Carrie

I've always heard that the Jews in the Old Testament times were expecting a savior to come. From reading the Old Testament, I don't get that impression. It seems to me they were just expecting God to save them, as usual.

I've heard they were expecting a military type savior. Where does it talk about that in the Bible?

When did the Jews start expecting a savior? Was it sometime between 400 BC and the New Testament days? Do the Apocryphal writings give any indication that the Jews were expecting a savior?

It's just weird that if they were expecting a savior, the "official" Bible would end at the book of Malachi without any clear mention of this savior, and then there not be any encouragement from God about this savior for 400 years.

I think there were Jews that started to believe there would be savior because of the beliefs of the people around them, the Romans and Greeks, who believed in savior gods that came in human form, and sons of God. So the Jews started reading the Old Testament looking for clues, and they interpreted many scriptures to be about the Son of God. But of course they were misinterpreting those scriptures.

But are there any scriptures in the Bible or Apochrypha that really do show that the Jews were expecting some kind of savior, other than God?

Ebonmuse

My impression of this whole matter is that the Jewish people were indeed expecting a messiah, but one nothing at all like the Christian conception. Quoting from my essay,
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/shadowofturning.html:

"The Old Testament envisions this individual as a righteous (though still mortal) king descended from the line of David (Isaiah 11:1), who would gather all the Jewish people to the promised land (Isaiah 11:11-12, Jeremiah 23:7-8), restore them to the true faith (Ezekiel 37:23-24), subdue their enemies once and for all (Ezekiel 34:28, Isaiah 45:14, Isaiah 49:22-23), rule politically (Jeremiah 23:5) over a state of Israel unified as it was in the times of David and Solomon (Ezekiel 37:22), and usher in an era of worldwide peace (Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3)."

Of course, different strains of Judaism no doubt believed different things about this, and I'd expect that full-blown messianic Judaism didn't develop until around the time of the Babylonian captivity, when apocalypticism began to work its way into Jewish beliefs.

spin

Perhaps if we start at Isaiah 45:1, we can see the notion of "messiah" being used, though for the king of the Persians, Cyrus, who had done God's bidding in a military sense. Again in Isaiah 11:1, we hear of a shoot from the stump of Jesse (David's father) upon whom the spirit of God will rest, ..., the spirit of counsel and might, ie we have a wise ruler figure prophesied for the day of the Lord. (David is often called "messiah" in 2 Samuel.)

Originally the messiah was a (high) priest, all of which were anointed for the position -- hence "messiah". The anointed ones in Daniel 9:25-26 Jeshua ben Jehozedek and Onias III, both high priests.

Now Zechariah in one of its obscure passages, 4:12-14, talks of two concurrent messiahs, presumably Zerubbabel and Jeshua. However, apparently only Jeshua gets crowned in 6:9-12. Yet this notion of two messiahs appears again in the Dead Sea Scrolls with the mention of the messiah of Aaron and of Israel. Again though there are other instances in the scrolls where the messiah is singular.

The "one like a son of man" in Daniel 7:13 has definite messianic aspects, for with his appearance the beasts are defeated and the apocalyptic new world is to be ushered in. This instance is different from both the priestly saviour who assures good relations with God and the royal messiah (Zerubbabel we are told is of the David line), for Daniel's messiah appears to be supernatural and foreshadows some of the more esoteric xian developments.

Zechariah 9:9ff seems to be more the image of the traditional Jewish messiah, firmly based in this world.

The 17th Psalm of Solomon, written circa 50 BCE, says

23 Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of David,
At the time in the which Thou seest, O God, that he may reign over Israel Thy servant.
24 And gird him with strength, that he may shatter unrighteous rulers,
25 And that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample (her) down to destruction.

Again the traditional notion of the royal messiah.

At other times, however, we find that God is in fact his own instrument of the apocalypse, the saviour of the Jews, as in Ezek 38-39.

So we can have our cake and eat it too.


spin

Amaleq13

Carrie,


My first thought was that you should read the Dead Sea Scrolls or somebody's explanation of them. I don't know what would be the best source for you but they contain all sorts of pre-Christian messianic expectations. I'm sure somebody here can provide more than one text to consult.

capnkirk

In a nutshell, they were expecting God to deliver them. The specific means were up to God.

With the beginning of the Babylonian Exile (576 BCE), Hebrew self-image reached a historical low-ebb. The exile was unexplainable; Hebrew history was built on the promise of Yahweh to protect the Hebrews and use them for his purposes in human history. Their defeat and the loss of the land promised to them by Yahweh seemed to imply that their faith in this promise was misplaced. This crisis, a form of cognitive dissonance (when your view of reality and reality itself do not match one another), can precipitate the most profound despair or the most profound reworking of a world view. For the Jews in Babylon, it did both.

They creatively remade themselves and their world view. In particular, they blamed the disaster of the Exile on their own impurity. They had betrayed Yahweh and allowed the Mosaic laws and cultic practices to become corrupt; the Babylonian Exile was 'proof' of Yahweh's displeasure. During this period, Jewish leaders no longer spoke about a theology of judgement, but a theology of salvation (though they were speaking in terms of communal salvation rather than the individual personal salvation of the NT). Exile-era prophets, such as Ezekiel, Isaiah and Daniel, speak of how the Israelites would be gathered together once more, their society and religion purified, and the unified Davidic kingdom be re-established.

This fervent revival of religious tradition was much aided by a fortuitous accident in history. When Cyrus the Persian conquered Mesopotamia, he allowed the Jews to return home (539 BCE), but it must have seemed like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Over the next four centuries, the Hebrews were conquered successively by the Greeks, Greco-Egyptians, Greco-Syrians, and finally the Romans. During these successive ocupations/coloniaizations, the impoverishment and desperation of the Hebrews continually escalated, and the dream of an apocalyptic society intensified both in grandeur and in urgency. It was a vision of an apocalyptic kingdom as an ideal society, a perfect world, a divine Eutopia* 'in imminent advent' here on earth. The vehicle God would use to create this new kingdom would be a descendant of King David, who would then rule in the new theocratic monarchy. The particulars of just how it was to be accomplished were suitably vague as was its imminence, but most thought some direct intervention by God would be required to overthrow the oppressors.

Yes, it is curious that there is a lot more information about the aspects of the apocalyptical world (Daniel 7 c. 160 BCE says quite a lot.) than about the man whom God would choose to act as his agent to initiate it.

The Hebrews brought more than themselves out of Babylon. While the reformers were busy trying to purify the Hebrew religion, the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, crept into it among the common run of people. They appropriate a number of salient features from this 'foreign' religion that ultimately become d'rigeur: They invent a concept of a more or less dualistic universe, in which all good and right comes from Yahweh, while all evil arises from a powerful principle of evil (first recognition of Satan). They begin to form an elaborate theology of the end of time, in which a deliverer would defeat once and for all the forces of evil and unrighteousness. They adopt an elaborate after-life. Since justice does not seem to occur in this world, it is only logical that it will occur in another world. The afterlife becomes the place where good is rewarded and evil eternally punished.

Because Jews are now living all across Asia Minor, many are, as you said exposed to these (and other) religious influences, including sacrificial deific gods, and are to varying degrees influenced. This process is generally referred to today as Hellenization, and it progressed quite unevenly, as subsequently did their concept of the nature of the promised Messiah. Very generally speaking, the farther they lived from Jerusalem and the closer they lived to a Greek or Persian town or city, the more divergence from the orthodox line was likely.

The ONLY descriptions in the OT necessarily reflect the orthodox Messiah. That this orthodox messiah was necessarily a "son of man" (i.e. a human being, a person) is best supported by the historical record of four other "men" (one before and three after Jesus) who claimed to be (or were accalimed to be) The Jewish Messiah...who had large followings and tried in various ways (that all ended disasterously) to precipitate the apocalypse. The 'support' lies in the fact that although all were executed by the Romans, none were thought to be heretical because they were 'mere mortals'. That this was also the Romans understanding is attested to by their (later) order to arrest all male members of the House of David.

The overlay of deification came from "external" sources, and was applied retroactively (first, by Paul...but that's another whole thread.).