering the observers had mislabeled as condemnation. The ones who called him 'struck' are the ones who are healed.

The word rendered "pierced" is a passive participial form of the root חָלַל, meaning 'to bore through' or 'to pierce.' That physical sense fits the line: a body run through, punctured. Modern translations settle there without hesitation. But Hebrew has a near-homonym with the same consonants and the same vowel pattern — a root meaning 'to profane,' 'to treat as common,' 'to defile.' The two roots are distinct in the lexicons, yet in the ear of a reader steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, they arrive together.

The Septuagint chose τραυματίζω — 'to wound' — navigating toward the physical without fully closing off the other echo. Some ancient interpreters pressed the profanation sense: the servant was not merely injured but treated as something unholy, discarded. Neither reading cancels the other; both live in the same four consonants. That is not a translation ambiguity to be resolved so much as a depth that a single English word cannot carry.