The messianic idea
. . . . Understanding what was meant by “messiah” was much simpler throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jewish and Christian scholars alike took for granted the existence of “the messianic idea” that was widely understood throughout the period of ancient Judaism. The evidence for this idea was not found in every text that made mention of a messiah, but it could be cobbled together by combining motifs from different documents.
So the Christian scholar, Emil Schürer, on the basis of the Apocalypse of Baruch and the fourth Book of Esdras, showed that this messianic idea entailed the following:
- The final ordeal and confusion
- Elijah as precursor
- The coming of the messiah
- The last assault of the hostile powers
- Destruction of hostile powers
- The renewal of Jerusalem
- The gathering of the dispersed
- The kingdom of glory in the holy land
- The renewal of the world
- A general resurrection
- The last judgment, eternal bliss and damnation
Jewish scholarship did not substantially differ, as seen from Joseph Klausner’s list of ingredients that make up the messianic idea:
- The signs of the Messiah
- The birth pangs of the Messiah
- The coming of Elijah
- The trumpet of Messiah
- The ingathering of the exiles
- The reception of proselytes
- The war with Gog and Magog
- The Day of the Messiah
- The renovation of the World to Come
Klausner conceded that no single text sets out this complex of ideas in full, but these points nonetheless are what the disparate texts mean when put together.
In other words, if a literary text lacks some of the pieces, that is the fault of the text, not of the messianic idea. The idea exists prior to and independently of the texts. (p. 37)
The messianic idea psychologized
What is more, in most modern accounts the messianic idea is described in specifically psychological terms: It is the force that animates the pious Jewish hope for redemption, either throughout Jewish history (in Jewish treatments) or at the time of Christ (in Christian treatments).
In this train we find discussions of the messianic idea arising out of a tenacious belief in a better future despite overwhelming troubles facing the present. Some authors have seen this as one of Judaism’s special gifts to the world alongside monotheism and ethical codes. Scholarly study has accordingly been less about the messiah figure than about the religious attitude and ideology that was the backdrop to various beliefs in such a figure.
The messianological vacuum
The concept of the “messianic idea” in Judaism started to unravel at the end of the Second World War with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars increasingly argued that the words for “messiah” and “christ” in the Second Temple period “had no fixed content” (De Jonge) and may even have had no special significance or meaning at all (James Charlesworth, Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green). They were labels that could be, and were, applied to a wide variety of persons and things.
The Qumran texts pointed to the depth of the motif of two messiahs — hardly supportive of the idea that a staple of Judaism was a uniform messianic idea. (A. S. van der Woude)
Texts that spoke of messiahs without any eschatological theme and others that addressed eschatology without any reference to a messiah were also drawn to the closer attention of the scholarly consideration. (Morton Smith)
References to a messiah in the Jewish writings of the Persian and Hellenistic periods are so few that one scholar has catalogued many ancient Jewish texts that he calls the “no hope list” — most of the Pseudepigrapha and Apocryphal writings contain no messianic ideas at all or employ terms other than “messiah” or its derivatives. (William Horbury)
“It is impossible to define, and difficult to describe the messianology of the early Jews. . . . There is no script the Messiah is to act out. There is no clear, widely accepted Jewish description of the Messiah. The references to him are frustratingly vague and imprecise.”(Charlesworth, quoted in Novenson, p. 41))
Neusner lays out the methodological rule that there is no messiah at all, nor is there even Judaism: there are only so many Judaisms and so many messiahs. (p. 41)
“In Jewish writings before or during the emergence of Christianity, ‘messiah’ appears neither as an evocative religious symbol nor as a centralizing native cultural category.” In other words, there is no “messianic idea” behind the texts. “Rather, it [“messiah”] is a term of disparity, used in few texts and in diverse ways.” . . . . The word, as a word, is “notable primarily for its indeterminacy.” (William Scott Green quoted in Novenson, p. 41)
This brings me up to date with my own reading of what “messiah” meant in the Second Temple period. I have as an amateur quoted Neusner, Green and Charlesworth in my posts addressing messianism. So it is with particular interest that I have picked up Novenson’s book to read his response to this scholarship.
But Messiah language did mean “something”
Novenson acknowledges the “messiah minimalism” of Woude, Smith, de Jonge, Neusner, Charlewsorth, Green and others has been “an important step forward” — but there is a problem.
What these scholars have really shown, says Novenson, is that in this Second Temple period of Judaism “messiah” did not mean “the messianic idea” that had been largely taken for granted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But they were wrong to conclude that it had no particular meaning at all. They failed to see what it did mean, says Novenson.
It is not that messiah language does not have meaning, just that its meaning does not consist in the manifestation of a reified messianic idea. (p. 41)
Before exploring the meaning of the term, however, Novenson considers a compromise view put forward by William Horbury.
Horbury argued that despite the paucity of references to “messiah” in the Second Temple documents, Jewish societies nonetheless preserved a strong tradition of a “messianic hope”. This “messianic hope” was not the same as the earlier understanding of the “messianic idea”. So the word “messiah” in the texts of the period are indicators (not of the older “messianic idea” explained at the beginning of this post, but) of a widespread and more general sense of future hope.
Horbury has not convinced most scholars, Novenson informs us. Novenson does think that Horbury is right, however, to distinguish “messianic hope” from the earlier concept of “messianic idea”.
And Novenson takes the argument one step further. He reminds us that words have constant meanings within any society regardless of whether people love or hate, act upon or dismiss, the ideas expressed in the words. (I will not outline the scholarly linguistic arguments here.)
So when John Collins in Judaisms and their Messiahs at the turn of the Christian era speaks of the “messianological vacuum” in the period of the Maccabees and our difficulty in knowing when and to what extent messianic expectations seized the popular imagination from then up until the time of the revolt against Rome, Novenson points out that none of this sociological history is relevant for deciding what the word “messiah” itself meant in the literature.
It does not matter how many Jews were looking for the coming of the messiah; what matters is that members of the linguistic community were able to understand what was meant when someone talked about a messiah. (p. 44)
And again in his conclusion to this section:
Popular hope may have been more or less current at different times and places in early Judaism, but the meaningfulness of the language is independent of the fervency of the popular hope. People could know what the words meant whether or not they shared the sentiment expressed. (p. 47)
The Jewish linguistic communities shared a stock of common linguistic resources. Words took their meanings from these resources.
Novenson will argue that Second Temple Jewish references to the “messiah” regularly (and explicitly) link back to a small subset of passages in the Jewish scriptures, and that it is these passages in the Jewish scriptures that scholars must investigate to understand what the word meant to Jews at this time.
Jewish scriptures as linguistic resources
The scholarly pursuit for an understanding of what “messiah” meant to Second Temple Jews has concentrated on the literature of that time, but Novenson takes us back to the importance of the Jewish scriptures for shaping the concepts and meanings found in this literature. These scriptures have provided the common traditions that have unified the Jews across their wide-ranging linguistic and political settings.
[T]he Jewish scriptures functioned for their readers not only as a corpus of holy books but also as a pool of linguistic resources, a source of ways of speaking about things both sacred and mundane. (p. 48)
And for Novenson this means:
Talk about “messiahs” in early Jewish literature is just such a scripturally derived pattern of speech. (p. 48)
The key question will be which scriptural references for later Jews had special meaning and how Second Temple Jews interpreted those passages.
But first, what do the Jewish scriptures say about the messiah? The word appears thirty-eight times:
- Leviticus 4:3, 5, 16; 6:15
- 1 Samuel 2:10, 35; 12:3, 5; 16:6; 24:7, 11; 26:9, 11, 16, 23
- 2 Samuel 1:14, 16; 19:22; 22:51; 23:1
- Isaiah 45:1
- Habbakuk 3:13
- Psalms 2:2; 18:51; 20:7; 28:8; 84:10; 89:39, 52; 105:15; 132:10, 17
- Lamentations 4:20
- Daniel 9:25, 26
- 1 Chronicles 16:22
- 2 Chronicles 6:42
. . . . .