What is Prophecy? And Who Is the Messiah?

So, this is a "mystery" post. I have had it in my blogger dashboard in a draft with just one paragraph that is more of a hastily jotted list and, separately, the single word "Messiah" for a while, and honestly, I forget if I had any idea of purpose beyond that paragraph. But I am going to turn it into a bit broader thing by using it as an opportunity to write down in a concise way the base from which I always discuss prophecy. I'm sure I have probably mentioned it passing or in minor details in other posts, but this will give a chance to focus on in it in a dedicated version with the details filled out, from which I will then go into what I had jotted down on the Messianic prophecy in particular, which will give me a chance to group in some of the material on apocalyptic Judaism that I always wonder if I have recorded anywhere on the blog.

Prophecy

So, Rabbi Abraham Heschel was the one to make this formulation of prophecy (click here to see a cool picture of him with Martin Luther King Jr. and here to see and even cooler one [although, unfortunately, smaller] of him marching with King in Selma), but I would have to look through his two-volume work on the prophets to recall if he used the exact terminology I will give for it or not. I first heard the terminology from a professor while working on my MA, and I later became, on account of this and a few other things, somewhat disappointed in that professor, who has been a bit of a celebrity in popular-level publishing, which I guess is supposed to excuse one from keeping up to graduate class standards when teaching a graduate class for which a student is paying money by providing them with the sources of ideas so that they are better informed as they head out into the field.

While the particular alliterative terms I first heard from professor celebrity may or may not be from celebrity himself, and while broader forms of the idea itself probably go back much further than Heschel, it is Heschel who is known as the one to formulate it in concise and direct concepts: in the Hebrew Bible, prophecy is more about "forthtelling" than it is about "foretelling," and the true form of the latter is only ever the product of the former.

(SIDENOTE: Fortunately, I had a tendency to be quiet, so when a different professor in a doctoral class later brought the concept into a discussion, I did not blurt out "oh yeah, that is Dr. celebrity's insight" and look like a jackass and have to be corrected ... AND my professor in doctoral, who was also my adviser for coursework, did the thing right and gave the source ... hence my knowing it here  ... much better, yes? "I think this has been a very good experience for all of us, eh? Spiritually? Ecumenically? Grammatically?" to quote Captain Jack Sparrow, as long as we're talking about pirating credit for such an insightful formulation. END SIDENOTE)

 So, "foretelling" would be what many would think of prophecy ... the usual divination of material details of future events. "Forthtelling" is looking into a situation and seeing what is really going on. And the logic is that if you can see what is really going on rather than what interested parties involved want others to think is going on, then you can see the logical outcome: God said to keep the covenant and you're not (forthtelling) keeping the covenant, and that is why you will (foretelling) be conquered by the Philistines or the Assyrians or the Babylonians, as punishment by God; or God says not to oppress the orphan and the widow, but you are (forthtelling) oppressing the orphan and the widow, so again, you will (foretelling) be conquered.

As with a lot of things on this blog, I have a Harry Potter example to use to help explain in action but also to show how much has been worked into that series. When divination starts in year 3, Hermione echoes McGonnagall's opinion of divination as a wooly and imprecise subject, and in book 6, we get Dumbledore challenging the idea that the mere fact that the prophecy was made meant that it had to happen. Especially for the latter, it is what somebody chose to do with it, how they chose to act in the present, that was the deciding factor.

[SIDENOTE: Even though I have said it before in passing, I'll say it again here in passing too that I liked when the United State Council of Catholic Bishops made changes to the English translation to the Mass to get it back more to the senses in the original Latin and away from the "power" interpretation that had crept in. In the Sanctus, "Lord God of power and might" became the more accurate "Lord God of hosts" and, important to this post, in the Creed, "in fulfillment of the Scriptures" became the more accurate "according to the Scriptures," tugged back away from that fascination with divination (which was out of bounds at points in the OT ... going to mediums and such like). The Latin secundum means "according to," and that is more often in the sense in which it is used in the titles of the Gospels: Evangelium Secundum Lucam means the Gospel as recorded by Luke, not the Gospel as predicted by Luke. And unless some other concrete language is distinctly augmenting in the direction of prophecy and fulfillment, which it does not seem to me there is, secundum scripturas in the Creed should be taken simply in the sense of "as recorded in the Scriptures")
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The Messiah

So, there is a lot that can be done with the Messiah, and I will bring some of it in here. But first I should put out the basic idea I want to put forward as the way in which the forthtelling and foretelling thing impacts the understanding of the Messiah: In the original setting, the Messiah was not a foretelling about a figure in the future but a forthtelling about God's faithfulness in the here and now. Originally, mashiach means simply "anointed one." It's primary usage as a term begins with it being applied to the king as duly anointed by a prophet, such as when Samuel first anoints Saul as king. When Saul is chasing David and David and his companion sneak into Saul's camp at night and the companion says David should kill Saul because, since Saul is seeking to kill David, it's justifiable self defense, David replies that he will not touch the Lord's "anointed one." In 2 Sam 7, the term takes on a more narrowed royal meaning: God promises David that there will always be a man from the line of David on the throne in Judah, he promises him an everlasting dynasty. And that man will be the Messiah, which is more of an ongoing office (the present legitimate Davidic king reigning in Judah) than a future singular personage. To quote professor celebrity, if it is viewed as a prophecy in the divination way, it was a prophecy that had an immediate fulfillment when Solomon took the throne, and then another when Rehoboam took the throne, and so on down to Zedekiah, who had his eyes gouged out by the Babylonians with the last thing they ever saw being the slaughter of his sons (which is a nice pairing with the Samson story as a nadir and Samson having his eyes gouged out [Joshua paired with Josiah and Samson paired with Zedekiah], probably an intentional pairing on the part of either the original single redactor of the Deuteronomisitic History or the second Deuteronomistic redactor in the exile, depending on whether the single redaction theory is right or the double redaction theory, or whether the DH theory in any form is right at all, etc. etc.).

So, that slaughter of Zed's sons brings us to how it gets from the ongoing present office to the single savior person that is "predicted" as Messiah in the distinctly futural projection sense of "prophecy." Zed's sons would not necessarily be the only ones eligible to succeed him to the throne. In fact, Zed actually succeeded his own nephew to the throne (Jeconiah/Jehoiachin, son of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah and brother of Zedekiah). Zed was the third of Josiah's sons to hold the throne, Jehoahaz and Jehoiakim being the first two. Jeconiah/Jehoiachin, the nephew Zedekiah actually replaced, was still eligible by Judah's standards, not having been killed when the Babylonians replaced him with his uncle on the throne of Judah (Judah at this time being a sort of vassal kingdom to Babylon), but simply taken into captivity in Babylon, the slaughter of Zedekiah's sons really is symbolic of the end of the dynasty. But Jeconiah/Jehoiachin is recorded in 2 Kings 25:27-30 as being released from actual prison in Babylon and given a sort of special status ... only remaining in Babylon and only really as far as what he received (VIP table), not with any ruling authority over anything. And this is the last that the Hebrew Bible sees fit to depict of that lineage. 2 Chronicles doesn't even include the release and dignitary status: it skips straight to the release of the kingdom by Cyrus the Persian after Persia conquered Babylon.

And the Persians did not allow a king. A "prince" was allowed, but looking at the records of the trouble Babylon had with Judah when it had a king and the collective experience of all suzerain empires when their vassal states had monarchies (the suzerain covenant treaty, which as a form going back at least to the Hittite empire from around 1600 BC to around 1200 BC, was a treaty formula for agreements between a singular empire, the suzerain "lord," and its vassal states), Persia decided that, since things always seem to run into trouble when you let them have a king, better not to let them have a king. That means no throne on which to have a man legitimately from the Davidic dynasty even if Jeconiah/Jehoiachin is still around or has had a son who is eligible.

So what is a faithful Jewish person supposed to think of a God who promises that there will always be a Davidic king on the throne in Judah and then lets the Davidic dynasty and the throne be wiped out? (Herod was no Davide; nor was he anointed by a prophet of the Lord ... that throne was not the same throne even as the one occupied by Saul.) This is where we get into apocalyptic Judaism, which centers around a set of events in the future that will be the last stage of this world, crossing over into the next, in which the promises made by God will be fulfilled.The principle is still that of "forthtelling" being the source of "foretelling," that God is faithful ... my emphasis on the present tense of the verb and that it has future tense implications. God promises (present of the text); God will fulfill (future of the text).

The promise was threefold: Land, Temple, King. This goes back beyond David in the Heilsgeschicte chronology of the Hebrew Bible. It goes all the way back to Abraham being promised the land (Gen 12) and then when, on the verge of finally entering that promised land, through Moses, God gives Israel the law that contains, as two prominent pieces, the law of the central sanctuary, a.k.a. the temple (Deut 12), and the law of the king (Deut 17 ... when I taught this material for undergrads, I called it the "no internet access" rule, no WWW: no building up Wealth, or Weapons [a standing army, symbolized by horses, particularly horses gotten from other kingdoms whose gods he will be tempted to ally himself with], or Women [taking many daughters of other kings as wives in political marriages, which would also entail religious inter-worship]).

[SIDENOTE: There is a lot in all this that goes into the reaction of diaspora Judaism to the formation of the state of Israel in 1947/48 and their slogans of "no homeland without a Messiah." If you don't have all three, then you don't have any. If God is waiting til the end to give any of them, then all of them are waiting for the end. And if the throne of Herod was not the throne of David, the political identity assigned by the United Nations certainly is not. A political nationhood connected to the religious identity will be given the way God gives it, not as determined by the UN. To be sure, there were practical motivations for the opposition as well, such as a fear that there would be backlash against Judaism worldwide in the form of persecution of one type or another, a persecution of a much greater percentage of Judaism for the sake of a handful in Palestine, but there is also a logic in the religious justification appealed to for opposition to the UN, a logic that stands on its own with legitimacy from within the Hebrew Bible. That's not my fight, and I have no right to make declarations on what should or should not be done, and so I am just noting the logic from within the text [although I will also add that: if you believe Donald Trump's  moving the US embassy to Jerusalem beginning at the end of 2017 is done out of any altruistic or virtuous motives on his actual part ... you deserve to be lied to]. END SIDENOTE]

So, what are you to think of God when the kingship he promised is gone and when the Temple he promised is destroyed by the Babylonians and then even the replacement (originally built by Nehemiah the layman at the direction of Ezra the priest/scribe, but become very problematic for some in the Herodian era) was definitively destroyed by the Romans in AD 70?  Does God not keep his promises? This is where you start to reinterpret what the promises must have meant, and the nature of the world in which promises hold starts to change.

The temple in Jerusalem is not the true temple. It is the truest in this world and definitely connected to the true temple in a way that no other thing in this world is, but it is not actually the true temple itself. It is only a model of it. The true temple is not confined to this world or even in it, and it has been seen by only the few to whom it has been shown in this world, such as Adam, Moses (who saw it on top of Sinai and built the portable tabernacle according to it as a model), Solomon (who built the earthly temple of Jerusalem according to it as a model), and "Baruch" and "Ezra" in the apocalyptic works known as 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, who are both given tours of the true temple (to accomplish the same ends but by a different means, the "author" of 1 Enoch gets not a tour of the microcosm, the Temple, but the macrocosm, the universe ... the word "cosmos" for universe is actually connected to our usage of it in words like "cosmetic" by way of ancient temple practices: usually there was a surface element [like our "cosmetic"] on the walls in temples, sometimes canvas or sometimes paint on plaster or other things, depicting the heavenly bodies and natural elements [our "cosmos"]).

The same thing happens with the promise of dynasty. Like the true temple, it has gone into hiding for a bit. But it will come back as a last blast in this world, the Messianic age, a time during which the king returning from hiding will be preparing to conquer and lead the righteous into the next world, an age that is sort of a bridge to the next world, but also one in which, until the Messiah conquers, is going to have some pretty heavy tribulation for the righteous. And that is how we get to the Messiah as the single person expected in the future as opposed to the present succession of holders of a currently ongoing office (at least in broad strokes). That's how we get from forthtelling to foretelling with the Messiah ... or at least that's how it seems to me that it works.