Ammon was made known to old Greece by the Greeks of Cyrene, Kimon visited the oracle at Siwa, Pindar wrote a hymn to Ammon, and the Athenians made his cult public at some undetermined date earlier than 371/0 B.C. Like Sarapis, Ammon seems never to have been extremely popular; Isis out-did them both. Nevertheless Ammon arrived long before, the others: the preserved records happen to show that he was receiving sacrifices from the Athenian generals themselves in a year (333/2) when the cult of Isis, which we learn about then for the first time, was still a cult of immigrants. Why Ammon, alone of all Egyptian gods, should have succeeded thus early is no mystery: he had an oracle, and he had Greek intermediaries.

The legend of Barlaam and Ioasaph, one of the most popular and influential of medieval romances, entered the western world by way of a Greek version, which fathered, directly or indirectly, translations into almost every European language, and inspired an entire cycle of literary influences. This Greek version was itself descended from a long line of Asiatic redactions, harking back through Georgian and Arabic to Pehlevi and to the Sanskrit prototype (now lost). Thus the Greek version occupies, so to speak, a focal position. It is at once the source of the European, and the culmination of the Asiatic, traditions. Its hero, Prince Ioasaph, can look backward to his earliest incarnation as the Buddha of the Lalita Vistara, and forward to his latest — as a saint of Rome and Byzantium; while many of the tales told him by the monk Barlaam to convert him to Christianity change little on their long journey from some such work as the Pantchatantra, via the Greek Barlaam, to the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, or the Gesta Romanorum.

The expression ‘plain meaning’ is here used in the sense of Hebrew peshat, since this paper is not primarily a study in the higher criticism of Deutero-Isaiah. But I may perhaps be allowed to make three brief preliminary statements of belief concerning the relation of the passage under discussion to the rest of the book: First: that the conception of the Servant found in 42.1–4 is closer to that found in the whole of Deutero-Isaiah than it is to that in the last of the so-called Servant-poems, 52.13–53.12. Second: that the first Servant-poem describes the people of Israel, as do chs. 40–55 generally, and not an individual. Third: that the suffering of the Servant has been unduly emphasized from the early Christian period onward, largely because the sublime portrayal of humility and suffering in ch. 53, which is strikingly different from most of the book, has obscured the predominantly consolatory and triumphant aspects of the Servant as God's instrument. With this introduction I should like to comment on the Masoretic text.