Jewish Messianic Expectation Before and After AD 70

Overview

The Hebrew term mashiach ('anointed one') originally described kings, priests, and sometimes prophets consecrated by anointing, without necessarily implying an end-time deliverer. Only gradually, especially after the trauma of exile and the loss of Davidic kingship, did some texts (Isaiah's later chapters, Jeremiah 23, Ezekiel 34 and 37) develop hope for a future, idealized Davidic ruler who would restore Israel's fortunes. This hope was not evenly distributed across Israelite and later Jewish literature; many texts show no interest in a personal messianic figure at all, expecting instead direct divine intervention.

By the Second Temple period the picture diversifies sharply. The Psalms of Solomon (mid-1st century BC) envisions a militarily and morally potent Davidic king who purges Jerusalem of Gentile occupiers. The Dead Sea Scrolls attest expectation of two messiahs at Qumran — a priestly 'Messiah of Aaron' who outranks a royal 'Messiah of Israel' (1QS 9:11; 1QSa) — reflecting the community's own priestly self-understanding. Other texts, including portions of 1 Enoch's Similitudes and 4 Ezra, describe a pre-existent, heavenly 'Son of Man' or 'my son the Messiah' figure who executes judgment, a rather different profile from a purely political liberator.

What is strikingly absent from nearly all pre-Christian Jewish texts is a messiah who suffers, dies at the hands of Israel's enemies, and is bodily raised before the general resurrection. Isaiah 53's suffering servant was read messianically by some early Jewish and later rabbinic interpreters, but rarely if ever combined before Christianity with royal Davidic messiahship into a single figure who both suffers and reigns. This is central to the historical puzzle: the earliest Christians did not invent belief in a coming Jewish deliverer, but they did apply the title to someone who had been shamefully executed by Rome — a move with no clear precedent, which is why Paul calls the cross 'a stumbling block to Jews' (1 Cor 1:23).

Messianic and prophetic movements were not confined to texts; Josephus records a series of would-be prophets and deliverers in the first century — Theudas, the 'Egyptian' prophet, and others — most crushed by Roman force, illustrating a live, socially dangerous expectation rather than an abstract theological idea. The final and most explicit messianic claimant of the period, Simon bar Kokhba, led the AD 132–135 revolt and was hailed by Rabbi Akiba (per later rabbinic tradition in y. Ta'anit 4:8) as 'king messiah' — a claim retracted by other rabbis after the revolt's catastrophic failure, showing that messianic identification remained a live, contested, and falsifiable category within Judaism itself, not a fixed dogma.

The debate for historians is less about whether Jewish messianism existed — it plainly did — than about how coherent or fragmented it was, and what that implies for explaining the rise of a resurrection-based, suffering-messiah Christology inside a Jewish milieu that had no ready-made template for it.