later Jewish doctrine of the last things and in the official exegesis
of the Targums. In the very developed eschatology of Daniel
they are, as we have seen, altogether wanting, and in the
Apocrypha, both before and after the Maccabean revival, the
everlasting throne of David’s house is a mere historical reminiscence
(Ecclus. xlvii. 11; 1 Macc. ii. 57). So long as the wars
of independence occupied the Palestinian Jews, and the Hasmonaean
sovereignty promised a measure of independence and
felicity under the law, the hope that connected itself with the
House of David was not likely to rise to fresh life, especially as a
considerable proportion of the not very numerous passages of
Scripture which speak of the ideal king might with a little
straining be applied to the rising star of the new dynasty (cf.
1 Macc. xiv. 4–15). It is only in Alexandria, where the Jews
were still subject to the yoke of the Gentile, that at this time
(c. 140 B.C.) we find the oldest Sibylline verses (iii. 652 seq.)
proclaiming the approach of the righteous king whom God shall
raise up from the East (Isa. xli. 2.) The name Messiah is still
lacking, and the central point of the prophecy is not the reign of
the deliverer but the subjection of all nations to the law and the
temple.[1]
With the growing weakness and corruption of the Hasmonaean princes, and the alienation of a large part of the nation from their cause, the hope of a better kingship begins to appear in Judaea also; at first darkly shadowed forth in the Book of Enoch (chap. xc.), where the white steer, the future leader of God’s herd after the deliverance from the heathen, stands in a certain contrast to the actual dynasty (the horned lambs); and then much more clearly, and for the first time with use of the name Messiah, in the Psalter of Solomon, the chief document of the protest of Pharisaism against its enemies the later Hasmonaeans. The struggle between the Pharisees and Sadducees, between the party of the scribes and the aristocracy, was a struggle for mastery between a secularized hierarchy whose whole interests were those of their own selfish politics, and a party to which God and the exact fulfilment of the law according to the scribes were all in all. This doctrine had grown up under Persian and Grecian rule, and no government that possessed or aimed at political independence could possibly show constant deference to the punctilios of the schoolmen. The Pharisees themselves could not but see that their principles were politically impotent; the most scrupulous observance of the Sabbath, for example—and this was the culminating point of legality—could not thrust back the heathen. Thus the party of the scribes, when they came into conflict with an active political power, which at the same time claimed to represent the theocratic interests of Israel, were compelled to lay fresh stress on the doctrine that the true deliverance of Israel must come from God.
But now the Jews were a nation once more, and national ideas came to the front. In the Hasmonaean sovereignty these ideas took a political form, and the result was the secularization of the kingdom of God for the sake of a harsh and rapacious aristocracy. The nation threw itself on the side of the Pharisees; not in the spirit of punctilious legalism, but with the ardour of a national enthusiasm deceived in its dearest hopes, and turning for help from the delusive kingship of the Hasmonaeans to the true kingship of Yahweh, and to His vicegerent the king of David’s house. It is in this connexion that the doctrine and name of the Messiah appear in the Psalter of Solomon. The eternal kingship of the House of David, so long forgotten, is seized on as the proof that the Hasmonaeans have no divine right.
“Thou, Lord, art our king for ever and ever. . . . Thou didst choose David as king over Israel, and swarest unto him concerning his seed for ever that his kingship should never fail before Thee. And for our sins sinners (the Hasmonaeans) have risen up over us, taking with force the kingdom which Thou didst not promise to them, profaning the throne of David in their pride. But Thou, O Lord, will cast them down and root out their seed from the land, when a man not of our race (Pompey) rises up against them. . . . . Behold, O Lord, and raise up their king the Son of David at the time that Thou hast appointed, to reign over Israel Thy servant; and gird him with strength to crush unjust rulers; to cleanse Jerusalem from the heathen that tread it under foot, to cast out sinners from Thy inheritance; to break the pride of sinners and all their strength as potter’s vessels with a rod of iron (Ps. ii. 9); to destroy the lawless nations with the word of his mouth (Isa. xi. 4); to gather a holy nation and lead them in righteousness. . . . He shall divide them by tribes in the land, and no stranger and foreigner shall dwell with them; he shall judge the nations in wisdom and righteousness. The heathen nations shall serve under his yoke; he shall glorify the Lord before all the earth, and cleanse Jerusalem in holiness, as in the beginning. From the ends of the earth all nations shall come to see his glory and bring the weary sons of Zion as gifts (Isa. lx. 3 seq.); to see the glory of the Lord with which God hath crowned him, for he is over them a righteous king taught of God. In his days there shall be no unrighteousness in their midst; for they are all holy and their king the anointed of the Lord (χριστὸς κύριος, mistranslation of משיח יהוה).—Psalt. Sol. xvii.
This conception is traced in lines too firm to be those of a first essay; it had doubtless grown up as an integral part of the religious protest against the Hasmonaeans. And while the polemical motive is obvious, and the argument from prophecy against the legitimacy of a non-Davidic dynasty is quite in the manner of the scribes, the spirit of theocratic fervour which inspires the picture of the Messiah is broader and deeper than their narrow legalism. In a word, the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah marks the fusion of Pharisaism with the national religious feeling of the Maccabean revival. This national feeling, claiming a leader against the Romans as well as deliverance from the Sadducee aristocracy, again sets the idea of the kingship rather than that of resurrection and individual retribution in the central place. Henceforward the doctrine of the Messiah is the centre of popular hope and the object of theological culture. The New Testament is the best evidence of its influence on the masses (see especially Matt. xxi. 9); and the exegesis of the Targums, which in its beginnings doubtless reaches back before the time of Christ, shows how it was fostered by the Rabbins and preached in the synagogues.[2] Its diffusion far beyond Palestine, and in circles least accessible to such ideas, is proved by the fact that Philo himself (De praem. et poen. § 16) gives a Messianic interpretation of Num. xxiv. 27 (LXX). It must not indeed be supposed that the doctrine was as yet the undisputed part of Hebrew faith which it became when the fall of the state and the antithesis to Christianity threw all Jewish thought into the lines of the Pharisees. It has, for example, no place in the Assumption of Moses or the Book of Jubilees. But, as the fatal struggle with Rome became more and more imminent, the eschatological hopes which increasingly absorbed the Hebrew mind all group themselves round the person of the Messiah. In the later parts of the Book of Enoch (the “symbols” of chap. xlv. seq.) the judgment day of the Messiah (identified with Daniel’s “Son of Man”) stands in the forefront of the eschatological picture. Josephus (B. J. vi. 5, § 4) testifies that the belief in the immediate appearance of the Messianic king gave the chief impulse to the war that ended in the destruction of the Jewish state; after the fall of the temple the last apocalypses (Baruch, 4 Ezra) still loudly proclaim the near victory of the God-sent king; and Bar Cochebas, the leader of the revolt against Hadrian, was actually greeted as the Messiah by Rabbi Aqiba (cf. Luke xxi. 8). These hopes were again quenched in blood; the political idea of the Messiah, the restorer of the Jewish state, still finds utterance in the daily prayer of every Jew (the Shemōnē Esrē), and is enshrined in the system of Rabbinical theology; but its historical significance was buried in the ruins of Jerusalem.[3]
- ↑ In Sibyll. iii. 775, νηόν must undoubtedly be read for υἱόν.
- ↑ The Targumic passages that speak of the Messiah are registered by Buxtorf, Lex. Chald., s.v.
- ↑ False Messiahs have continued from time to time to appear among the Jews. Such was Serenus of Syria (c. 720 A.D.). Soon after, Messianic hopes were active at the time of the fall of the Omayyads, and led to a serious rising under Abu ʽIsa of Ispahan, who called himself forerunner of the Messiah. The false Messiah David Alrui (Alroy) appeared among the warlike Jews in Azerbijan in the middle of the 12th century. The Messianic claims of Abraham Abulafia of Saragossa (born 1240) had a cabalistic basis, and the same studies encouraged the wildest hopes at a later time. Thus Abarbanel calculated the coming of the Messiah for 1503 A.D.; the year 1500 was in many places observed as a preparatory season of penance; and throughout the 16th century the Jews were much stirred and more than one false Messiah appeared. See also Sabbatai, Sebi.
