The Messiah in Jewish Thought [4] – Wait for Him

In the last lesson we dealt with a number of passages about the time of the coming of the Messiah, and with the concept of history being patterned after the week of creation — all of history compared to seven days, where each day is a thousand years, and the seventh day is the millennial rest, a millennial Sabbath. We continue with the same concept on this page.

Eighty-Five Jubilees

This section is still dealing with the same topic: when the Messiah is going to come. Here it presents the concept that the world will exist no fewer than eighty-five jubilees — that is, 4,250 years, since each jubilee is fifty years. And in the last jubilee the Messiah will come. The question R. Judah asks is whether the Messiah will come at the beginning of that last jubilee or at the end — but Elijah does not know. This citation is a Baraita — it comes from outside the Mishnah and is an ancient Tannaitic source. It leaves the rabbis hanging. It gives a similar date to the previous discussions, but now the time period is based not on the week, but on the jubilees. Eighty-five jubilees is 4,250 years, and at the end of that time the Messiah will come.

This is still within the same time frame. In last week's discussion we had two thousand years of Tohu vaVohu — disorder, before the Torah was given; two thousand years in which the Torah flourishes; and then the last two thousand years of the six, which are the Messianic era. That means the Messiah was supposed to come at approximately the year 4000 according to the Jewish calendar. Eighty-five jubilees is still in the same ballpark, at 4,250 years. The Jewish calendar today stands at 5786. So however you look at it from the Talmudic point of view, the Talmudic rabbis considered that the Messiah should have come about 1,780 years ago — around the year 4000 of the Jewish calendar — but they believe he did not come.

R. Ashi retorts to this discussion. R. Ashi is an Amora, a Talmudic rabbi of the fourth century. His statement basically says: before that day, do not expect the Messiah to come; but after that day — in the last, the eighty-fifth jubilee — you must wait for him every day and be ready for his coming.

A Manuscript in the Roman Archives

We continue reading.

I have to stop and explain something here. The Hebrew text we have today in the Bible, and the way we write Hebrew today, is in the Assyrian character — the square letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The characters our forefathers used in the First Temple period are called the Canaanite characters, and they are very different from what we read today. The average Israeli — I would say 99.9% of all Jews — cannot read the ancient script of the First Temple period. Only paleographers and archaeologists who have studied it can read it. Biblical scholars generally can't; they don't learn to read the ancient Hebrew text, which is found mainly in archaeological evidence and in ancient inscriptions, and very little in the Dead Sea Scrolls — though the tetragrammaton, the holy name of God, is in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls still preserved in the ancient Canaanite character. So R. Hanan b. Tahlifa is telling R. Joseph of a scroll written in Hebrew but in Assyrian characters — that is, in the square letters, similar to the way they are today.

This is an interesting discussion, with a great deal of historical interest. You have two rabbis discussing the coming of the Messiah, and they bring a story that someone found, in the Roman archives, a Hebrew manuscript — most likely from the Second Temple period, written in Assyrian script — in which it was stated that the Messiah will come at 4,231 years after the creation of the world. This fits very much the picture of the previous Baraita, which spoke of 4,250 years and the last jubilee. So we are still dealing with the last jubilee, and now they bring support for that position from a manuscript found in the Roman archives, in the Hebrew language.

That in itself is interesting, because we know that after sacking Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Roman army took from the Temple its implements and many of its documents; and in fact scholars have been discovering ancient documents in the Roman archives, kept by the Catholic Church to this day. There are still thousands upon thousands of Hebrew manuscripts that the Catholic Church has not shown or revealed to anyone, though now they are doing it tipin-tipin, slowly, drop by drop, revealing what kind of documents they have.

In that connection: in 1988 I myself found a manuscript in the palace of El Escorial in Spain, which used to be the palace of King Philip II. They have a fabulous library of manuscripts. I asked the curator, a Catholic priest, whether they had any Hebrew manuscripts, and immediately he took me to a glass case in which there was a wonderful illuminated manuscript of the Bible with beautiful paintings. I asked whether he had any other interesting manuscripts in Hebrew, and he said, yes, they had many — and he locked me in a room, and after a few minutes brought three big handwritten manuscripts. I opened them; they were written on vellum, by hand, in beautiful, very legible Hebrew. And when I opened the first one, I almost fainted. It was called "The Book of the Wisdom of God," and it was dedicated to the bishop of Toledo, written in 1472 — twenty years before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It was written by a Jew, obviously a very learned rabbinical student, in Hebrew; its title was "The Book of the Wisdom of God," but its dedication was "to our Lord Yeshua HaMashiach." And it was an explanation, from strictly Jewish sources, without a single quotation from the New Testament, of why Yeshua is the Messiah. I asked the priest for permission to publish this manuscript, and he told me to come back the next day; when I did, I received a microfiche of the whole manuscript, which I have to this day, along with written permission to publish it. It was totally unknown and unpublished before. I still have it; the only thing I don't have is the time and money to sit down, translate it, and publish it. And so there are literally hundreds of thousands of Hebrew manuscripts in the possession of the Catholic Church.

This Talmudic passage, written sometime in the fourth or fifth century, reflects that reality — that in the archives in Rome there were Hebrew manuscripts dealing with the coming of the Messiah. The Talmud preserves this and records that such a manuscript was found, saying the Messiah would come at 4,231 years after the creation of the world; that at his coming there would be a great mythological war against the sea monsters and the war of Gog and Magog; and that after these wars would come the Messianic era. In other words, this manuscript holds — if we put it in the framework of Christian theology — the coming of the Messiah, then a great war, then the blessing of the Messianic era. One might call it a post-tribulation theology. The Messianic era begins at 4,231 years, but the world is renewed — the new heavens and new earth, as the prophet Isaiah and the book of Revelation describe — only after the seventh thousand-year period. These rabbis do not see a millennium of a thousand years here; they see a Messianic era of almost two thousand years — an opinion we have already met in earlier sections. R. Aha, a later Babylonian scholar, corrects the opinion, saying the world will be renewed not after seven thousand years but after five thousand. Well, we know that R. Aha was wrong, because our calendar already reads 5786.

R. Nathan and the Vision That "Cannot Lie"

We continue reading from the same page.

speaking of a verse from Habakkuk chapter 2 verse 3. It is a very important passage, and just as informative for Jewish thinking about the Messiah, and especially for Maimonides' concept of the Messiah. Let us first read how the Talmud quotes this verse. The Jewish translation renders it:

Read it again and notice the shift in the grammar that this translation reflects from the Hebrew. "For the vision is yet for an appointed time" — the subject is the vision. "But at the end it shall speak, and not lie" — who shall speak and not lie? The vision. "Though he tarry, wait for him" — the subject has changed in the middle of the thought; you would think it is still the vision, but now the pronoun is a singular masculine, "he," not "it." "Because it will surely come, it will not tarry" — again the exchange between "he" and "it." So there is a change of pronoun, from a neuter "it" to a masculine "he," in the middle of the verse. The Talmudic passage continues:

that is, "a time, and another time, and a divided time," as translated from Daniel chapter 7 verse 25, the last three and a half years of Daniel's vision. The Talmud brings R. Nathan's reading from Habakkuk and then rejects the opinion of the Masters — the great rabbis — who interpreted Habakkuk in light of Daniel 7:25.

taken from Haggai chapter 2 verse 6. So you have three verses, brought by different rabbis in different periods, each of which seems to indicate a time when the Messiah would come: the first from Habakkuk chapter 2, the second from Daniel chapter 7 verse 25, and the third from Haggai chapter 2 verse 6.

R. Akiba, Bar Koziba, and a Costly Error

Let us come back to these verses. R. Akiba's opinion, based on the passage in Haggai, is: the first dynasty [the Hasmonean] shall last seventy years, the second dynasty [the Herodian] fifty-two, and the reign of Bar Koziba two and a half years. This is what the Talmud presents as R. Akiba's vision of when the Messiah will come. Why is that vision relevant? Because R. Akiba is the one who appointed and anointed Bar Koziba — today we call him Bar Kochba — as the Messiah. The great revolt failed in the days of the Roman emperor Hadrian, ending in 135 AD, and lasted approximately three years. In 135 AD, R. Akiba and nine other great rabbis who supported the revolt were executed — crucified, in fact — by the Romans. And Bar Koziba's revolt brought a great calamity: Jerusalem was totally destroyed by Hadrian. By "totally" I mean that every single building was flattened, plowed under, and covered over with soil, and a new city was built on top of the mound that had been Jerusalem. The name of that city was Aelia Capitolina. Hadrian tried to erase the name "Jerusalem" from the map. Today, of course, hardly anybody has heard of Aelia Capitolina, except archaeologists and historians. But Jerusalem is still here! We are living in Jerusalem right now, looking out the window, seeing the Parliament and the High Court rebuilt. Nobody has heard of Hadrian, and few of Bar Kochba — but everybody knows Jerusalem, and Yeshua the Messiah.

These historical notes are not the main point; the important thing is to see these three verses about the coming of the Messiah, the disagreement among the rabbis over their interpretation, and R. Akiba's reading of the verse from Haggai as three periods: "Yet once" for the Hasmonean dynasty, "it is a little while" for the Herodian dynasty (which lasted fifty-two years, according to this passage), and then the short reign of Bar Kochba — Bar Koziba, in the Talmudic spelling, which is the correct one. Today we know he signed his name Bar Koziba, because we have found his letters in the Dead Sea area, with his handwriting and his signature. So his real name was not Bar Kochba, which means "son of a star," but Bar Koziba, which means "son of a lie." And history has proved that both R. Akiba and Bar Koziba were wrong when they declared him the Messiah, and that they brought a terrible calamity on the nation of Israel — one that caused most of the Jewish people to be cast out of the Land of Israel, of Judea, and of Jerusalem. At that time the center of Jewish learning moved to the Galilee, and from the Galilee to Babylon, and it has not yet fully come back to Jerusalem. A great percentage of Jewish learning today is still in the United States of America, not in Jerusalem, but it's coming back.

The Meaning of R. Nathan's Position

But let me return to the first opinion, that of R. Nathan, and analyze it in greater depth. R. Nathan's opinion is taken from Habakkuk chapter 2 verse 3. What does it say, basically? It says that in our promises there is a vision — chazon la-mo'ed in Hebrew. There is a time for the vision, an appointed time. It shall not lie; it shall speak at the end. Our task is to wait for him — to wait and not give up, to wait and keep waiting — because he will come, and he will not tarry. Why? There is an appointed time; we do not know the time, but our task is to wait. It is a very Maimonides-like, amillennial position: that the task of the believer is not to give up and not to lose hope, but to wait, and to be ready.

The second position, held by our Masters, the rabbis, was interpreted from the verse in Daniel chapter 7 verse 25 — "a time, times, and a divided time," in other words a period of three and a half years. There is a set time, and we must wait for it, but not be anxious before that three and a half years comes. Many premillennial Christians today live under the illusion that there are certain events that must take place in history before the coming of the Messiah, and that therefore we have time — that since these events haven't taken place, there is time to watch for the signs supposed to be fulfilled before he comes.

R. Akiba's position was that the Messiah was coming in his own day — that, in fact, he was already here, in the person of Bar Kochba — but we know that this did not pan out in history. The discussion itself is interesting in its use of these verses and their interpretation in light of the coming of the Messiah.

"Blasted Be the Bones of Those Who Calculate the End"

I will continue reading one more passage from the same page. The Talmud asks: what is meant by "but at the end it shall speak, and not lie"? "At the end it shall speak" means the vision; "and not lie" —

Quite a harsh statement — a curse on all those who engage in end-time speculation. The Talmud continues, explaining why: because they would say, "since the predetermined time has arrived, and yet he has not come, he will never come." The Talmud here predicts what happens to these calculators of the end — the same speculation that brings division and hatred among Christians and among believers. When you set a time and say "the Messiah is going to come then, because I have calculated it from Daniel, or Revelation, or Habakkuk, or Haggai, or Isaiah," you are dealing only with your own interpretation; and when such times don't pan out, it destroys people's faith. This has happened more than once in Christian history: it destroys people's faith, and they give up entirely on the coming of the Messiah. The Talmud predicts exactly this — that when they teach these doctrines and it doesn't turn out as taught, they cause people to despair, and to say, "Well, since it didn't come as we thought, then he will never come."

But it is not so, the Talmud repeats — wait for him, as it is written, "Though he tarry, wait for him." Do not give up on his coming.

This quotation is from Isaiah chapter 30 verse 18, and it reflects the Talmudic view that you should wait — and that God himself is waiting for the advent of the Messiah. Why is God waiting? He waits because of his mercy: so that he may be gracious to you, that he may have a chance to show you mercy. This passage is very encouraging. In the New Testament, Yeshua taught the same thing: that the Messiah may tarry so that more people can hear the Gospel, change their lives, walk in the light, and be saved — because if he came right now, most of the world would still be in unbelief, in disobedience and rebellion against God. So he is giving humanity a chance; he himself is waiting to come, giving humanity a chance to change, to do the work of evangelism, to do what the rabbis called ha-tikkun ha-gadol, the great repair — the repair that humanity so badly needs for its spiritual, moral, and social disorder. That is why God delays the advent of the Messiah.

We continue reading.

The Attribute of Justice is one of the main attributes of God. God has two great attributes — Justice and Mercy — and he balances them in history. Yeshua is the Attribute of Mercy, and he had to die because of God's Justice; that is what the book of Romans explains to us in chapter five. Because God's attribute of Justice cannot go unsatisfied — it is part of his character — God's disposition toward humanity is a balance of his love and mercy with his desire for truth and justice. And in Yeshua these two aspects come together, as John chapter 1 verse 17 describes it: "the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Yeshua the Messiah." Truth is the attribute of justice, which is absolute; and grace is the attribute of the love and charity of God, which shows that the absolute can stand without compromising its truth, righteousness, and justice. Yeshua paid for us, so that we can receive grace. So the Talmud says: what delays the coming of the Messiah? God's Attribute of Justice — simply because we are not yet worthy to be saved, and God does not want to condemn us; so he tempers that attribute of justice by waiting until we respond to his grace.

We continue.

Another quotation from the same passage, Isaiah chapter 30 verse 18. And so we wait for him, in order that we may be blessed.

This is the end of this study, and I will continue the next teaching on page 98a.