THE ONCE AND FUTURE DAVID
You will recall, from the end of Chapter 3, that there was no completely unified consensus about the identity of God’s intermediary for the eschatological transformation, or Great Divine Cleanup of the World. But insofar as there was any popular agreement, it was that the Anointed One would be a Davidic Messiah, that is, a new David, who would establish justice and peace for God’s people. His character, activity, and salvific success had to be like David’s, but to be born of David’s lineage or born in David’s city were probably quite negotiable. But, before looking at Jesus as the new David, who or what exactly was the old David?
About a millennium before the time of Jesus, Philistine invaders struck the southern coastal plain of Israel with iron weaponry, swift chariotry, and unified leadership. In responding to this lethal threat, the tribes of Israel first chose an unsuccessful defender in Saul, who was badly defeated by the invaders. Then, ignoring Saul’s dynastic pretensions, they chose a very successful defender in David, who finally defeated the Philistine advances. That story is told—in a serene combination of historical fact and romantic fiction—in 1–2 Samuel and 1 Kings 1:1–2:11. And, of course, “David was the son of an Ephrathite of Bethlehem in Judah, named Jesse” (1 Sam. 17:12). David was born in Bethlehem.
But apart from David’s personal success historically as a military leader and king of Israel, it is especially his dynastic images as filtered theologically through the royal psalms and prophetic promises that we see visions of the new David, the new Anointed One—“Messiah” in Hebrew, “Christ” in Greek—who would establish justice and righteousness, peace and security for his people.
In Psalm 2, for example, on the day of his royal enthronement in Jerusalem, a descendant of David is the “anointed” (2:2), “king” (2:6), and “son” of God, because, “today I [God] have begotten you” (2:7). God also promises him, “I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession” (2:8). That is surely a promise more in the theological future that the historical present.
In another Psalm God says, “I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him” (89:20), and, “He shall cry to me, ‘You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!’ I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” (89:26–27). Furthermore, once again, God promises, “I will crush his foes before him and strike down those who hate him” (89:23).
You can read this prophetic medley as a commentary on that once and future Davidic king and especially on his attributes and activities. Notice how the future arrival of the new David is “on that day” or on “days that are surely coming” or “in those days”:
On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old. (Amos 9:11)
His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. (Isa. 9:7)
Then a throne shall be established in steadfast love in the tent of David, and on it shall sit in faithfulness a ruler who seeks justice and is swift to do what is right. (Isa. 16:5)
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. (Jer. 23:5)
In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. (Jer. 33:15)
In reading those texts, we ask you to recall what we said in Chapter 3 about messianic expectations from texts around the time of Jesus. We drew attention there to two questions concerning those expectations for God’s anointed intermediary. First, was he to be human or transcendent? And, second, was he to be violent or nonviolent?
To answer those questions, we turn to The Scepter and the Star by John J. Collins of Yale University. It is a very thorough and helpful survey of messiahs in ancient literature. Collins focuses, despite other “minor” understandings of the term “messiah” around the time of Jesus, on this “common core” or “dominant note”:
This concept of the Davidic messiah as the warrior king who would destroy the enemies of Israel and institute an era of unending peace constitutes the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era…. There was a dominant notion of a Davidic messiah as the king who would restore the kingdom of Israel, which was part of the common Judaism around the turn of the era.1
The Davidic Messiah as a warrior king is not, therefore, just one option among many messianic understandings and expectations. It is, rather, the basic one. And that, of course, raises this immediate problem:
Although the claim that he [Jesus of Nazareth] is the Davidic messiah is ubiquitous in the New Testament, he does not fit the typical profile of the Davidic messiah. This messiah was, first of all, a warrior prince, who was to defeat the enemies of Israel…. There is little if anything in the Gospel portrait of Jesus that accords with the Jewish expectation of a militant messiah.2
We cannot explain that discrepancy by taking the “common core” or “dominant note” of a violent Davidic Messiah as “Jewish” and that of a nonviolent Davidic Messiah as “Christian.” At least for some Jews at the start of the first century CE that understanding of the warrior Davidic Messiah underwent a profound mutation in interaction with their experience of Jesus himself. For some Jews, in other words, Jesus was a nonviolent Davidic Messiah. It is necessary, therefore, to accept fully the profound mutation that Davidic messianism underwent within Judaism in that first century.
We are back, in other words, with those two questions about the Messiah from our Chapter 3. Would the Messiah be human or transcendent? Would the Messiah be nonviolent or violent? For those Jews who accepted Jesus as the Davidic Messiah—and whom we would later call Christians—the answer to those two questions was quite clear. As the Davidic Messiah or new David, Jesus was human and transcendent and nonviolent. His establishment of “justice and righteousness”—as promised by those prophets above—would be not by violence, but by nonviolence.
MESSIAH AND KING OF THE JEWS
In Matthew’s Christmas story the Magi are being led toward Jesus’s birthplace by their miraculous star. So you might wonder why they stop in Jerusalem and ask for directions. But, hold that question for a moment, and notice this juxtaposition of questions and titles in 2:2–4:
Magi to Herod:
“Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews?”
Herod to Advisers:
“Where [is] the Messiah to be born?”
The Messiah, for Matthew, is King of the Jews. But what is most striking is that Matthew never uses that title again until Pilate judges and executes Jesus at the end of his gospel: the governor asks, “Are you the King of the Jews?” (27:11); the soldiers mock, “Hail, King of the Jews” (27:29); and the indictment on the cross reads, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews,” (27:37). That title never appears, by the way, in Luke or the other gospels except during those same execution processes. Why does Matthew alone make this very deliberate juxtaposition of Herod and Pilate?
It is Roman power alone that designated and supported Herod the Great as “King of the Jews.” In 40 BCE, Marc Antony “determined then and there,” according to Josephus’s Jewish War, “to make him King of the Jews” (1.282). Since Antony and Octavian were still allies at that date—a decade before Actium—they combined to get the Senate’s agreement, and then they both “left the senate-house with Herod between them, preceded by the consuls and other magistrates, as they were to offer sacrifice and to lay up the decree in the Capital” (1.285).
It is therefore very significant that Matthew calls Jesus by the pointedly anti-Roman title “King of the Jews” (2:2), and not, say, “king of Israel.” That is the title used, for example, by the evangelist John at
the start of Jesus’s public life: “Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’” (1:49); and also by Mark at the end: “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe” (15:32).
The use of that title “King of the Jews” in Matthew 2:2–4 is, therefore, another overture-to-gospel theme. Roman-appointed Herod seeks to kill, and Roman-appointed Pilate succeeds in killing Jesus, the messianic King of the Jews. The shadow of Roman imperial execution hangs already and immediately over the birth of Jesus. Put another way, the clash between Jesus the Messiah and Caesar Augustus the emperor started right from the birth of Jesus.
“WISE MEN FROM THE EAST CAME TO JERUSALEM”
We turn now to the birth of Jesus in Matthew’s Christmas story. You will recall from Chapter 5 that in Matthew’s story Jesus’s conception was created in parallelism with and in exaltation over Moses’s conception as reflected in contemporary popular accounts. As seen there, those popular versions in targumim (translations) and midrashim (commentaries) expanded creatively on the bare-bones version in Exodus 1–2. Matthew does exactly the same with the story of Jesus’s birth as he did previously with that of his conception.
The Birth of Moses in the Midrashim
In Chapter 5, the three units of the parallelism between the conceptions of Moses and Jesus were the divorce, revelation, and remarriage. Those expansions intended to answer this obvious question about the conception of Moses in Exodus 1–2. If their male children were to be killed, why did parents continue in wedlock and intercourse?
We have a similar situation here in this chapter concerning the birth parallelism of Moses and Jesus. The obvious question about the birth of Moses in Exodus 1–2 is this. How did it happen that Moses was born just after that decree of genocide by Pharaoh? Did he just happen to get born at the wrong time and place? What about divine providence?
In answer to that question, the popular traditions claimed that it was precisely in order to kill Moses that the general newborn-male infanticide took place. It was not that Moses just happened to be born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Instead, Pharaoh had a mysterious dream that caused fear within the court. The interpretation of his counselors foretold the birth of a Jewish male infant who would grow to greatness as a dangerous threat to Egypt. And so, precisely in order to kill that predestined child, this Moses-to-be, Pharaoh gave the command to slaughter all the newborn male infants of the Jews.
The model for those expansions of Exodus 1–2, by the way, is also biblical. It derives from the book of Daniel, where you have that same sequence of dream, fear, and interpretation. First, in Daniel 2, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, “dreamed such dreams that his spirit was troubled and his sleep left him. So the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans be summoned to tell the king his dreams” (2:1–2). But only Daniel could, with divine assistance, interpret his dream. Those same three elements occur for Daniel himself with the dream in 7:1–14, the fear in 7:15, and the interpretation in 7:16–27. And, as with the three elements of divorce, revelation, and remarriage in the Moses/Jesus conception parallelism, so also here with the three elements of dream, fear, and interpretation in the birth parallelism of Moses and Jesus, we expect and get creative variation rather than strict uniformity.
We looked at four texts for the conceptions of Moses and Jesus, but have only three texts for their births, since Pseudo-Philo does not have any expansion on that latter subject. So this time we begin with the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, or Targum of Jerusalem I, on Exodus 1–2:
Dream: And Pharaoh told that he, being asleep, had seen in his dream, and, behold, all the land of Egypt was placed in one scale of a balance, and a lamb, the young of a sheep, was in the other scale; and the scale with the lamb in it overweighed.
Interpretation: Forthwith he sent and called all the magicians of Mizraim, and imparted to them his dream. Immediately Jannis and Jambres, the chief of the magicians, opened their mouth and answered Pharaoh: A certain child is about to be born in the congregation of Israel, by whose hand will be destruction to all the land of Egypt.
Pharaoh’s “chief magicians” are identified as Jannes and Jambres, and those names are another typical example of midrashic, or sermonic, expansions. Confronted by the power of the adult Moses in Exodus 7:11, “Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers; and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same by their secret arts.” No names are given there, but 2 Timothy in the New Testament says that “Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses” (3:8). By then or later, they even had their very own book, the Book of Jannes and Jambres. Midrash is a growth industry.
You will have noticed, however, that the targumic translation mentions dream and interpretation, but no intervening reaction of fear. Here is another version of that tradition from, once again, Josephus’s late-first-century Jewish Antiquities:
Prophecy: While they were in this plight, a further incident had the effect of stimulating the Egyptians yet more to exterminate our race. One of the sacred scribes—persons with considerable skill in accurately predicting the future—announced to the king that there would be born to the Israelites at that time one who would abase the sovereignty of the Egyptians and exalt the Israelites, were he reared to manhood, and would surpass all men in virtue and win everlasting renown.
Fear: Alarmed thereat, the king,
Advice: on this sage’s advice, ordered that every male child born to the Israelites should be destroyed by being cast into the river. (2.205–6)
Notice that, for Josephus, prophecy replaces dream and, with fear intervening, advice replaces interpretation. For his Greco-Roman audience, Josephus prefers to speak about prophetic sages rather than royal nightmares.
Finally, the most complete version is, once again, in the Sefer ha-Zikhronot, or Book of Memoirs. In that story, the fear element applies not just to Pharaoh, as in Josephus, but to all his servants:
Dream: In the 130th year after the Israelites had gone down to Egypt, Pharaoh dreamt a dream. While he was sitting on the throne of his kingdom he lifted up his eyes, and beheld an old man standing before him. In his hand he held a pair of scales as used by merchants. The old man then took the scales and, holding them up before Pharaoh, he laid hold of all the elders of Egypt and its princes, together with all its great men, and, having bound them together, placed them in one pan of the scales. After that he took a milch goat, and, placing it on the other pan, it outweighed all the others. Pharaoh then awoke, and it was a dream.
Fear: Rising early next morning, he called all his servants, and told them the dream. They were sorely frightened by it,
Interpretation: and one of the king’s eunuchs said, “This is nothing else than the foreboding of a great evil about to fall upon Egypt.” On hearing this the king said to the eunuch, “What will it be?” And the eunuch replied, “A child will be born in Israel, who will destroy all the land of Egypt. If it is pleasing to the king, let the royal command go forth in all the land of Egypt that every male born among the Hebrews should be slain, so that this evil be averted from the land of Egypt.”
That triadic structure of dream, fear, and interpretation—with Exodus 1–2 filled out from Daniel 2, 4, and 7—holds firm across a millennium with, of course, specific details added or omitted in any given version.
The Birth of Jesus and the Mosaic Midrashim
Our proposal in Chapter 5, on Jesus’s conception, and in this present Chapter 6, on his birth, is that the general structure of the popular traditions about Moses’s infancy gave Matthew the basic outline for his Moses/Jesus parallelism. That explains, as we saw already, why Matthew must tell the infancy story from the viewpoint of Joseph and not of Mary (as in Luke). He is watching consistently the Mosaic parallelism, with its emphasis on the father, Amram, and not on the mother, Jochebed. Here is how Matthew fashions the birth story of Jesus to be parallel to that of Moses:
Magi: In the time of Kin
g Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”…And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they [the Magi] left for their own country by another road. (2:1–2, 12)
Fear: When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him. (2:3)
Interpretation: And calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea.” (2:4–5)
You will notice, of course, that Matthew’s parallelism does not match the dream of Pharaoh with a dream of Herod. Why does he make that change?
The Magi Stop for Directions
Matthew’s five dreams in 1:20; 2:12, 13, 19, 22 are all salvific messages from God to good people, not harmful suggestions to evil ones. The addition of the Magi allows him to start his story not with Herod’s dream, but with their advent. And, thereafter, that dream can be relocated from Herod to them (the other dreams are all for Joseph). Thus, Matthew’s dreams remain positive divine commands without injecting a negative royal nightmare among them. But that emphasizes Matthew’s own creation of those eastern astrologers, the Magi from Mesopotamia, who come to pay homage to the infant Jesus.
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