Re: Three Assumptions
Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 7:21 am
No problem.
The concept may seem gray to us, but I think it is often actually a very logical consequence of the simple fact that, in the Hebrew scriptures, certain promises were made which were said to be binding forever. Israel was to inherit the land "forever" (Exodus 32.13; Joshua 14.9). The priests are due their portion "forever" (Leviticus 7.34). The Davidic line is to occupy the throne "forever" (2 Samuel 7.13). And so on.
So what happens when, for example, Israel is kicked out of the land, the priests are ousted and denied their role in the temple cult, and/or the Davidic line is no longer on the throne? Well, those promises cannot have been false; they were uttered by God himself, after all. The current sorry state of affairs must be a temporary setback, and the time is coming when all will be set right again, the promises vindicated. So the expectation is set up that a future Israelite generation will once again be in complete control of the land, that a future priest will once again be performing sacrifices in the temple, and that a future Davidic king will once again be sitting on the throne. And that is the essence of what we think of as messianism. The connection between the present priest or king (or prophet, for that matter) having been anointed for his present task of ruling and a future priest or king (or prophet) being anointed for his future task of restoring rule is, then, extremely tight and obvious. Within the worldview of predictive prophecy, in fact, it is virtually the only thing that makes sense. If David's seed is not currently on the throne, and if no future son of David is ever going to be on the throne, then the divine promise to David was false, and that cannot be. The promise of "forever" created the messianic expectation.
We see exactly the same impulse at work in the updating of those predictive prophecies themselves. For example, Jeremiah 29.10-14 predicted that, after 70 years of serving Babylon, the Jewish nation would return from its state of exile, its captivity ended (verse 14). But that did not exactly happen. Some people were able to return after a while, but they were still captive to foreign powers, even while dwelling in the land. So Daniel 9.1-27 updates Jeremiah's prediction (verse 2) to 70 weeks of years. Later still, 4 Ezra 12.10-35 updates Daniel's prediction (verses 11-12). The predictions, made by God himself through his own prophets, cannot have been false. So they have to be reinterpreted, spun in a way that makes sense of what has really happened over the course of history.
There is a parallel sort of logic behind resurrection, as well. This time the logic does not depend upon predictive prophecy; rather, it depends upon the idea that God is just. Ideally, with a just ruler governing the land, those who do right will be rewarded: not in some future utopia, but rather in the here and now; and, in fact, Israel seems to have gone a long time without any concept of resurrection at all. What happens, however, when doing right under a tyrant like Antiochus Epiphanes will actually get you killed like the Maccabean martyrs? How can God still be considered just if some people are murdered for doing right while others, in the nostalgic past, were able to live out full, happy lives for doing right? Well, one solution is resurrection (Daniel 12.2): God will raise the dead and then balance the scales. He is a just God, after all.
This is not to say that all Jews at all times and all places were engaged in this sort of thinking: not at all. But those who were engaged in it were, I argue, simply following prominent parts of their own cultural logic.