Messianic Expectations in the Second Temple Period

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Another geeky topic this way comes. 😃

We’ll talk here about how the whole concept of ‘messianic expectation’ in the context of the Second Temple period and the time of Jesus. But first off, I’ll start with a question: what do you guys know about ‘messianic expectation’, and how do you think it went? 🙂
 
patrick457 said:
Another geeky topic this way comes. 😃

We’ll talk here about how the whole concept of ‘messianic expectation’ in the context of the Second Temple period and the time of Jesus. But first off, I’ll start with a question: what do you guys know about ‘messianic expectation’, and how do you think it went? 🙂
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First off, I’m curious whether you have read Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels. It’s a quick read and he makes some very relevant contributions to this topic.

My own personal view is that various things in the Old Testament are termed meshiach. The people (including the disciples) were thinking primarily “king!” with accompanying enhancements to their own political power; the Gospel writers were instead thinking primarily “sacrifice,” and secondarily “prophet” and “priest”.
 
Dave_Noonan said:
First off, I’m curious whether you have read Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels. It’s a quick read and he makes some very relevant contributions to this topic.
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No I haven’t, but I’ll put that on my to-read list. 🙂
My own personal view is that various things in the Old Testament are termed meshiach. The people (including the disciples) were thinking primarily “king!” with accompanying enhancements to their own political power; the Gospel writers were instead thinking primarily “sacrifice,” and secondarily “prophet” and “priest”.
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You’ve pointed out something crucial here. While it is common to speak of a ‘messianic expectation’ (especially in Christian circles under the influence of the gospels), in reality the sources give us a huge variety of views about what ‘messiah’ is that cannot be formed into a coherent whole. In fact, many scholars warn against simply speaking of ‘messianic expectation’ in the context of the Second Temple period: in fact, there is huge disagreement as to just constitutes as ‘messianic’. Sometimes the word is defined in very broad terms to include more or less everything that fits under the general category of Jewish eschatology. Others disagree with this approach and prefer a more minimalistic approach, opining that the discussion should be limited to passages which explicitly speak of a ‘messiah’ (which itself is not free from problems).
 
I think the level of expectation in Israel at the the time of Jesus cannot be underestimated.

***At that time Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan *were going out to him [John the Baptist] and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins. (Matthew 3:5-6)

People understood that the time of the Messiah was approaching and were actively looking, so much so that people from all over the countryside to were going out twenty miles into the middle of nowhere, to the lowest point on earth, to be inmmersed in a ritual mikvah purification bath by John the Baptists.

People were actively looking for the Messiah. They were looking for - and here is the answer to your question Patrick - looking for the new Moses.

When the Jews from Jerusalem sent priests and Levites [to him] to ask him, “Who are you?” he admitted and did not deny it, but admitted, "I am not the Messiah.” So they asked him, “What are you then? Are you Elijah?” And he said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” He answered, “No.” (John 1:19-21)*

The Jews, priests and Levites ask John point blank if he is the Messiah, or if he was the “Elijah who is to come” before the Messiah.

Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets, Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” But Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” (John 1:45-46)

Philip recognized the Messiah because Phillip was expecting the Messiah. Nathanael asks with no little expectation of his own, “Are you sure?” The samaritan woman expects the Messiah as well.

The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Anointed; when he comes, he will tell us everything.” (John 4:25)

Simeon was expecting the Messiah.

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This man was righteous and devout, awaiting the consolation of Israel, and the holy Spirit was upon him. It had been revealed to him by the holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Messiah of the Lord. (Luke 2:25-26)

The Jews were knowledgeable about the scriptures, and they understood the prophecy. If not universally accepted, there were a large number of people who did accept many Old Testament prophecies as pointing to the Messiah sometime around the time Jesus steps onto the scene. I’m sure you will elaborate on the 490 year prophecy of Daniel. I hope you will. I’m sure any (name removed by moderator)ut you have will be fascinating.

The most telling sign of the expectation of the people that the Messiah would come however, is found in Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin. She stands in the temple looking at her twelve year old son, knowing that he is the Messiah, the Annointed of God, and asks,

Son, why have you done this to us?

…and adds…

Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety. (Luke 3:48)

All of Israel has longed for their Messiah. It had been a millenia since God showed himself to man.

Moses then went up with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel, and they beheld the God of Israel. … They saw God, and they ate and drank. (Exodus 24:9-11)

Some glimpsed God here and there, but ever since the seventy two went up on the mountain and ate and drank with God, ever since the days of Moses, people have been eagerly awaiting the Messiah, eagerly awaiting the new Moses who would acomplish a new exodus and give them miraculous bread from heaven just like in the first exodus.

Mary understands all this. She knows that Moses was the mediator of a covenant, knows the prophecies of the Jewish scriptures, and knows that the Messiah would mediate a new covenant. Knowing all this, the the pinnacle of all creation - Mary - stands in front of God incarnate - her son Jesus - looks him in the eye, and demands, ***“Why have you done this to us? Why have you left us for so long? We have been LOOKING FOR YOU!!! We have been waiting for you for ONE THOUSAND YEARS!!! How could you do this to us? Why did you wait so long?” ***

The level of expectation at the arrival of the Messiah in the years leading up to Jesus’ public ministry cannot be underestimated. As the new Moses, I think the whole thing went pretty well. Not nessissarily exactly as many of the Jews had envisioned it, but for most of us it went pretty well. 😉

-Tim-
 
IMHO the ‘problem’ with an uncritical reading of the gospels is that being also apologetic works, the authors themselves have their own goal, so to speak: for Christians, Jesus is the Messiah, and so the evangelists attempt to prove it by emphasizing at each and every turn how Jesus is the fulfillment of this expectation. The side effect of this is, that it could leave an impression to the reader of a unified, strong ‘messianic expectation’ shared by all Jews at the time. On the contrary, as we’ve said, the picture was in reality very diverse: some expected a prophet like Moses, others a king, still others a priest, yet others a warrior-judge, or a heavenly figure, or some combination of the above, while there are also those who seem to have merely awaited general signs of deliverance from God without any specific figure/s in sight, or maybe even not at all. There wasn’t even any agreement on how many messiahs there would be: some think there would be one, others two.
 
But even your post indicates a Messiah was expected. You are discussing more the ‘type’ of Messiah that was expected; but whatever the type, one was expected.

On top of what tim posted, I read somewhere that the Jews expected one distinctly special person (the Messiah) to come 4000 years after Adam, which is the time Jesus lived, and that is why, based on all Jesus said and did, He was heralded on as He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday - the people believed the long awaited Messiah had finally come. And that is why, along with the Temple cleansing, the Jewish leaders doubled down on their efforts to kill Jesus. He was dead before the week was out.

And as part of that, I read how the Jewish leaders over the next decades altered their history and purposefully ‘lost’ 240 years to make it as if Jesus did not live 4000 years from Adam (google ‘jews lost 240 years?’). If the 240 years are added back, the year 2000 is the year 6000 on the Jewish calendar.

God bless you.
 
Some scholars, like Paolo Sacchi in The History of the Second Temple Period, think that the origins of later Jewish messianism lie with what Sacchi calls ‘royal messianism’, wherein a royal descendant of David would herald a new golden age. Sacchi, for the record, defines ‘messianism’ as being composed of two elements: the certainty that in the unforseeable future a happier world would come about, and that this will not come about merely through human means, but through the mediation of a figure appointed by God for that task.

During different historical periods and in different places messianism, therefore, took on different forms. The oldest form is royal messianism. The scriptural basis for royal messianism could today seem to be the prophecy of Nathan as it is narrated on the seventh chapter of the 2 Samuel: ‘Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; [Footnote 2. *Before me: is the reading of some Hebrew manuscripts and the Greek. Most Hebrew manuscripts, the Vulgate and the Syriac read ‘before you’, which limits the prophecy to the reign of David. In any case, the Chronicles read ‘before me’, clearly indicating an eternal reign.] your throne shall be established forever’. At least in the form that has been handed down to us, this text is certainly later than the events narrated. Essentially it mirrors the ideology of salvation belonging to the redactor of the historical books, who was a convinced monarchist.
The historical origin of royal messianism should instead be sought in Isa. 11.1-5. Here Isaiah states that a happier time will come and that the advent of that time is linked to a descendant of David possessing particular gifts. We therefore have the two fundamental elements of messianism, a better future world and the human instrument, in this case a descendant of the house of David. In this case we must speak, therefore, of Davidic messianism. In its original form messianism was both royal and Davidic.

This pattern of Davidic messianism, according to Sacchi, continues with Jeremiah in the 7th century BC (23:5-6), who prophesied of a ‘Branch’ who will rule over both Israel and Judah and “execute justice and righteousness in the land.” It is with Ezekiel that we begin to see a reinterpretation of the idea: the royal element is still present, but the Davidic element is not, Ezekiel having thought that the Davidic dynasty had now come to an end. Instead, the historical David now becomes a figure of the ideal king who will save Israel: whereas heretofore the idea was that the ‘messiah’ will be a monarch of the Davidic line, now the messiah is seen to be a new, ideal David himself, not necessarily related to the historical one (34:23; 27:24-26).

At first, it seemed that this ‘messianic’ hope was being fulfilled in the persons of Zerubbabel and Joshua son of Jozadak, who led a huge caravan of exiles from Babylon back home to Jerusalem in the 530s-20s BC. It is thought that Ezekiel had in mind for Israel to be governed by two heads: the ‘prince’ and the priest, and we can see the returning exiles abiding by this idea. Zerubbabel, furthermore, belonged to the house of David, being the grandson of Jehoiachin, penultimate king of Judah, which helped the connection to gain further weight. The prophet Zechariah had a vision which went thus:

And the angel who talked with me came again and woke me, like a man who is awakened out of his sleep. And he said to me, “What do you see?” I said, “I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold, with a bowl on the top of it, and seven lamps on it, with seven lips on each of the lamps that are on the top of it. And there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left.” And I said to the angel who talked with me, “What are these, my lord?” Then the angel who talked with me answered and said to me, “Do you not know what these are?” I said, “No, my lord.” Then he said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts. Who are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you shall become a plain. And he shall bring forward the top stone amid shouts of ‘Grace, grace to it!’”
Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also complete it. Then you will know that the LORD of hosts has sent me to you. For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice, and shall see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.
“These seven are the eyes of the LORD, which range through the whole earth.” Then I said to him, “What are these two olive trees on the right and the left of the lampstand?” And a second time I answered and said to him, “What are these two branches of the olive trees, which are beside the two golden pipes from which the golden oil is poured out?” He said to me, “Do you not know what these are?” I said, “No, my lord.” Then he said, “These are the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth.”

(Zechariah 4)
 
While according to this argument Zerubbabel seems to have first predominated at the early phase in the minds of the people (Zechariah 3:8 "Behold, I will bring my servant the Branch (ṣemaḥ); cf. Jeremiah 23:5; 33:15), for some reason he drops out of the scene by the time of the dedication of the second Temple in 515 BC. In fact, the political situation in general seems to have stifled any royal ‘messianic’ expectations: Judah (as Yehud) was an autonomous province, but a province under a foreign empire nonetheless.

While the returnees seem to have attempted to restore in Yehud the First Temple threefold leadership template of ‘king’ (under the person of Zerubbabel and possibly Sheshbazzar), high priest (Joshua, descended from the priestly line), and prophets (like Haggai and Zechariah), by the 450s BC only the high priest remained, joined by the scribe-sage (as Ezra and Nehemiah were). It seemed that the prophetic hope for a (renewed) Davidic dynasty did not eventuate, and thus, expectations in the early 5th to the late 2nd century BC were largely lacking overtly ‘messianic’ content. There was still the expectation of a better world and the restoration of Jerusalem to its former glory, but in a reversal of traditional messianism’s values, emphasis is now on human activity: we can see this attitude reflected in the book of Judith (9:8-13). Joshua ben Sira (aka Jesus son of Sirach), writing in the 2nd century BC, did not include any hint of an individual messianic figure or anything resembling this in his book, though there are impressive references to the divine upholding of the Davidic dynasty (Sirach 47) and the Aaronic priesthood (Sirach 45), as well as to a general hope of deliverance (Sirach 35:18-19; 36:1-7). For Ben Sira, these hopes of ‘messianic’ expectations by the hand of man have already been clearly realized:

How to extol ZERUBBABEL?
He was like a signet ring on the right hand,
And JESHUA, Jozadak’s son?
In their time they rebuilt the altar
And erected the holy temple,
destined for everlasting glory.

(49:11-12)

If anything resembling traditional ‘messianism’ still existed at this time it should sought among the Samaritans in the north, even though they did not believe in an ‘anointed one’ (a concept peculiar to Jews) but to a prophet (dubbed in later ages as the Taheb). ‘Messianic’ expectations would only achieve a strong and sudden renaissance among the Jews thanks to the events which would unfold afterwards.
 
beehumble said:
But even your post indicates a Messiah was expected. You are discussing more the ‘type’ of Messiah that was expected; but whatever the type, one was expected.

On top of what tim posted, I read somewhere that the Jews expected one distinctly special person (the Messiah) to come 4000 years after Adam, which is the time Jesus lived, and that is why, based on all Jesus said and did, He was heralded on as He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday - the people believed the long awaited Messiah had finally come. And that is why, along with the Temple cleansing, the Jewish leaders doubled down on their efforts to kill Jesus. He was dead before the week was out.

And as part of that, I read how the Jewish leaders over the next decades altered their history and purposefully ‘lost’ 240 years to make it as if Jesus did not live 4000 years from Adam (google ‘jews lost 240 years?’). If the 240 years are added back, the year 2000 is the year 6000 on the Jewish calendar.

God bless you.
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Oh yes, that. The whole 4000 years thing is something attested in several postbiblical texts: Pseudo-Philo (28.8) reckoned that the world will exist for 4000 years (a textual variant has 7000); the Testament of Moses calculates 4250 years from Adam to the Messiah (1.2; 10.12); the Babylonian Talmud reports that the ‘school of Elijah’ reckoned 4000 years from creation to the Messiah and a further 2000 years for the Messianic age (Avodah Zarah 9a; Sanhedrin 97b).
 
The sociopolitical climate of the final centuries before Christ - the advent of the Seleucids and the subsequent rise and fall of the Hasmonean dynasty - contributed to the sudden rebirth and further development of Jewish messianism, going hand-in-hand with the rise of resistance thought among Jews at this time. These events provided a catalyst for a radical reinterpretation of the scriptural tradition that eventually evolved into full-fledged Jewish messianism. Whereas we have little evidence that Jews during Persian and Ptolemaic rule attempted any sort of revolt against their overlords (for one, it was thought that any revolt would be unlikely to succeed anyway to the small size and limited resources of Yehud), the Maccabean revolt stirred up a strong feeling of resistance and assertion of Jewish identity in the face of assimilation. The exhibition of hopes for national redemption and spasmodic resistance to foreign rule were inspired by renewed interpretation of Israel’s sacred traditions.

The uncertainty and turmoil of the times encouraged the raising of human hopes up to the heavens. Whereas there was already an idea of a presence of God among men through the mediation of a more or less hypostatized Wisdom (cf. Proverbs 1:20-32; 8:1-9:6), some now expected God Himself to come down, since it seemed that only He could guarantee the fulfillment of the so-called messianic hopes. We can see this idea formulated in the book of Jubilees (1.26-29):

“And do thou write down for thyself all these words which I declare unto thee on this mountain, the first and the last, which shall come to pass in all the divisions of the days in the law and in the testimony and in the weeks and the jubilees unto eternity, until I descend and dwell with them throughout eternity.” …] And the angel of the presence who went before the camp of Israel took the tables of the divisions of the years – from the time of the creation – of the law and of the testimony of the weeks, of the jubilees, according to the individual years, according to all the number of the jubilees [according to the individual years], from the day of the [new] creation when the heavens and the earth shall be renewed and all their creation according to the powers of the heaven, and according to all the creation of the earth, until the sanctuary of the Lord shall be made in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, and all the luminaries be renewed for healing and for peace and for blessing for all the elect of Israel, and that thus it may be from that day and unto all the days of the earth.

In many ways this idea of ‘God amongst men’ is an example of a ‘messianic’ expectation (used in a broad sense here BTW) without any actual messiah: there does not appear to be an intermediary between divine intervention and human salvation. Sacchi writes:

In reality, though, this conception stems from a different spiritual attitude than that of the messianism without the Messiah found in the preceding centuries. The earlier belief had been that justice would have come to the earth as a gift of God, characterizing the world to come, but that world was still a distinctly human one. In the new conception God’s intervention is imagined as being so complete that he himself will come and live among the humans. In other words, he becomes the mediator between himself and human beings, almost as if to emphasize the idea that the task is so great that no human could perform the anointed one’s functions. Following this line of thought, the role of the Messiah can only be carried out by God himself; he and he alone can be the Messiah. The ideology of the early Apocalyptic certainly lies behind this sort of conception, casting its gaze on the entire cosmos and not only on the earth.

Now this idea had never caught on, since the general emphasis in eschatological thought still lay on history than on the cosmos: God will guide history up until the end of days, when all mankind will be handed over to the authority of an anointed one, who will rule in God’s name. It, at best, remained in an embryonic stage, in Sacchi’s words “more of an extreme possibility rather than a fully elaborated theory.”
 
It seems to me that the scholars of the Old Testament put an awful lot of effort into deriving meaning and identity of the Messiah, and were completely wrong. That should be a warning to today’s prophets of the End Times. 😉
 
Joe_Kelley said:
It seems to me that the scholars of the Old Testament put an awful lot of effort into deriving meaning and identity of the Messiah, and were completely wrong. That should be a warning to today’s prophets of the End Times. 😉
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I won’t exactly say “completely wrong;” from the Christian viewpoint the Jews have grasped different aspects more or less correctly, but not the whole picture. 😉
 
patrick457 said:
I think I should bump this thread up. 😉
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How about this?

Tacitus wrote in his Historiae: "“Most were convinced that the ancient books of the priests predicted that, around this time, the East would grow more powerful. And that the rulers of the world would emerge from Judea.”

And also, Suetonius says, in his Life of Vespasian: “Throughout the East, an idea was gaining currency: the consistent and very ancient view that it was to be written in the world’s destiny that from Judea would emerge the rulers of the world.”
 
farpinho said:
How about this?

Tacitus wrote in his Historiae: "“Most were convinced that the ancient books of the priests predicted that, around this time, the East would grow more powerful. And that the rulers of the world would emerge from Judea.”

And also, Suetonius says, in his Life of Vespasian: “Throughout the East, an idea was gaining currency: the consistent and very ancient view that it was to be written in the world’s destiny that from Judea would emerge the rulers of the world.”
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I’m aghast.

A Forum poster quoting Roman historians? 🙂

Suetonius is probably working off Tacitus, and Tacitus relies a lot on Josephus in these matters, and probably talked to the old Josephus before Josephus died c. A.D. 100.
 
  1. Gathering the tribes of Israel.
  2. Cleansing the temple.
  3. Dealing with the enemies of Israel.
4)Ruling as Lord of the Nations.

Fr Barron has a great talk on this on YouTube…

Fr Barron comments on Creation
" " " " The Fall
" " " " Israel, The Church and the Law - part 1 + 2
" " " " HOW JESUS IS THE MESSIAH
" " " " The Cross + the resurrection of Jesus
" " " " " dumbed down" Catholism

It’s a part of a series of talks, try and listen to them all, but the Messiah stuff is in both the 5th and 6th of the 7 parts.
 
asd72 said:
  1. Gathering the tribes of Israel.
  2. Cleansing the temple.
  3. Dealing with the enemies of Israel.
4)Ruling as Lord of the Nations.

Fr Barron has a great talk on this on YouTube…

Fr Barron comments on Creation
" " " " The Fall
" " " " Israel, The Church and the Law - part 1 + 2
" " " " HOW JESUS IS THE MESSIAH
" " " " The Cross + the resurrection of Jesus
" " " " " dumbed down" Catholism

It’s a part of a series of talks, try and listen to them all, but the Messiah stuff is in both the 5th and 6th of the 7 parts.
Click to expand...
Can you give us a link, asd, please?
 
I don’t know how to link using my phone, if you type in the titles I’ve given you at YouTube they will come up.
 
I’ll just quote a small something from another thread:

If we look at other sources, there is a confusing array of ideas as to what the messiah/s is/are supposed to do. There is certainly an idea that the messiah rules on earth either as a king-priest or warrior-judge (though at the same time, God is also described to be ultimately the one who rules the earth); for example Psalms of Solomon 17.23-35. If we look at the Qumran texts, we see that in some documents, the sectarians await “the prophet” (cf. Deuteronomy 18:15) and the “messiah (or messiahs) of Aaron and Israel.” (1QS 9.10-11; 4Q175; CD 12.23-13.2; 14.18f. 19:10, 33-20.1) When they are identified as separate individuals, the ‘priestly’ messiah of Aaron takes precedence over the ‘lay’ messiah of Israel: at the eschatological banquet, the messiah of Aaron is the first who would lay his hands on the bread, followed by the messiah of Israel (1QSa [1Q28a] 2.18ff). We can also this same idea in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, where again two messianic figures (this time connected with Levi and Judah) appear; the priestly messiah of Levi is here also superior to the one of Judah, and is the one who will bring deliverance after the wicked priests are punished (Testament of Levi 18). In these texts, only the priestly messiah has any real authority; the other seems to never do anything important at all. Meanwhile, 4Q174 (4QFlorilegium 11) and 4Q252 (Pesher on Genesis) envision a “shoot of David,” aka the “messiah of righteousness” to appear in Zion alongside a (or the) “teacher of the Torah.” In CD 7.18f the “teacher of the Torah” is identified with the “star of Jacob” (Numbers 24:17); there he is accompanied by “the Prince of the Congregation,” who is identified with the “scepter of Israel” and is there the one who will execute the judgment. 11Q13 has the angelic Melchizedek being the agent of salvation and the eschatological judge, using Psalm 7:78 and 82:1 to prove his point. The author seizes on the fact that the word 'elohim by this time can also be used for angels, and so is able to explain how the passage refers not to the 'Elohim Himself, but to an 'elohim, Melchizedek. Now curiously, in the document known as The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness (aka the War Scroll), which describes an eschatological battle between the “sons of light” (members of the community) and the “sons of darkness” (everyone else), there is no trace of a messianic figure (even a Davidic one). Priests give the orders and sound the signals, an army comprising of members of the twelve tribes of Israel march around, legions of angels come down from heaven to fight, and “the great hand of God shall be lifted up against Belial and against all the forces of his dominion” somewhat like a literal deus ex machina (pun intended). But no messiah. It seems that that the messiah(s) are not a major part of the sectarian eschatology, though they are indeed there in the background - at least, they don’t refer to him (or them) often.

In 1 Enoch the title “messiah” does not come up often (it appears only twice, in the Book of Parables, chs. 37-71). More important are the titles “Elect One” and - less important - “Son of Man,” who in chapter 71 (v. 14-17) is identified with Enoch himself. In 4 Ezra (aka 2 Esdras) 7:28, we have a scenario where the messiah “shall be revealed to those who are with him, and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years,” at the end of which he and everyone else dies and the world reverts back to its primeval state for seven days. At the end of the seven days the eschatological resurrection will then occur. Meanwhile, the messiah does not die in 2 Baruch; instead, “when the time of the presence of the messiah on earth has run its course,” he will “return in glory” (presumably to heaven), at which point the dead will be raised.

I might go into details later in continuation of what I have written, but since I’m not a man of my word, I can’t promise anything.
 
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