The hope of the advent of an ideal king was only one feature of that larger hope of the salvation of Israel from all evils, the realization of perfect reconciliation with Jehovah, and the felicity of the righteous in Him, in a new order of things free from the assaults of hostile nations and the troubling of the wicked within the Hebrew community, which was constantly held forth by all the prophets, from the time when the great seers of the 8th century b.c. first proclaimed that the true conception of Jehovah’s relation to His people was altogether different from what was realized, or even aimed at, by the recognized civil and religious leaders of the two Hebrew kingdoms, and that it could become a practical reality only through a great deliverance following a sifting judgment of the most terrible kind. The idea of a judgment so severe as to render possible an entire breach with the guilty past, and of a subsequent complete realization of Jehovah’s kingship in a regenerate nation, is common to all the prophets, but is expressed in a great variety of forms and images, conditioned by the present situation and needs of Israel at the time when each prophet spoke. As a rule the prophets directly connect the final restoration with the removal of the sins of their own age, and with the accomplishment of such a work of judgment as lies within their own horizon; to Isaiah the last troubles are those of Assyrian invasion, to Jeremiah the restoration follows on the exile to Babylon; Daniel connects the future glory with the overthrow of the Greek monarchy. The details of the prophetic pictures show a corresponding variation; but all agree in giving the central place to the realization of a real effective kingship of Jehovah; in fact the conception of the religious subject as th 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 “the Christ” (ό χριστός) being itself nothing more than the translation of “the Messiah.”

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 “unction” 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 Judaean 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 instrumentality 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 continued 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 (“the servant of Jehovah ”) as a whole (Isa. lv. 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. In the book of Daniel it is collective Israel that appears under the symbol of a “son of man,” 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 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 “the world to come.” 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; 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 eschatology 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 construe 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.υ.). 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 there is enough to show that the hope of Israel was never forgotten, and that the imagery of the prophets had moulded that hope into certain fixed forms which were taken with a literalness not contemplated by the prophets themselves. It was, however, only very gradually that the figure and name of the Messiah acquired the prominence which they have in later Jewish doctrine of the last things and in the official exegesis of the Targums. In the very developed eschatology of Daniel they are, as we have seen, altogether wanting, and in the Apocrypha, both before and after the Maccabee revival, the everlasting throne of David’s house is a mere historical reminiscence (Sirach xlvii. 11; 1 Mac. ii. 57). So long as the wars of independence worthily occupied the energies of the Palestinian Jews, and the Hasmonaean sovereignty promised a measure of independence and felicity under the law, in which the people were ready to acquiesce, at least, till the rise of a new prophet (1 Mac. xiv. 41), the hope that connected itself with the house of David was not likely to rise to fresh life, especially as a considerable proportion of the not very numerous passages of Scripture which speak of the ideal king might with a little straining be applied to the rising star of the new dynasty (comp, the language of 1 Mac. xiv. 4-15). It is only in Alexandria, where the Jews were still subject to the yoke of the Gentile, that at this time (c. 140 b.c.) we find the oldest Sibylline verses (iii. 652 sq.) proclaiming the approach of the righteous king whom God shall raise up from the East (Isa. xli. 2) to establish peace on earth and inaugurate the sovereignty of the prophets in a regenerate world. The name Messiah is still lacking, and the central point of the prophecy is not the reign of the deliverer but the subjection of all nations to the law and the temple.

With the growing weakness and corruption of the Hasmonaean princes, and the alienation of a large part of the nation from their cause, the hope of a better kingship begins to appear in Judaea also; at first darkly shadowed forth in the Book of Enoch (chap, xc.), where the white steer, the future leader of God’s herd after the deliverance from the heathen, stands in a certain contrast to the inadequate sovereignty of the actual dynasty (the horned lambs); and then much more clearly, and for the first time with use of the name Messiah, in the Psalter of Solomon, the chief document of the protest of Pharisaism against its enemies the later Hasmonaeans. The struggle between the Pharisees and Sadducees, between the party of the scribes and the party of the Hasmonaean aristocracy, has been described in Israel (vol. xiii. p. 423 sq.). It was a struggle for mastery between a secularized hierarchy on the one hand, to whom the theocracy was only a name, and whose whole interests were those of their own selfish politics, and on the other hand a party to which God and the law were all in all, and whose influence depended on the maintenance of the doctrine that the exact fulfilling of the law according to the precepts of the scribes was the absorbing vocation of Israel. This doctrine had grown up in the political nullity of Judaea under Persian and Grecian rule, and no government that possessed or aimed at political independence could possibly show constant deference to the punctilios of the schoolmen. The Pharisees themselves could not but see that their principles were politically impotent; the most scrupulous observance of the Sabbath, for example—and this was the culminating point of legality —could not thrust back the arms of the heathen. Thus the party of the scribes, when they came into conflict with an active political power, which at the same time claimed to represent the theocratic interests of Israel, were compelled to lay fresh stress on the doctrine that the true deliverance of Israel must come from God and not from man. We have seen indeed that the legalism which accepted

Jehovah as legislator, while admitting that his executive sovereignty as judge and captain of Israel was for the time dormant, would from the first have been a self-destructive position without the complementary hope of a future vindication of divine justice and mercy, when the God of Israel should return to reign over his people for ever. Before the Maccabee revival the spirit of nationality was so dead that this hope lay in the background; the ethical and devotional aspects of religion under the law held the first place, and the monotony of political servi + ude gave little occasion for the observation that a true national life requires a personal leader as well as a written law. But now the Jews were a nation once more, and national ideas came to the front. In the Hasmonaean sovereignty these ideas took a political form, and the result was the secularization of the kingdom of God for the sake of a harsh and rapacious aristocracy. The nation threw itself on the side of the Pharisees; but it did so in no mere spirit of punctilious legalism, but with the ardour of a national enthusiasm deceived in its dearest hopes, and turning for help from the delusive kingship of the Hasmonaeans to the true kingship of Jehovah, and to His vicegerent the king of David’s house. It is in this connexion that the doctrine and name of the Messiah appear in the Psalter of Solomon. The eternal kingship of the house of David, so long forgotten, is seized on as the proof that the Hasmonaeans have no divine right.

‘ ’ Thou, Lord, art our king for ever and ever. . . . Thou didst choose David as king over Israel, and swarest unto him concerning his seed for ever that his kingship should never fail before Thee. And for our sins sinners (the Hasmonaeans) have risen up over us, taking with force the kingdom which Thou didst not promise to them, profaning the throne of David in their pride. But Thou, 0 Lord, will cast them down and root out their seed from the land, when a man not of our race (Pompey) rises up against them. . . . Behold, 0 Lord, and raise up their king the Son of David at the time that Thou hast appointed, to reign over Israel Thy servant; and gird him with strength to crush unjust rulers; to cleanse Jerusalem from the heathen that tread it under foot, to cast out sinners from Thy inheritance; to break the pride of sinners and all their strength as potter’s vessels with a rod of iron (Ps. ii. 9); to destroy the lawless nations with the word of his mouth (Isa. xi. 4); to gather a holy nation and lead them in righteousness. . . . He shall divide them by tribes in the land, and no stranger and foreigner shall dwell with them; he shall judge the nations in wisdom and righteousness. The heathen nations shall serve under his yoke; he shall glorify the Lord before all the earth, and cleanse Jerusalem in holiness as in the beginning. From the ends of the earth all nations shall come to see his glory and bring the weary sons of Zion as gifts (Isa. lx. 3 sq.); to see the glory of the Lord with which God hath crowned him, for he is over them a righteous king taught of God. In his days there shall be no unrighteousness in their midst; for they are all holy, and their king the anointed of the Lord (χp<στδs κlpιos, mistranslation of ∏l∏' Π'B ’ 0). He shall not trust on horses and riders and bowmen, nor heap up gold and silver for war, nor put his confidence in a multitude for the day of war. ‘The Lord is king,’ that is his hope. . . . He is pure from sin to rule a great people, to rebuke governors and destroy sinners by his mighty word. In all his days he is free from offence against his God, for He hath made him strong by the Holy Spirit. . . . His hone is in the Lord; who can do aught against him? Strong in deeds and mighty in the fear of the Lord, he feedeth the flock of the Lord in truth and righteousness, and suffereth not one of them to stumble in the pasture. . . . So it beseemeth the king of Israel whom God hath chosen to lead the house of Israel. . . . God hasten His mercy on Israel to deliver them from the uncleanness of profane foes. The Lord is our king for ever and ever. ”— Psalt. Sol. xvii.

This conception is traced in lines too firm to be those of a first essay; it had doubtless grown upas an integral part of the religious protest against the Hasmonaeans. And while the polemical motive is obvious, and the argument from prophecy against the legitimacy of a non-Davidic dynasty is quite in the...