Messianic Times Just Like Always

When the going gets tough, the traumatized Jewish imagination gets messianic. That’s the way it has been probably since the destruction of the First Temple (in 586 BCE) and across centuries of travail, persecution, and genocide.

But what do Jews even mean when they invoke the messiah?

Is the messiah human or divine or both? Do we expect the messiah to herald a preternatural epoch? Will humanity’s characteristics be radically transformed? I mean will man no longer be a wolf to man.

Alternatively, are we to think of the messiah as a charismatic monarch with unparalleled talents who would unite the Jewish tribes and spread sovereignty, peace, and security over the Land of Israel?

In The Messianic Controversy, Israel Knohl, a leading Hebrew University Bible scholar succinctly lays out the evolution of the Jews’ understanding of the messiah. Presently his book is available in Hebrew only as מחלוקת המשיח – the subtitle –?למי מחכים היהודים -- “Who are the Jews Awaiting? –  identifies the crux of the issue.

Each Bible author and redactor inserted their view about the messiah. The Five Books of Moses make no explicit mention of a messiah, nor do they characterize God as a king, if I read Knohl correctly.

At a certain later point deity and king become synonymous. The role of King, God, messiah become interchangeable. Throughout the Middle East kings were seen as Godlike. And elsewhere Knohl argues that the messiah idea originated even before Israel came on the historical stage.

The author of Isaiah (740 BCE) portrays the prophet as despondent at the fall of Samaria and the dispersal of the northern kingdom’s Ten Tribes by the Assyrians. He has given up on any new improved temporal monarchy. Salvation will come from God alone. The prophet refers to the messiah in the sense of an anointed one (recall kings were ceremonially daubed with olive oil).

Hosea (8 century BCE) is likewise portrayed as critical of the Northern Kingdom’s political leadership and not keen on a temporal messiah.  For salvation Israel need only stop betraying God. Knohl posits that Hosea’s message endured in altered form in the surviving southern Kingdom of Judea and evolved in a way that blended God and messiah into a singular savior.

The Psalms that originated during the Kingdom of Judea and were redacted during the Second Temple period are similarly replete with messianic overtones.

And so, the idea evolves.

Then Jeremiah (who witnesses the destruction of the First Temple) associates the messiah with divinity.

Deutero-Isaiah, whom Knohl sees as a product of the Babylonian exile (in the time after Persia becomes the paramount regional power), ties the messianic idea to the House of David.

The Pharisees were, Knohl tells us, the most popular stream during the Second Temple period. They championed the messianic idea, the Davidic-messianic connection, belief in an afterlife, and in the resurrection. 

In contrast, the Sadducee stream rejected the concepts of reward and punishment, messiah, and afterlife. The religious ideas of the Sadducees have been assigned to the dustbin of theology. Much of what we know about them is filtered through the lens of the victorious Pharisees.

During late antiquity, this messianic idea and attendant beliefs about the hereafter and resurrection was codified in the liturgy and the Talmud – (redacted by 500 CE). And later echoed by Maimonides (d. 1204) in his broad synthesis of the Talmud, Mishna Torah.

Some scholars read Maimonides as supporting the view of a divine-like messiah and a supernatural messianic era. Others point to his description of the messianic age as a time when king messiah working within the confines of ordinary nature will deliver peace and sovereignty over the Land of Israel. 

Maimonides may have calibrated his message to his audience: Jews desperate for a ray of hope got the superman messiah. Rationalists were told that Israel’s messianic era need not involve hocus pocus.

Each of history’s dozens of claimants to be savior – including the Yemenite Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, and Jacob Joseph Frank – were exposed as frauds at a significant psychic cost to the Jewish people. One reason for the Vilna Gaon’s (d. 1797) opposition to Hassidism was his fear that the movement could spawn messiah wannabes.  

Knohl gingerly addresses Chabad’s messianic platform. He thinks that the Lubavitcher Rebbe believed that by spreading knowledge of God to all of humanity he was fulfilling the task of the messiah. He thinks Chabad’s messianic impulse was ignited by the trauma of the Holocaust – both the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson and his predecessor (and father in law) Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn escaped Hitler’s clutches.

Knohl’s bottom line message is that the messiah idea has generated controversy perhaps as far back as the destruction of the First Temple. It is reflected in the Hebrew bible to discerning readers. This accessible primer puts the messiah controversy into perspective – including also chapters on where Jesus fits in the Jewish scheme of things. 

He pushes the envelope yet the book is unlikely to offend rational traditionalists.

As for which messiah the Jews are now awaiting? My answer is that each Jewish tribe is anticipating – some literally others figuratively – a messiah created in their own image.

FOR MORE...

Here is a lecture Prof. Knohl gave at the Israel National Library.