<p>8:32 <i>Now the passage of the Scripture which he was reading was this:</i> <em>He was led- </em>This changes the quotation from Is. 53 to say that Christ was led (this isn't in the Hebrew text). The impression given of His passivity is another indication that He was giving His life of His own volition, it wasn't being taken from Him. There is great emphasis on the Lord being led (Mt. 26:57; 27:2,31; Mk. 15:16; Jn. 18:13,28; 19:16). The eunuch felt he too was being led; Luke uses the word to speak of the convert to Christ being led to the inn by the good Samaritan (Lk. 10:34), and it is used of Peter being first led to Christ (Jn. 1:42), of the sheep being led to the Lord's fold (Jn. 10:16), of sinners being led to repentance (Rom. 2:4) and the many sons being led to glory (Heb. 2:10). So the eunuch saw striking similarities between himself and all that was written of the Messianic figure in Isaiah. We could say that he saw in the Christ his representative. But he needed to make some conscious act of identification with him, which is why the appeal for baptism into Him was so natural and was exactly what he needed to hear.</p><p><em>As a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb</em>- Having been so recently in Jerusalem for worship, these images were fresh in the eunuch's mind. Those animals were representative of some greater reality- and now he was figuring that that person whom they represented was also in turn representative of himself.</p><p><em>Before his shearer is dumb, so he did not open his mouth</em>- One simple reason the Lord was silent before His accusers was because He was utterly scared in the face of death. His silence wasn't merely because of an iron willed biting of the tongue; it was also a result of the same humanity which sweated great drops in Gethsemane as He begged not to die. The sheep-Messiah was &quot;dumb&quot;, literally, without a voice. Just as the eunuch was in Judaism. He too had been unable to &quot;open his mouth&quot; in the worship formalities because he was excluded from the temple on account of his physical condition and ethnicity.</p>