The prevalence of the expectation of a personal Messiah reflected in the Gospels, and the clearness and consistency of the idea, are not to be explained solely from the Old Testament prophecies.
In the Apocrypha the Messianic expectation has almost died out (Ecclus. xlix. 11; 1 Macc. ii. 57), but after the Maccabæan revolt it revived, owing doubtless to the disappointment caused by the deterioration of the Hasmonæan dynasty, of which so much had been expected. The Pharisees, who resented the policy of the Hasmonæans, made the idea of a restoration of the Davidic line the peculiar property of their party, and from this time until the appearance of Jesus, Messianic expectation reached a point never before attained. The following summary shows the emergence of the idea in the literature of the period:—
(1) The Dream-Visions of Enoch. B.C. 166–161. The Messiah appears under the figure of a white bullock, and the saints are changed into His image. The Messiah has only an official function in the world-drama, and a human though glorified personality.
(2) The Sibylline Oracles. In a passage assigned to B.C. 140, the Messiah is represented as a God-sent King, who is expected to arise from the East, and whose appearance will be a signal for an attack upon the Temple by the Gentiles.
(3) The Book of Jubilees. B.C. 135–105. The writer is concerned more with the Messianic Kingdom, which he conceives of spiritually, than with the Messiah, who is only alluded to once, and who is expected to arise from Judah.
(4) The Similitudes of Enoch. B.C. 95–80. This part of the Book of Enoch is much occupied with the person of the Messiah. He is definitely named "the Messiah," and also bears the titles "the Elect One," "the Righteous One," and "the Son of Man." He is a Prophet and a Teacher, "the light of the Gentiles," all judgment is committed unto Him, and He will sit on the throne of His glory. He will raise again to life all the righteous who have died.
(5) The Psalms of Solomon. B.C. 70–40. The Messiah is to be sinless; He is the Son of David; He will not adopt the ordinary methods of warfare, but will smite the earth with the rod of His mouth.
The following works all belong to the Christian era, but they may reflect ideas that had an earlier origin:—
(6) The Assumption of Moses. A.D. 7–30. The hope of an earthly Messiah is abandoned and it is God Himself who is expected to take vengeance on His enemies.
(7) The Apocalypse of Baruch. c. 70 A.D. The Messiah will appear after Israel's enemies have been destroyed. His Kingdom is likened to "the bright lightning," and at the end of His reign He is to return in glory to heaven.
(8) 2 Esdras. A.D. 81–96. The Messiah, although more than earthly, dies after a reign of 400 years. He is pictured as a lion rebuking an eagle (the Roman power), and "as it were with the likeness of a man" arising from the midst of the sea, and flying with the clouds of heaven.
[Lecture XI]
MESSIANIC EXPECTATIONS
In all the stages through which the Old Testament religion passed there seems to have existed a consciousness of their imperfection, and this produced a tendency to gaze into the future, in which it was thought the ideal religion would exist, and where could be descried the perfect realisation of God's dwelling among men. It is natural that this characteristic should find its clearest expression in the Prophets. When their eyes are upon the present, they condemn; when they look to the immediate future, they utter grave warning and the shadows deepen upon their faces; but when they lift their eyes to the distant hills of time, the light is on their faces, and they break into songs of the days that are yet to be. It is this vision of the future and the endeavour to give it a definite outline that runs like a thread through the Old Testament and forces us to look beyond its borders for the ultimate issue of its religious development. This subject may best be studied under the general head of Messianic expectations.
The immediate difficulty in understanding this subject is found in the circumstance that it has received from Bible students an exaggerated attention, and has been pursued with methods that the best modern scholarship cannot sanction. The eager hunting for Messianic prophecy, and the desire to find literal fulfilment, has often stretched the meaning of passages unwarrantably and made a sane exegesis appear tame and uninteresting. But more disastrous has been the effect upon the understanding of the Old Testament as a whole. The literature has been treated as a mysterious typology, in which some indirect picture of the Messiah was to be discovered, or a series of exact predictions of His life and work. This has destroyed the sense of perspective, it has ignored the message of the Prophets to their own age, and it has been responsible for the idea that the religion of the Psalmists was simply a pious expectation of the Messiah, instead of a real communion with God.
It is difficult to gain a right appreciation of this subject after it has suffered such abuse, but a serious effort should be made; for it is in the understanding of the Messianic expectation that we shall find a key to the New Testament and more especially to that conflict of soul which the acceptance of the Messiahship seems to have brought upon Jesus.
The method of study followed will be an endeavour to read all alleged Messianic predictions, first of all in the light of their actual meaning for the age in which they were uttered; but more particularly it will embrace the general ideas of the future of which the conception of the Messiah forms only a part. We shall find that the conscious prediction of the Messiah is somewhat reduced in bulk, and that the Messianic expectation includes something more than a figure of the Messiah himself, and is indeed sometimes found without any such feature.
The Messianic ideal involves the whole conception of the religious future of Israel. The Hebrew religion receives much inspiration from its tradition of the past, but infinitely more from its hopes for the future: the golden age is not thought to lie far back in history, but in a time yet to come. It seems likely that this idea was widely dispersed even among the common people, and it is therefore only natural that it should often have been held in an unspiritual manner and expressed after a material fashion. This hope was seized upon by the Prophets, and by them elevated above a merely material expectation; they enriched it by the wealth of their creative genius, and from their time it receives a definite content. Standing far above their contemporaries in their conception of the meaning of Jehovah's covenant with Israel, the Prophets were forced to realise the failure of their message to win immediate acceptance, and sometimes they witnessed its entire rejection by the people; and therefore it was inevitable that they should look to the future to yield what the present seemed unable to produce: a religion pure, simple, and free from all limitations. If we inquire the reason of this hope, we find it in their trust in Jehovah's covenant and in their conviction of the ultimate triumph of truth. Now it was not unnatural, with the peculiar character of their national history, for their hopes to group themselves around some commanding figure; for all along Israel had been moved by splendid personalities. They were accustomed to the appearance of men whose power and genius marked them out as fitted by Jehovah for some mighty task; so that whenever they think of the future and come to a detailed description of their vision they descry one dominant figure, the symbol and representative of the people, but also the symbol and representative of the power of Jehovah dwelling among them. This figure receives his peculiar outline largely from the needs of their immediate times, and any person of whom great things are expected may be hailed as the Messiah (Cyrus, Isa. xlv. 1; Haggai ii. 20–23, seems to suggest that Zerubbabel is the expected Messiah; and Zech. vi. 12 uses Messianic language of Joshua the High Priest).
We should have expected that the figure of the Messiah, as conceived by the Prophets, would partake largely of the prophetic office idealised and accepted by an obedient people. This however is not the case. There is a promise of a prophet made through Moses, which in the New Testament has been interpreted as a Messianic prophecy (Deut. xviii. 18; Acts iii. 22, vii. 37), but an examination of the passage, which follows a denunciation of the practices of divination, necromancy, and sorcery, out of which primitive Prophetism arose, shows that it is a promise of the establishment of the prophetic office rather than of any one person. Elsewhere Moses is made to exclaim: "would that all the Lord's people were prophets" (Num. xi. 29). Both these passages are due to prophetic teaching, and this is the Prophets' conception of their office: they do not rejoice in their splendid isolation and their unique relation to God; they are grieved that the people do not share their possession of the Spirit of God and their hearing of His word, for to them these things are the essence of all true religion. So they look forward to a time when their office will no longer be necessary (Jer. xxxi. 34), and when the Spirit of the Lord shall be poured out on all flesh (Joel ii. 28f). It is not in any contradiction to this that the picture of the Servant of the Lord, delineated by the Second Isaiah, is largely drawn from the prophetic office (Isa. xlii. 1–4, xlix. 1–6, l. 4); for the Servant is the Nation of Israel fulfilling her prophetic role among the nations of mankind. In the late prophecy of Malachi the figure of Elijah the prophet is seen in the future, but only as the herald of the coming of the Messianic era (Mal. iv. 5).
The Priest contributes little more than the Prophet to the picture (Zech. iii.; vi. 12; Psa. cx.); for to the prophetic conception of things the Priesthood is hardly a necessary office in a true religion. It is from the office of the King that the Messiah is largely drawn. This conception could only have arisen after the founding of the monarchy and only when the real David had faded far enough into the past to be idealised. It was in their experience of the imperfection of the Kings of Israel and Judah that the Prophets saw the need for a true kingly head; and in the oppression of military kingdoms, the need for a mighty warrior. And yet it is not a king who fills the picture of the future, so much as a kingdom.
Outside the Prophets and the Psalms we find little expectation of a personal Messiah, but we find almost everywhere the conception of an ideal or Messianic age. What has been called the Protevangelium, the promise to the woman that her seed should bruise the serpent's head (Gen. iii. 15), does not point explicitly to any one person, but simply promises that in man's eternal warfare with temptation he shall at length gain the victory. The prophecy of Balaam (Num. xxiv. 17–19) involves nothing more than the future supremacy of Israel. Jacob's blessing on Judah (Gen. xlix. 10) promises a stable dynasty to that tribe, and the reference to Shiloh is so obscure that nothing can be built upon it (Shiloh may mean peace, but in the Septuagint the phrase is translated: "until that which is his shall come." Another ancient reading is: "till he come whose it is." Shiloh might refer to the town of that name, but this would give no help to the interpretation. The text must be corrupt).