13 - The messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible

Summary

2001

Historical-critical perspectives on the roots of messianism

At the first Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian origins in 1985, the members of the symposium unanimously endorsed the opinion that the term ‘messiah’ in the Hebrew Bible refers ‘to a present, political and religious leader who is appointed by God, applied predominantly to a king, but also to a priest and occasionally a prophet.’ The statement paraphrases J. J. M. Roberts's paper, in which his very brief comments on the occurrences of the term messiah in the Hebrew Bible distinguish its use as an adjective defining priests from its use in a nominal form in a construct state: ‘the anointed one.’ ‘With one exception, he concludes, all these occurrences (of the nominal form) referto the contemporary Israelite king, and … seem intended to underscore the very close relationship between Yahweh and the king whom he has chosen and installed.’ The exception he claims is, of course, Isaiah 45:1, where Cyras is the king referenced. P. D. Hanson largely concurs, and, having done so, can follow Charlesworth, and turn to an understanding of the Hebrew Bible in terms of history and realism and of messianism as a later development within Judaism, beginning in the ‘proto-messianic’ context of Zerabbabel's restoration in Haggai and Zechariah. Certainly both Hanson's and Roberts's essays on the messiah in the Hebrew Bible are vulnerable to the critique of W. S. Green about scholars of Judaism: that they assume that ‘the best way to learn about the Messiah in ancient Judaism is to study texts in which there is none.