Vladius said:
Okay but you said “thousands of years,” which is different from a few centuries.
Right, sorry I meant “thousands of years” from the perspective of like a Rabbi alive today, who inherits a scholarly tradition of Talmud study/commentary going back to the Babylonian exile and including many highly developed ideas about the Messiah. I was responding to your earlier comment about the Jews not paying sufficient attention to the meaning of prophesies in their scriptures. I initially understood your comment to be referring to modern Jews living today, so my response was intended like “What do you mean not paying attention? These guys have been studying this stuff for a living for like 2500 years.”
Everything they came up with was based on prophecies, like Isaiah’s. Most of those prophecies also tell Israel that they’re going to get wrecked by foreign powers and have to repent and return, so the Messiah would not be “meaningless” just because it hasn’t happened yet.
The Deuteronomic covenant in general had a mandate to behave properly or be conquered by other nations. But I’m not sure to what extent the average Levite living in say, 800 BC, would be aware of the idea of a future eschatological savior/Messiah. Perhaps there were seeds of the idea in things like the Book of Judges, with God raising up a national hero to defeat some foreign adversary of the week. But I very much doubt the idea existed in its later eschatological form until around the time of the Babylonian exile, and I don’t think there are any truly unambiguous examples of Messianic prophecy that significantly predate the exile. (I realize Isaiah canonically predates the Babylonian exile and the historical prophet Isaiah lived through the Assyrian conquest of the northern tribes; I don’t know what beliefs you subscribe to regarding the dating of the book of Isaiah, but the explicit name-dropping of Cyrus the Great forces me to date the latter part of Isaiah using a secular methodology that assigns a later date).
Of course, some theologians discern Messianic prophecies all the way back in Genesis, so I guess your mileage may vary here. And I realize this easily gets into a discussion about what counts as a Messianic prophecy. If something like Isaiah 7:14 (the virgin birth) should count as a true Messianic prophecy, or just a short-term prophecy about some local political situation. I assume the latter option.
You also mentioned the southernmost two tribes were still there like the loss of 10 tribes and the entire northern kingdom to Assyria isn’t a massive deal.
Well, the Assyrian conquest of the Northern tribes was certainly a huge deal at the time, but the Messianic stuff really mostly came from the perspective of Judah, which considered itself politically distinct from the north. But this is almost tautological to even mention: the northern 10 tribes by definition couldn’t participate in any Messianic prophecy to lament the Assyrian conquest, because the 10 tribes ceased to exist after they were conquered by Assyria and thus had no means of writing down prophecies on scrolls. And all 3 of the Major Prophets were from Judah, not northern Israel, and so their Messianic prophesies mostly concerned Judah. This is also a bit redundant to say, because of course Messianic prophecies are by definition about Judah, since the Messiah is from the line of David. Sometimes Judean prophets include the northern tribes in prophesies of doom and restoration (Isaiah prophesied doom for the north), but most of the Messianic stuff is generally in the context of the exiled Jews in Babylon returning home (which of course only symbolically includes the northern tribes). Again, your mileage may vary depending on what you consider a Messianic prophecy.
Messiah was not intended to be a general Chosen One sort of character category to be dropped into media hundreds of years later, so your original criticism that it’s all about one guy saving everyone with no one else taking any effort doesn’t make sense. If the messiah was a political messiah coming to free people from the Romans, they would still need to take part in the revolution, and if the messiah was a spiritual leader or some mixture of both, people would still need to repent and get their act together.
Okay well, firstly, I’m not at all sure that a political Messiah necessarily implied participating physically in an armed insurrection. Maybe it did, in some cases or to some people, like the followers of Bar Kochba. But then, in the Gospels, James and John are at one point clearly under the impression that Jesus is capable of calling down fire from Heaven and fucking everyone up all by himself. Jesus also said he was capable of summoning an army of angels at any time, but chose not to in order to fulfill his actual mission. A political Messiah might be interpreted in some cases as just an ordinary human general or military leader, but others might have expected supernatural ability from such a figure, in the vein of Elijah. (Modern Judaism tends to model the Messiah around Elijah, a connection going back at least to the time of John the Baptist).
Regardless, I concede your point that if the Messiah is exclusively a spiritual leader, as with Christianity, then my original criticism doesn’t apply. But wouldn’t you agree that the “pop culture” version of Messiah is closer to the original Jewish idea of a political/military figure who will overthrow some oppressor? At least, in stuff like the Matrix that’s pretty much the idea (even if those movies apply a bullshit layer of spirituality/mysticism over everything), and Dune has the same idea (except in that case the idea is subverted). And my criticism is simply that this concept basically encourages the idea that on an individual level one is effectively powerless to change their situation without waiting around for help from some future prophesied leader. In pop culture, Messiah stories often overlap with “Hero’s Journey”, and are often told from the POV of a “reluctant protagonist Messiah”, emphasizing the individual agency and destiny of the protagonist Messiah while implying that the rest of humanity is cosmically ordained to wait around to be saved by the main character. Even if the protagonist Messiah has help from other characters, the Messiah is still implied to be cosmically necessary whereas others are expendable.