216 A History of Judaism
in the midst of all flesh. Righteousness shall rejoice on high, and all the
children of His truth shall jubilate in eternal knowledge. And you, the sons
of His Covenant, be strong in the ordeal of God! His mysteries shall uphold
you until He moves His hand for His trials to come to an end.^21
Speculation about the nature of the Messiah in any case took wildly
different forms in the late Second Temple period. The role of Elijah as a
messenger from God ‘before the great and terrible day of the Lord’ was
stated explicitly by the prophet Malachi: ‘he will turn the hearts of the
parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so
that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.’ The Qumran
Community Rule referred more generically to ‘the Prophet’, alluding to
the future prophet like Moses promised in the book of Deuteronomy.
The author of the Gospel of John assumed that the obvious questions to
John the Baptist when he appeared in the millennium, once he had
denied being the Messiah, were ‘Are you Elijah?’ and ‘Are you the
prophet?’^22
The Messiah himself was sometimes thought of as an earthly king
and ruler from the house of David, endowed by God with special pow-
ers: ‘And he shall lead all of them in equity, and there shall be no
arrogance among them, that any one of them should be oppressed. This
is the majesty of the king of Israel, which God knew, to raise him up
over the house of Israel to discipline it.’ At other times he was envisaged
as a supernatural figure, a ‘son of man’ whose name was uttered ‘before
the Lord of the Spirit before the stars of the heaven were made’, with
outstanding qualities:
For he is mighty in all the secrets of righteousness; and unrighteousness
will vanish like a shadow, and will have no place to stand. For the Chosen
One has taken his stand in the presence of the Lord of Spirits; and his glory
is forever and ever, and his might, to all generations. In him dwell the spirit
of wisdom and the spirit of insight, and the spirit of instruction and might,
and the spirit of those who have fallen asleep in righteousness. He will
judge the things that are secret, and a lying word none will be able to
speak in his presence; for he is the Chosen One ...
Some of the more supernatural depictions of the Messiah in Jewish
writings have been influenced by the Christian copyists of the manu-
scripts in which they are found, but certainly free from Christian influence
are the remarkable references in the sectarian Dead Sea scrolls to a great
variety of messianic images. The scrolls sometimes refer to the priestly