The Messiah in Jewish Thought [8] – How Long His Reign?

We are continuing our study on the tractate Sanhedrin from the end of page 98b, with R. Simlai's statement.

The Cock and the Bat

The prophet Amos is addressing those who keep crying out that they are waiting for the day of the Lord — of course, waiting for it with the hope that the Lord will come and vindicate them, their worldview, and their religious convictions. They are not waiting for the day of the Lord expecting to be punished. So Amos tells these people, who were so absorbed in waiting for the Lord's coming and for vengeance upon their enemies — vengeance being the primary connotation of the day of the Lord as a day of judgment — "Woe to you who wait for the day of the Lord; for you it will be darkness and not light." In other words: when the Lord comes, you will be on the wrong side of the judgment. You will not be on the side of light; it will be darkness for you.

On this, R. Simlai asks what Amos meant, and he brings a parable to explain the meaning of the day of the Lord for those who wait for it:

For what follows, we have to explain the Talmudic use of the word Min. The word is used generally for a sectarian — someone who belongs to a sect, someone who may have cut himself off from the general community of Israel. But in the Talmudic period especially — and R. Abbahu belongs to the Talmudic period — the Talmud normally uses Min to mean a believer in Yeshua, in Yeshua as the Messiah. So when the Talmud speaks of a Min, it speaks of someone who believes in Yeshua as the Messiah.

R. Abbahu's Curse That Became a Blessing

So one Min asks R. Abbahu, "When will the Messiah come?" And having just told the parable of the cock and the bat, R. Abbahu is comparing the Min to the bat — the blind one, the one who cries "the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord" in the sense Amos rebuked. He replies: "When darkness covers those people." This phrase alludes to the very person questioning him — meaning, "when darkness covers the believers, that is when the Messiah will come."

The Min, the believer, turns to R. Abbahu and says, "You are cursing me." And R. Abbahu, embarrassed by the retort, answers, "It is but a verse" — that is, "I am not really cursing you, I am only quoting the Bible." He then quotes the whole verse, from Isaiah chapter 60 verse 2, a very messianic prophecy: "For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall shine upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee." By doing this, R. Abbahu gets out of the accusation that he cursed the believer. He backtracks and says, in effect, "No, I am not cursing you; I am just quoting the Bible" — and of course the verse is not really against those whom darkness covers, since it goes on, "but the Lord shall shine upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee." So in trying to get out of cursing the believer, he ends up, out of embarrassment, blessing him.

This is an interesting insight into the relationship between the establishment of the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish believers. R. Abbahu did not feel comfortable having the Jewish believer think the rabbi was cursing him. It shows that the relationship within the community was not as bad as one might think — that there was still some mutual respect and connection between the Jewish community and the believers.

Forty Years, Seventy Years, Three Generations

We continue from the same page.

Both quotations are placed in a messianic context. The first, from Psalm 95, is quoted in Hebrews chapter 3, and is written against those who rebel against God — God gives them forty years' chance before he brings judgment upon them. This is very interesting, because it stands in complete contradiction to the concept of the Messiah prevalent in Judaism today. For most Jews today, the days of the Messiah would be days of glory, victory, and the subjugation of the nations, with no death, no illness, no sickness. But here, according to all the opinions we have read — R. Eliezer, R. Eleazar b. Azariah, R. Hillel, R. Joseph, from both the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods — the days of the Messiah are days of affliction, if not for Israel then for the nations of the world. They do not see the days of the Messiah only as days of victory. They compare them to the suffering and affliction of the forty years in the wilderness — which were not years of victory — and to the four hundred years from Abraham to the Exodus. In both cases the days of the Messiah are days of suffering, not victory. This reflects a very ancient viewpoint, completely in agreement with the New Testament: that the days of the Messiah are days of affliction. They are not looking at the Messiah as the Davidic king enthroned and subjugating the nations, but at the Messiah as the suffering servant who comes to dwell among the people and to suffer with them, in their wilderness experience and their slavery in Egypt. That in itself should open our minds to think differently than we have until now.

The second text, from Isaiah, is the war of God and Israel against Tyre, which lasts seventy years. It is interesting how the rabbis take these totally unrelated passages, set them in opposition, and derive from them the length of the days of the Messiah on earth — one says forty years, another seventy. They draw them from passages that, to our eyes, have nothing directly to do with the Messiah; but in the rabbis' eyes they are associated with the Messiah because they deal with messianic themes. (After all, who is the uniquely distinguished king? The Messiah, of course.)

The verse is interpreted: they shall fear thee when the Messiah comes (referred to as the sun), and they shall fear thee on account of the reign of the house of David (likened to the moon), for a generation and generations to come. Because it says "a generation and generations" — one singular, and at least two plural, mi-dor dorim in Hebrew — they say the Messiah's reign will be three generations of forty years each, that is, a hundred and twenty years.

It is interesting that they are dealing with how long the Messiah's reign will be — and more interesting still that in this context none of these rabbis raise the issue of a thousand years. Normally you would expect them to say the Messiah will be here a thousand years, as most Christians argue about the millennium. We have already met that concept; but in this discussion of how long the Messiah will be on earth, one says forty years, one says seventy, and one now says three generations — a hundred and twenty years. None here mention the thousand-year reign, which shows that the thousand-year concept was not the only one within Judaism concerning the reign of the Messiah on earth. And again we see the way the rabbis argue with verses, each bringing his own — even when the verse is drawn from a context that has nothing to do with the Messiah, it is still brought to substantiate the view.

Hillel's Claim and R. Joseph's Rebuke

This statement is repeated several times in the Talmud. Hillel's claim is that the promises of the Messiah in the prophets were already fulfilled in Hezekiah's time; the Messiah did not come as expected, and therefore he is not coming — or, if he comes, in a totally different way than expected. Hillel's statement is repeated here to bring in R. Joseph's response:

R. Joseph directly contradicts Hillel, saying he was wrong to claim the Messiah will not come, that "we have eaten the Messiah in the days of Hezekiah." That is a strong thing for one rabbi to say of another who preceded him. Now, when did Hezekiah flourish? During the First Temple. Yet Zechariah, prophesying in the days of the Second, proclaimed:

R. Joseph's point is that Hillel cannot be right — because we have prophets who lived hundreds of years after Hezekiah and still held messianic expectations, still gave messianic prophecies awaiting fulfillment. He brings the famous prophecy from Zechariah of the Messiah coming on a donkey. So it cannot be that Israel has lost the messianic era, since prophets after Hezekiah — like Zechariah, in the post-exilic period — were still waiting for the Messiah and still promising that he would come.

This is a significant disproof of Hillel's view. And it is also interesting that R. Joseph brings the Zechariah prophecy clearly as messianic: that the Messiah will come to Jerusalem to bring salvation and proclaim his justice, and that he will come on a donkey.

"The Master Has Need of It"

It was no accident that Yeshua came into Jerusalem on a donkey, as we read in Luke 19. He told his disciples to go and bring him a donkey so that he could ride it into Jerusalem. He could have walked in — he wasn't tired; he had walked the whole way with his disciples, and could have entered Jerusalem on foot like everyone else. But no. When he reached the top of the Mount of Olives, near the village of Bethany, with Jerusalem in sight, he told his disciples: "Go there, and you will find a donkey tied; bring it to me, and if anyone asks, 'Why are you taking it?', say, 'The Master has need of it.'" And that is exactly what happens. They go to untie the donkey, and the owner comes and says, "What are you doing with my donkey?" They say, "The Master has need of it," and the man immediately lets them take it — which means the owner himself understood what "the Master has need of it" meant. He understood that this was a donkey the Messiah would ride into Jerusalem, that the deliverer would come to Jerusalem on his donkey, and that is why he let it be taken by two Galilean strangers.

Compare that to today: if my car is parked at the side of the road and I see two people trying to jimmy the lock and break in, and I say, "What are you doing to my car?", and they say, "The Master has need of it" — the only way I would say, "Alright, take it," is if I recognized who the Master was: his authority, his place, his promise. That is what happened there, in the fulfillment of Zechariah's prophecy. Our interest is that the Talmud, and particularly R. Joseph, recognizes without any doubt that this prophecy speaks of the coming of the Messiah into Jerusalem, exactly as Yeshua fulfilled it. It would be very strange today, in an era of cars and jet planes, for the Messiah to come to Jerusalem on a donkey. Living in Jerusalem, I have seen many people who are not entirely well come into the city on a donkey, thinking they are the Messiah — only because they haven't changed their clothes in weeks and are riding a donkey.

Measure for Measure

We continue with another Baraita, an external source from the Tannaitic period.

The first quotation's context is the forty years in the wilderness, when Israel ate manna from heaven; the second also concerns the wilderness, where they were ruled by the kingship of God. During that period Moses was regarded as a messenger of God, but the real ruler and guide of Israel was God himself, through his presence over the Tent of Meeting — the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day. God was truly their king; Moses and Aaron were only messengers. So R. Eliezer's view is that the time of the Messiah is forty years — just as we read earlier from Psalm 95:10, "Forty years long was I grieved with that generation."

The four hundred years, of course, are the years of slavery in Egypt — from God's word to Abraham that his seed would serve another nation four hundred years before inheriting the Land. In both cases the days of affliction are the mirror of the days of the Messiah: the days of the Messiah bring rejoicing equal to the days of affliction. Both derive the length of the messianic era from the same verse, "Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us." The concept is "measure for measure" — by the measure we were afflicted, we will be rewarded in the days of the Messiah. This is not so different from the earlier view attributed to R. Eliezer, that the days of the Messiah are days when "darkness shall cover the earth… but the Lord shall shine upon thee" — except that here the days of the Messiah are days of darkness for the nations, but light and glory for Israel.

A Solar Year, Seven Thousand Years, and As Long As Creation

I continue the reading.

It is interesting that he says three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar year — which raises the question of what calendar the rabbis went by in the Second Temple period. Did they follow the solar calendar, like the people of Qumran and the Essenes, or the lunar calendar that modern Judaism uses, like the Arab world? It may be that Jews of the Tannaitic period, and even in second-century Babylon, went by the solar calendar. In any case, he is clearly speaking of the days of the solar year: the days of the Messiah will be like a solar year, three hundred and sixty-five days, which will be the years of redemption. And the verse says each of these will be a day of God's vengeance. So the vengeance of God will be the period of the messianic reign — each day of the Messiah's mission a year of God's vengeance on the world. That fits the view we saw earlier, that there is no difference between the days of the Messiah and now, except for the subjugation of the nations. If that is your view, you may well say the Messiah will come to carry out vengeance against the nations who persecuted Israel and were unfaithful to God. But this is a totally different view of what the messianic era is supposed to be — and we see it reflected throughout the discussion of how long the messianic reign will be.

The Talmud asks: what is meant by "the day of vengeance is in mine heart"?

In other words, R. Johanan says he has kept these doctrines sealed in his heart, not giving them expression. What did he keep?

The bridegroom's rejoicing lasts seven days, and God's day is a thousand years; so if the bridegroom rejoices for a week over his bride, God will rejoice over the world for seven thousand years.

So R. Judah believes that the messianic era will last as long as the earth exists.

Conclusion

In summary, we see that the rabbis were occupied with how long the Messiah would be on earth, how long his reign would last — from the shortest view, one generation, to the longest, as long as from creation until now. Of course, the rabbis of fifth- and sixth-century Babylon did not realize the world would go on for another fifteen hundred years; the world has now existed almost six thousand years. So the longest opinion says the Messiah will come after six thousand years; the shortest says one generation.

These things are interesting in that the New Testament actually deals with this issue very little. About all one could say is that the New Testament looks forward to a period — symbolically, in my opinion — called the reign of a thousand years, in which Satan will be restricted and God will reign on earth for a thousand years. But the very fact that there are so many opinions, each bringing a verse to justify itself, each rabbi with his own idea, indicates that we do not have a clear biblical mandate on how long the messianic era will last. If there were a verse that closed the argument — "this is clearly what the Bible says" — there would be nothing to argue about. But each draws his verse from a different context, a different setting, a different worldview. And so they hold these discussions, ranging from forty years to as long as the world lasts, for the time of the Messiah.