The birth of the Messiah was foretold in Isaiah 7:10-14: "Ask the Lord your God for a sign -therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name "Immanu El", "God with us". 200 years before Christ the Septuagint understood the Hebrew concept "almah" in Greek as "parthenos" as a "virgin". This is the sign!

Isaiah 53 has been totally omitted from the annual reading of the prophets, so called haphtaroth. In Yalkut Makhiri also there is a note in brackets relating to Isaiah 53 that "here is missing a little of the matter".However, on the Great Day of Atonement the Jew feels that his sins must be forgiven before God. On that day Isaiah 53 is sometimes mentioned in the Jewish prayers. A separate prayerbook for the feast days, the Mahzor Rabbah, contains a remarkable literary prayer by Rabbi Eleazar Qalir which may be from the sixth century AD. It is often heard in the Synagogue. 

God's first words in the Bible are: "Let there be light! And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good." When we study the creation account closely we notice that it was not until the fourth day that God created the "two great lights", the sun and the moon. The Sages understood this too to be a Messianic allusion. The Midrash known as Pesikhta Rabbah, which was read from the 9th century on in connection with feast days, asks, "Whose is this light which falls upon the congregation of the Lord?" and answers, "It is the light of the Messiah". The Yalqut Shimoni, comprising catenae of Talmudic and Midrashic passages drawn up in the 12th and 13th centuries, adds to this exposition the words: "This is the light of the Messiah, as is written in Psalm 36:10,'In your light, we see light'".