Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/64

Rh 54 MESSIAH as tb e nation of Israel, with a national organization under Jehovah as king, is common to the whole Old Testament, and forms the bond that connects prophecy proper with the so-called Messianic psalms and similar passages which theologians call typical, i.e., with such passages as speak of the religious relations of the Hebrew commonwealth, the religious meaning of national institutions, and so necessarily contain ideal elements reaching beyond the empirical present. All such passages are frequently called Messianic ; but the term is more properly reserved as the specific designation of one particular branch of the Hebrew hope of salvation, which, becoming prominent in post-canonical Judaism, used the name of the Messiah as a technical term (which it never is in the Old Testament), and exercised a great influence on New Testament thought, the term &quot; the Christ &quot; (6 xpioros) being itself nothing more than the translation of &quot; the Messiah.&quot; In the period of the Hebrew monarchy the thought that Jehovah is the divine king of Israel was associated with the conception that the human king reigns by right only if he reigns by commission or &quot; unction &quot; from Him. Such was the theory of the kingship in Ephraim as well as in Judah (Deut. xxxiii. ; 2 Kings ix. 6), till in the decadence of the northern state Amos (ix. 11) foretold the redintegration of the Davidic kingdom, and Hosea (iii. 5 ; viii. 4) expressly associated a similar prediction with the condemnation of the kingship of Ephraim as illegitimate. So the great Judsean prophets of the 8th century connect the salvation of Israel with the rise of a Davidic king, full of Jehovah s Spirit, in whom all the energies of Jehovah s transcendental kingship are as it were incarnate (Isa. ix. 6 sq. ; xi. 1 sq. ; Micah v.). This conception, however, is not one of the constant elements of prophecy ; indeed the later prophecies of Isaiah take a different shape, looking for the decisive interposition of Jehovah in the crisis of history without the instru mentality of a kingly deliverer. Jeremiah again speaks of the future David or righteous sprout of David s stem (xxiii. 5 sq. ; xxx. 9) ; and Ezekiel uses similar language (xxxiv., xxxvii.) ; but that such passages do not necessarily mean more than that the Davidic dynasty shall be con tinued in the time of restoration under a series of worthy princes seems clear from the way in which Ezekiel speaks of the prince in chaps, xlv., xlvi. As yet we have no fixed doctrine of a personal Messiah, but only material from which such a doctrine might by and by be drawn. The religious view of the kingship is still essentially the same as in 2 Sam. vii., where the endless duration of the Davidic dynasty is set forth as part of Jehovah s plan of grace to His nation. There are other parts of the Old Testament notably 1 Sam. viii., xii. in which the very existence of a human kingship is represented as a departure from the ideal of a perfect theocracy. And so, in and after the exile, when the monarchy had come to an end, we find pictures of the latter days in which its restoration has no place. Such is the great prophecy of Isa. xl.-lxvi., in which Cyrus is the anointed of Jehovah, and the grace promised to David is transferred to ideal Israel (&quot;the servant of Jehovah&quot;) as a whole (Isa. Iv. 3). So too there is no allusion to a human kingship in Joel or in Malachi ; the old forms of the Hebrew state were broken, and religious hopes expressed themselves in other shapes. 1 In the book of Daniel it is collective Israel that appears under the symbol of a &quot; son of man,&quot; and receives the kingdom (vii. 13, 18, 22, 27). Meantime, however, the decay and ultimate silence of the living prophetic word concurred with the prolonged political servitude of the nation to produce a most 1 The hopes which Haggai and Zechariah connect with the name of Zerubbabel, a descendant of David, hardly form an exception to this statement. important change in the type of the Hebrew religion. The prophets had never sought to add to the religious unity of their teaching unity in the pictorial form in which from time to time they depicted the final judgment and future glory. For this there was a religious reason. To them the kingship of Jehovah was not a mere ideal, but an actual reality. Its full manifestation indeed, to the eye of sense and to the unbelieving world, lay in the future ; but true faith found a present stay in the sovereignty of Jehovah, daily exhibited in providence and interpreted to each generation by the voice of the prophets. And, while Jehovah s kingship was a living and present fact, it refused to be formulated in fixed invariable shape. But when the prophets ceased and their place was taken by the scribes, the interpreters of the written word, when at the same time the yoke of foreign oppressors rested continually on the land, Israel no longer felt itself a living nation, and Jehovah s kingship, which presupposed a living nation, found not even the most inadequate expression in daily political life. Jehovah was still the lawgiver of Israel, but His law was written in a book, and He was not present to administer it. He was still the hope of Israel, but the hope was all dissevered from the present ; it too was to be read in books, and these were interpreted of a future which was no longer, as it had been to the prophets, the ideal development of forces already at work in Israel, but wholly new and supernatural. The present was a blank, in which religious duty was summed up in patient obedience to the law and penitent submission to the Divine chastisements ; the living realities of divine grace were but memories of the past, or visions of &quot; the world to come.&quot; The scribes, who in this period took the place of the prophets as the leaders of religious thought, were mainly busied with the law ; but no religion can subsist on mere law ; and the systematization of the prophetic hopes, and of those more ideal parts of the other sacred literature which, because ideal and dissevered from the present, were now set on one line with the prophecies, went on side by side with the systematization of the law, by means of a harmonistic exegesis, which sought to gather up every prophetic image in one grand panorama of the issues of Israel s and the world s history. The beginnings of this process can probably be traced within the canon itself, in the book of Joel and the last chapters of Zechariah ; 2 and, if this be so, we see from Zech. ix. that the picture of the ideal king early claimed a place in such constructions. The full development of the method belongs, however, to the post-canonical literature, and was naturally much less regular and rapid than the growth of the legal traditions of the scribes. The attempt to form a schematic escha- tology left so much room for the play of individual fancy that its results could not quickly take fixed dogmatic shape ; and it did not appeal to all minds alike or equally at all times. It was in crises of national anguish that men turned most eagerly to the prophecies, and sought to con strue their teachings as a promise of speedy deliverance in such elaborate schemes of the incoming of the future glory as fill the APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE (q.v.). But these books, however influential, had no public authority, and when the yoke of oppression was lightened but a little their enthusiasm lost much of its contagious power. It is not therefore safe to measure the general growth of eschatological doctrine by the apocalyptic books, of which Daniel alone attained a canonical position. In the Apocrypha eschatology has a very small place ; but thero is enough to show that the hope of Israel was never forgotten, and that the imagery of the prophets had 2 See JOEL, vol. xiii. p. 706, and Stade s articles &quot;Deuterozacharja,&quot; Z.f. ATlicJie Wiss., 1881-82. Compare Dan. ix. 2 for the use of the older prophecies in the solution of new problems of faith.