| Messianic Hopes in the
Florentino Garcia Martnez
Florentino Garcia Martinez is professor at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he heads the Qumran Institute. This chapter is reprinted from The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Florentino Garcia Martinez and Julio Trebolle Barrera (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
In the first twenty-five years which followed the discoveries and first publications of the texts from Qumran few topics were so widely discussed as that of "messianism." 2 The reason for this interest is easy to understand. In most of the other Jewish writings of the Second Temple period, the figure of the Messiah either does not feature or plays a very secondary role. In contrast, the new texts expressed not only the hope of an eschatological salvation but introduced into this hope the figure (or the figures) of a Messiah using the technical terminology. Thus they promised to clarify the origins of the messianic hope which occupies such a central position within Christianity. The expectations of the first years of research were not fulfilled and the reaction was not long in coming. The interest in "Qumran messianism" moved rapidly to a secondary level on the agenda of Qumran studies.3In publications of the last few years a new interest in the topic of Qumran messianism is evident, not dependent on the messianic idea of the New Testament but as an object of study in its own right. New studies appear regularly and abundantly.4 It would not be necessary, though, to deal with the topic again except that, in the course of 1992, several texts were published which throw new light on Qumran messianism5 but have not as yet been incorporated into an overall view of the problem. My intention is simply to present the messianic texts recovered, that is, all the texts from the Qumran library (published or unpublished) in which are found references to the figure of the Messiah using the technical term, or to various other messianic figures, agents of eschatological salvation who are not referred to with the actual term Messiah. Naturally, I will discuss in more detail the texts which until now have been studied less and much more briefly those of which the content has been analyzed at length in the past. Unlike the presentation of other scholars,6 I make no distinction between texts which can be considered sectarian and those whose character is more uncertain. This is because I am convinced that the simple fact of these texts being included in the sectarian library is enough to guarantee that their content was seen as in agreement with the basic thought of the group. Also these texts whose origin is difficult to determine reflect the development of biblical ideas prevalent in the period when the real sectarian texts were composed. The picture that emerges is fragmentary and kaleidoscopic, like the texts themselves. We cannot forget that we find ourselves before an accumulation of texts produced during a period of not less than two hundred years. They can reflect perfectly well different perceptions, changes and transformations of a single idea. The library of Qumran is uniform but it is not one-dimensional or monolithic. We cannot expect more uniformity in it than is found in the Hebrew Bible, the base text which forms the foundation of all later developments. In none of the 39 times where the Hebrew Bible uses the word "Messiah" does this word have the precise technical meaning of the title of the eschatological figure whose coming will bring in the era of salvation.7 The "Messiahs" of the Old Testament are figures of the present, generally the king (in Isaiah 54:1 it is Cyrus) and more rarely, priests, patriarchs or prophets. And in the two cases when Daniel uses the word, they are two persons whose identity is difficult to determine, though certainly not "messianic" figures. Later tradition was certainly to re-interpret some of these Old Testament allusions to the "Messiah" as "messianic" predictions. However, the roots of the ideas which later would use the title of "Messiah" to denote the figures who would bring eschatological salvation, are found in other Old Testament texts which do not use the word "Messiah." Texts such as the blessings of Jacob (Genesis 49:10), Balaam’s oracle (Numbers 24:7), Nathan’s prophecy (2 Samuel 7), and the royal psalms (such as Psalm 2 and Psalm 110) would be developed by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in the direction of hope in a future royal "Messiah," heir to the throne of David. The promises of the restoration of the priesthood in texts such as Jeremiah 33:14–26 (missing from the LXX) and the oracle about the high priest Joshua included in Zecariah 3, were to act as a starting point for later hope in a priestly "Messiah." Similarly, the double investiture of the "sons of oil," Zerubbabel and Joshua, in Zecariah 6:9–14 would be the starting point of the hope in a double "Messiah," reflecting a particular division of power already present since Moses and Aaron. In the same way, the presence of the triple office: king, priest, prophet, combined with the announcement of the future coming of a "prophet like Moses" of Deuteronomy 18:15,18 and with the real hope in the return of Elijah of Malachi 3:23, would act as the starting point for the development of a hope in the coming of an agent of eschatological salvation, whether called "Messiah" or not. Similarly, the presentation of the mysterious figure of the "Servant of YHWH" in chapters 40–55 of Isaiah, as an alternative to traditional messianism in the perspective of the restoration, would result in the development of a hope in a "suffering Messiah." Also, the announcement of Malachi 3:1 that God was to send his "angel" as a messenger to prepare his coming would permit the development of hope in an eschatological mediator of non-terrestrial origin. This complex of such different "messianic" hopes, barely alluded to in the Hebrew Bible, are included and developed in the manuscripts from Qumran. The exception, perhaps, is the figure of the "Son of Man," a figure derived from Daniel 7, who reaches his full messianic development in the Book of the Parables of Enoch. About him, however, the manuscripts from Qumran seem to maintain a silence which does not fail to be surprising, given the influence of Daniel on the Qumran writings and the presence among them of various pseudo-Danielic compositions. All the other potentially messianic figures of the Old Testament occur in the writings from Qumran, in various stages of development. Analysis of the texts containing these references permits us to outline the complex picture of the messianic hopes of the community. We begin with those texts which actually mention a single messianic figure, either because he was the only one hoped for or because the chances of preservation have deprived us of the passages in which other messianic figures were mentioned. We end with those texts in which several messianic figures occur together.
Introduction | Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | Section 4 | Section 5 | Section 6 | Section 7 | Section 8 | Chapter Notes |
