Conclusion
Chapter Three
God prepares the way in Israel’s hope
The ancient people of Israel knew changes in their fortunes. Oppression under Pharaoh gave way to life under God in a land of promise (Exodus to Joshua). In that land and because of Israel’s unfaithfulness, before long new cycles of oppression began. These cycles were broken only by God’s oppressed people calling on the name of the Lord, and that Lord responded by raising up judges to deliver them (Judges). Then came Solomon’s glorious kingdom, the high-water mark of Israel’s national fortune. Even the queen of Sheba was impressed (1 Kgs 10). However, once more a people, starting with their king, descended into disobedience and fracture. The northern part of the subsequent split is overwhelmed by Assyria in 722 bc (2 Kgs 17) and then the southern definitively by the Babylonians in 586 bc (2 Kgs 25). But in that land of promise and even in exile in Babylon there were those who never ceased to wait on the Lord with expectation. Indeed in Old Testament terms to wait on the Lord is to hope in him, as in Isaiah 40:30–31:
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope [qāwâ, ‘wait’, as in the ESV] in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
However, what exactly was the content of that hope?
One way of summing up the hope of Israel as presented in the canon of the Old Testament is that it was the hope for a new (ḥādāš) state of affairs, whether a new song on the lips of God’s people, as in Psalm 40:3, or a new covenant, as in Jeremiah 31:31, or a new spirit and a new heart within God’s people, as in Ezekiel 36:26, or a new heavens and a new earth, as in Isaiah 65:17. Indeed there was hope that God himself would come to set the world right (Ps. 96). The God of the Bible is the God who can do a new thing. A new state of affairs is needful at personal, societal and environmental levels because of the corruption and disorder the primordial disobedience has introduced into the sphere of creation. Israel is very much aware – to adapt the title of one of Cornelius Plantinga’s books – that things are not the way they’re supposed to be. Charles H. H. Scobie captures the point admirably: ‘Amid the chaos and darkness caused by Israel’s rebellion and disobedience, and indeed the rebellion and disobedience of all human kind, again and again the OT sees the only hope as lying in some future action of God on behalf of his people and of his world.’
The question is, however, whether God’s Old Testament people expected a divine-human incarnation as the way in which their hope would be realized? As stated above, they were looking for Yahweh to come himself. But to come in the flesh? In this chapter we shall consider recent treatments of Israel’s hope that contend that no incarnation is in view in the Hebrew Bible. Next we shall turn our attention to B. B. Warfield’s contrasting argument that the Old Testament in fact expected a divine Messiah to come to Israel’s aid, and shall look at some contemporary support for it. Next we shall explore Israel’s hope as found in certain key Old Testament texts and their import. We shall also briefly explore intertestamental expectations and a recent development in the typological reading of Scripture.
The hope for a divine Messiah
We begin on a negative note. First, some recent scholarship that says the Old Testament betrays no notion of a coming divine Messiah, is unclear on the question or at least says very little on the subject. Indeed, leaving aside the question of the expectation of a divine Messiah, some scholars see little in the Old Testament by way of messianic hope per se. We shall then turn to scholarship of a previous generation and some in our own that is far more positive.
As mentioned above, for much recent scholarship there is no expectation whatever of a divine Messiah to be found in the Old Testament witness, nor is any clarity to be had there concerning the question. For example, J. Andrew Dearman acknowledges that patristic interpreters found references to the pre-incarnate logos in the Old Testament that prepared the way for the coming of Christ, but concludes his study of theophany, anthropomorphism and imago Dei in the Old Testament with the statement that ‘There is no line of thought which leads inevitably from the OT to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation.’ Even so, he contends:
And although no line of thought in the OT leads inevitably to the doctrine of the incarnation (because of the difference between anticipation and reality, seed-bed and flower), when interpreters work back to the OT from the claim that ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9), they find themselves in mysteriously familiar territory.
He is not alone in this judgment. Alan F. Segal argues that there is in Judaism some background to ideas like resurrection and Trinity. But that unique relation of Spirit and matter, which the church has labelled ‘incarnation’, is much harder to find. He notes that the divine presence is presented in a variety of ways in the Old Testament (e.g. theophany per se, the angel of the Lord, the temple). However, he maintains concerning this variety, ‘None of them precisely fits the Christian use of the term incarnation.’ N. T. Wright sums up the common view of the academy – a view he challenges – in these terms: ‘no first-century Jew could think of a human being, far less than himself, as the incarnation of God. Jewish monotheism prohibits it; and even if it didn’t… There is no actual model for it within Judaism.’
Some scholars of a previous generation would not be at all convinced by some recent scholarship. One of the doyens of the evangelical tradition, Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield, writing in the opening decades of the twentieth century, posed the matter in the following terms: ‘The question whether the Old Testament has any testimony to give as to the Deity of our Lord, when strictly taken, resolves itself into the question whether the Old Testament holds out the promise of a Divine Messiah.’ His answer to the question is entirely affirmative. He maintains that Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6 and Daniel 7:13 rightly understood show that the Old Testament expected a divine Messiah. Furthermore the Old Testament expectation that Yahweh himself was coming coalesces with the figures of the promised child of Isaiah 9:6 and the Son of Man of Daniel 7:13. The relevant texts read:
Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
let the sea resound, and all that is in it.
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;
let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.
Let all creation rejoice before the LORD, for he comes,
he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
and the peoples in his faithfulness.
Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever;
a scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom.
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. (Dan. 7:13)
For Warfield Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6 and Daniel 7:13 viewed together with Psalm 96:11–13 bear witness to a hope for a figure that transcends the merely human. He concludes his discussion of the divine Messiah in the Old Testament with the words of another scholar, F. Godet:
There was in the whole of the Old Testament from the patriarchal theophanies down to the latest prophetic visions, a constant current towards the incarnation as the goal of all these revelations. The appearance of the Messiah presents itself more clearly to the view of the prophets as the perfect theophany, the final coming of Jehovah.
Regarding the coming of God as Ruler and King, Warfield contends that the parallel between the coming of God in those roles and the expectation of a human who is the Saviour in those same roles is ‘very complete’. Warfield seeks to capture the coming of Yahweh motif and its parallel with the coming of a human Saviour in a quote he takes from a work by Ernst Sellin:
He too is the ruler over the peoples (Gen. xlix. 10; Ps. lxxii. 11), to the ends of the earth (Deut. xxxiii. 17; Mic. v. 3; Zech. ix. 10 f.), the scepter-bearer over the nations (Num. xxiv. 17–19; Ps. xlv. 17) to whose dominion there are no limits (Is. ix. 6), etc.; he too bears sometimes but not often the title of ‘King’ (Ps. xlv. 2; lxxii. 1; Zech. ix. 9; Jer. xxiii. 5), elsewhere those of ‘Judge’ (Mic. v. 1), ‘Father’ (Is. ix. 5), ‘Anointed’ or ‘Son of Jehovah’ (Ps. li. 2, 7). Precisely as the activity of the one, so that of the other is three-fold: it is his to destroy the enemies (Num. xxiv. 17b; Deut. xxxiii. 17; Ps. Ii. 9 [sic]; xlv. 6; cx. 1, 2, 5); he has to judge (Is. ix. 6b; xi. 3; Jer. xxiii. 5b; Ps. lxxii. 6); and finally he has to ‘save’ (Zech. lx. 9 [sic]; Jer. xxiii. 6; Ps. lxxii. 4, 12), above all by bringing social betterment, Paradise, and universal peace (Gen. xlix. 11, 12; Is. vii. 15; xi. 4, 6–9; Mic. iv. 4a, 5b; Zech. lii. 9b, 10 [sic]; Ps. lxxii. 12, 16)…. Moreover he is given a name. ‘Emmanuel,’ by which his appearance is notified as the fulfillment of Balaam’s prophecy of the end of days, ‘Jahve, his God is with him’; and he is further designated as ‘Star’ (Num. xxiv. 17), as ‘God-Hero’ (Is. ix. 5), as ‘God’s Son’ (Ps. li. 7);… [and] exegesis is continually bringing us back to the idea that Is. vii. 14, Mic. v. 2 assume thoroughly a miraculous birth of a man; … [and] there is the promise to him when scarcely born, the dominion of the world (Gen. xlix. 10; Is. ix. 5; Mic. v. 3).
For Warfield what Sellin encapsulates is ‘the correlation of the hope of the coming Savior, with the hope of what we have been accustomed to speak of as “the advent of Jehovah” ’. What others of his day endeavoured to keep distinct – the coming of a saviour and the coming of Yahweh – Warfield wanted to synthesize. For him the ultimate synthesis was to be found in one person alone, namely Jesus who was yet to come.
Almost a hundred years after Warfield wrote, Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., who stands in the same tradition as Warfield, has revisited the question of whether the deity of the Christ is part of Old Testament faith. His careful discussion merits serious attention.
Ortlund, Jr., distinguishes three categories of texts. The first category he argues consists of texts that are inaccurately construed by some to reveal the deity of Christ. Psalm 2 centres on a personage who is the Lord’s Anointed (v. 2), his king (v. 6), and his Son (vv. 7, 12). He contends that the interpretative crux is verse 7, as per the ESV:
I will tell of the decree:
The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.’
Does ‘today’ refer to a day that is always today, namely eternity as Augustine argued? Or is it referring to the coronation day of the Davidic king? With regard to this text he concludes, ‘Psalm 2 says much about the Christ – his unique role in God’s plan for history, his inevitable judgment of the nations, all fulfilled in Jesus as the final son of David. But Psalm 2 does not reveal his deity.’
The second category of texts consists of those, according to Ortlund, Jr., that can accurately be construed as revealing the deity of the Christ. According to Ortlund, Jr., there are four Old Testament texts that can accurately be construed to reveal the deity of Christ. Three are ones that Warfield majored on (Ps. 45; Isa. 9; Dan. 7). The other is Psalm 110.
Ortlund, Jr., embraces translations of Psalm 45:6 that render the verse as addressed to God in terms of ‘Your throne, O God’ will be eternal or everlasting. He sees support for this rendering in the LXX, an Aramaic Targum, Jerome’s Latin translation and Hebrews 1:8. The superscription attached to the psalm describes it as a wedding song intended for royal nuptials; but as the language is so extravagant, how can it apply to any ordinary Davidic king? He is convinced that Psalm 45:6 ‘foresees a divine-human king – divine because of “O God” in verse 6, human because of “God, your God” in verse 7’. He quotes Derek Kidner with approval that the verse is ‘consistent with the incarnation, but mystifying in any other contexts’. However, his own conclusion is stronger: ‘Psalm 45, if allowed to speak for itself, demands recognition as a prophecy of a divine-human Messiah and the joy of his ultimate glories with his people.’ Isaiah 9:6, Ortlund, Jr., maintains, is best understood as affirming the deity of the promised ‘human child’, the ‘Mighty God’ upon whose shoulders rests the government that never ends. He argues, ‘And Hezekiah cannot be the king Isaiah is referring to, because the endless triumph of verse 7 goes far beyond the accomplishment of any historic son of David.’ Daniel 7’s vision of the one like the Son of Man’ is best interpreted as rendering ‘[a] human-like figure presented at the heavenly court… at a level fit for deity.’ Ortlund, Jr., acknowledges that Psalm 110 poses exegetical difficulties. Even so, verse 1 is striking:
The LORD says to my Lord:
‘Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.’
Ortlund, Jr., contends that the figure of whom David writes in verse 1, who is the Lord seated at the right hand of the Lord, cannot be reduced to any ordinary king of Israel. This figure clearly goes beyond David himself. Moreover this figure has a unique priesthood, according to verse 4: ‘in the order of Melchizedek’. Ortlund, Jr., contends, ‘Unlike the ancient kings of Israel, the Messiah is a king-priest – and forever, after the analogy of Melchizedek.’ For him Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6, Daniel 7:13 and Psalm 110:1 provide firm evidence that the Old Testament held out the promise of a divine-human Messiah. The third category includes Old Testament texts that are not clear enough to be certain one way or the other on the question of the deity of Christ. There are two such texts that some interpret as describing a divine-human Messiah, but Ortlund, Jr., is not so convinced. Regarding Isaiah 7:14 he maintains, ‘But if Matthew saw in Isaiah 7:14 an indirect foreshadowing of Jesus, then the divine element in the name Immanuel does not necessarily identify the nature of the child.’ In fact it could be argued that the promised child is the mahēr šālāl ḥāš baz (‘quick to plunder, swift to spoil’, NIV footnote) of Isaiah 8:1–4. He concludes that Isaiah 7:14 is consistent with an affirmation of the deity of the Messiah but that interpretation is not demanded. He views Micah 5:2 similarly, which speaks of a ruler coming out of Bethlehem as someone who is ‘from ancient days’ (ESV). He believes that although, with its time reference, there is a case for the verse’s referring to eternity, it is on balance more likely to be about ‘the antiquity of the Messiah’s Davidic roots’.
The discussion by Ortlund, Jr., raises a very important hermeneutical point. Is an interpretation demanded by the text in view, or is the interpretation under discussion simply consistent with that text of Scripture? The issue is not whether a New Testament writer or Jesus himself as presented in the Gospels interpreted the Old Testament text correctly when seeing it as messianic or prophetic. A robust doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture does not reduce the text merely to what the human authors intended. There is the divine author. The story of Scripture is a story of double agency. There can be a fuller meaning in canonical perspective that later events clarify.
Interestingly present-day Jewish scholars Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, writing in The Jewish Study Bible, lend some independent albeit guarded support to Warfield’s reading of Psalm 45:6. They write that verse 7 (v. 6 in the NIV) could be read as presenting the king as divine. However, although this would have ancient Near Eastern parallels, in the Hebrew Bible it would be the only occurrence. In the same volume Lawrence M. Wills argues that the author of Daniel 7:1–14 is ‘most likely’ presenting a ‘celestial being’.
What then was Israel hoping for according to the texts under discussion (Ps. 45:6, Isa. 9:6 and Dan. 7:13 viewed together with Ps. 96:11–13)?
Israel’s hope and the incarnation: key texts revisited
Expressing oneself in language can take a variety of forms. The British are famous for their understatement. Points are made subtly with an economy of words but a wealth of implication. There is a story of Oscar Wilde, the British playwright and wit, told at a party by someone he did not care for that this particular gentleman had driven by Wilde’s house on a previous day but did not have the time to call in. Wilde’s reply was just two words, ‘Thank you!’ At the other end there is hyperbole. Jesus famously said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:24). Funny but hardly subtle. The question is whether the language found in Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6, Daniel 7:13 and Psalm 110:1 is similarly hyperbolic. We shall consider each of these texts in turn.
Psalm 45:6
Psalm 45 is a wedding song and a royal one at that. In the ESV and nrsv translations the psalm addressed to the king becomes in verse 6 an address to God: ‘Your throne, O God’. As C. S. Rodd points out, the meaning of verse 6 is a matter of much debate. He references some of the other possibilities; for example, ‘Your throne is everlasting like that of God’, as in the nrsv margin. However, he rightly says that the most natural way to take the Hebrew is to render it as an address to God. Derek Kidner comments on verse 6, ‘Throne and sceptre introduce the array of formal splendours and symbols of the king, for whose honour and retinue no rarity is too costly and no person too exalted.’ He adds, as Ortlund, Jr., noted, ‘This paradox [he is referring to the phrase ‘God, your God’] is consistent with the incarnation, but mystifying in any other context. It is an example of Old Testament language bursting its banks, to demand a more than human fulfilment (as did Ps. 110:1, according to our Lord).’ Peter C. Craigie expands the picture:
Psalm 45 is a superb example of what C. S. Lewis has called ‘second meanings in the Psalms’ (Reflections on the Psalms, 101–15). The primary meaning of the psalm is clear; it is a wedding song, celebrating the marriage of a king to a princess. In its original sense and context, it is not in any sense a messianic psalm. And yet within the context of early Christianity (and in Judaism before that), it becomes a messianic psalm par excellence.
Psalm 45:6 provides an excellent example of how an Old Testament text takes on a valence that was unseen in its own time but with the unfolding of salvation history its depth of meaning becomes patent. Dots were being laid down in the Old Testament scriptures but lay unjoined.
Isaiah 9:6
Some scholars are very confident that Isaiah 9:6 speaks of a divine Messiah to come (e.g. as we saw in Warfield and in Ortlund, Jr.). The context is the fall of the northern kingdom, and the hope for both a future restoration and the overthrow of the enemies of God’s people. In view is the birth of a Davidic king or perhaps the coronation of such. However, given that so many extravagant names (throne names) are predicated of this child – ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’ – it is a puzzle how any merely human king could be so named. The name ‘Mighty God’ (’ēl gibbôr) is of particular importance in this view. Geoffrey W. Grogan comments:
If the child of Isaiah 7:14–16… typifies the ultimate divine Christ, the child of these verses is that Christ. It is true that monarchs of the Near East often received exaggerated adulation from their subjects, especially at their enthronement and at subsequent kingdom renewal ceremonies. This is not Mesopotamia, however, but Judah, and Hebrew prophecy was founded on truth, not flattery … To speak to monarchs words that could not be taken at their face value was hardly consistent with their calling.
Alec Motyer argues similarly: ‘Mighty God: the repetition of this title in 10:21, referring to the Lord himself, establishes its meaning here. Translations like “Godlike Hero” are linguistically improbable, sidestepping the implication that the Old Testament looked forward to a divine Messiah.’ For Motyer ‘Mighty God’ refers to the person and power of the child.
Other scholars will have none of this. Benjamin D. Sommer in The Jewish Study Bible rejects any suggestion that Isaiah 9:5 (v. 6 in the NIV) has a divine Messiah in view: ‘These names do not describe that person who holds them but the god whom parents worship.’ Indeed this translation renders the Hebrew of Isaiah 9:5 (v. 6 in the NIV) as follows: ‘He has been named “The Mighty God is planning grace; The Eternal Father, a peaceable ruler.’ His argument is that these are throne names that need to be read in the light of how names were understood in ancient Israel. He gives examples: ‘thus the name Isaiah in Hebrew means “The Lord saves”; Hezekiah, “The Lord strengthens”’. Another Jewish scholar, James L. Kugel, renders the Hebrew in a slightly different way but again in complete sentences: ‘He has been named “Mighty-God-counsels-wondrous-things,” “Eternal-father-is-a-peaceful-ruler.”’ How then is the exalted language to be explained? Kugel argues:
In the ancient world, it went without saying that a new golden age could be brought about only by a new golden ruler… life worked from the top down. Only a great new ruler could change things, but if such a ruler did arrive, he might indeed cause everything to be different: righteousness and justice and peace would all come about as a result of his rule.
Traditional Judaism interpreted Isaiah 9:6 as applying to Hezekiah. These early exegetes saw then no divine Messiah implications in ‘Mighty God’.
On balance Isaiah 9:6 is consistent with the coming of a divine Messiah but does not demand that reading. R. Coggins provides a cautious but in my view sound comment: ‘“Mighty God” may imply divine kingship, for which there is some evidence in ancient Israel (cf. Psalm 45:6), or “God” here may be a kind of superlative.’ Indeed if ‘Mighty God’ refers to the person and power of the child (so Motyer) then why not ‘Everlasting Father’? Of course if that were so, then the incarnation of the Father would be in view and not that of the Son. The way around this for Motyer is to distinguish between person and role. Motyer argues that ‘Everlasting Father’ refers to this King’s relation to his subjects. In other words this throne name embodies the hope of kingly care. However, if so, why not argue that ‘Mighty God’ is the hope for a king mighty enough to defeat enemies in a Godlike way? I do not hold this view myself; I wish only to point out that the interpretation of the throne names of Isaiah 9:6 is not quite as straightforward as some think. Coggins’s caution is warranted. Therefore I would move this text from Ortlund, Jr.’s accurately construed to reveal the deity of Christ category but not to his not clear enough to be certain one way or the other category. Instead another category is needed, that of the ‘Quite plausible’.
Daniel 7:13
In this apocalyptic work, Daniel 7:13 speaks of ‘one like a son of man’ (bar ’ĕnāš in Aramaic). However, to whom does the phrase refer? Rikki E. Watts captures the debate well: ‘is the figure concrete or symbolic, celestial or human, individual or corporate’ or some combination? Charles H. H. Scobie discusses only one option. The figure of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 refers to ‘a collective figure symbolizing “the holy ones of the Most High,” i.e., God’s faithful people’. He rejects the notion that the text is referring ‘to an individual figure, whether the Davidic messiah, personified Wisdom, or an angel’. Lawrence M. Wills, however, as a Jewish scholar is attracted to the proposition that an angelic figure such as Michael is in view. G. L. Archer, Jr., will have none of this. He contends:
The personage who now appears before God in the form of a human being is of heavenly origin. He has come to this place of coronation accompanied by the clouds of heaven and is clearly no mere human being in essence. The expression ‘like a son of man’ (kebar enas) identifies the appearance of this final Ruler of the world not only as a man, in contrast to the beasts (the four world empires), but also as the heavenly Sovereign incarnate.
Archer, Jr., sees the incarnation per se in the text. This contention goes beyond the evidence and prematurely forecloses on the interpretative options.
In the light of the above diversity of opinion Watts is right to describe the identification of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 as ‘hotly contested’. Indeed he argues that ‘no resolution’ is in sight. My point in parading this diversity of scholarly opinion is a simple one. Leaving to one side the way Jesus used the phrase of himself, the identity of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 when considered within the confines of the Old Testament canon is not transparent. Little wonder then, as Christopher J. H. Wright can write, ‘Most scholars are agreed that the “Son of Man” was not a messianic title or figure in the inter-testamental Jewish writings. That is, the people of Jesus’s day, whatever else they were hoping for in the way of a messiah, were not on the lookout for a “Son of Man.” ’ Therefore I would move this text from Ortlund, Jr.’s accurately construed to reveal the deity of Christ category to his not clear enough to be certain one way or the other category.
Psalm 110:1
Psalm 110:1 is the most quoted or alluded to Old Testament text to be found in the New Testament. The text is intriguing:
The LORD says to my lord:
‘Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.’
However, is Ortlund, Jr., correct to see this royal psalm as revealing the deity of the Christ? On the one hand if David is the speaker, then the identity of the two lords is the crucial question. ‘The right hand’ (yāmîn) is the place of greatest power or dignity next to that of the monarch. Normally this was where the second-in-command would sit. Interestingly Bathsheba was given that honour by Solomon (1 Kgs 2:19). Derek Kidner comments, ‘What is unique is the royal speaker, addressing this more-than-royal person.’ On this reading clearly a greater than David is in view. On the other hand if the speaker is a court prophet, then one of the lords is Yahweh and the other is the Israelite king. In fact, although pre-Christian Jewish interpretation on occasion understood the psalm as messianic, these interpreters did not regard the psalm as necessarily referring to a divine Messiah. Therefore yet again I would move this text from the accurately construed to reveal the deity of Christ category to the not clear enough to be certain one way or the other category. Remembering, of course, that at this stage we are moving within the horizon of Israel’s ancient text, not that of the complete biblical canon.
The reference above to the completed biblical canon raises an important consideration. At this point someone reading this analysis may be somewhat frustrated. After all, for example, does not Hebrews 1:12 employ Psalm 110:1 – and Psalm 45:6 for that matter – as a key element in establishing the superiority of Jesus to angels? Indeed the New Testament writer does. However, the useful discussion of Ortlund, Jr., as to whether the deity of Christ is to be found revealed in the Old Testament appears to assume that the reader who may accurately or inaccurately construe the Old Testament text with regard to the question is the Christian who believes the Nicene Creed. Our concern is different if we are reading the Old Testament with our New Testament shut at this stage. We are endeavouring to understand what ancient Israel hoped for before the revelatory light of Christ became available. This, of course, does not preclude the fact that in the light of Christ such Old Testament texts take on a legitimate depth of significance that may not have been apparent to the original writer.
Intertestamental hopes
Jewish intertestamental hopes took a variety of forms. Donald E. Gowan sums these expectations up in an admirable way. I quote in extenso:
Hope for the ideal future could be expressed very nicely in post-OT Judaism without a Messiah. No such figure appears in the eschatology of Jubilees; 1 Enoch 1–36; 91–104; Assumption of Moses; 2 Enoch; Sibylline Oracles IV; the War Scroll; Psalms Scroll, or Habakkuk Commentary of Qumran; or in any of the books of the Apocrypha except 2 Esdras. Messiah does appear in other documents from Qumran, but does not play a major role in them (1QSa II. 11–22; The Patriarchal Blessings; 1QS IX.11). A royal figure who might fairly be said to represent the messianic hope, although the word itself is not used, appears in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (T. Sim. 7:2; T. Jud. 24:1–6; Dan. 5:10–13; T. Jos. 19:8–11) in company with an eschatological priest. A white bull who presumably represents the Messiah appears in the dream-vision of Enoch (1 Enoch 90:37), but plays no significant role.
He acknowledges that there is one, extensive, pre-Christian delineation of the Messiah to be found in Psalms of Solomon 17, which is a mid-first-century bc document. The figure portrayed is that of a Davidic king who defeats the enemies of God’s people, regathers Israel and settles them in the land of promise under his judgeship. He will rule the nations. However, he ‘is still a purely human figure’.
Gowan’s picture of Second Temple expectations needs nuancing. As Darrell L. Bock points out, 1 Enoch 33–34, one of the texts Gowan refers to, presents a ‘transcendent figure of divinely bestowed authority’. Moreover Bock judiciously quotes Psalms of Solomon 17.4 to reveal how deeply Davidic its expectations are: ‘Lord, you chose David to be king over Israel, and swore to him about his descendants forever, that his kingdom should not fall before you.’ Even more apposite though is Psalms of Solomon 17.33–36:
And he shall purge Jerusalem, making it holy as of old:
So that nations shall come from the ends of the earth to see his glory,
Bringing as gifts her sons who had fainted,
And to see the glory of the Lord, wherewith God hath glorified her.
And he [shall be] a righteous king, taught of God over them.
And there shall be no unrighteousness in his days in their midst,
For all shall be holy and their king the anointed [Messiah] of the Lord.
Bock also reviews the Qumran materials. His conclusions are worth stating: ‘So we see four major figures of the end time expected by Jews of one sort or the another; a regal David-like figure [Psalms of Solomon]; a transcendent figure described as one like a son of man [1 Enoch]; a priestly figure [1QS 9.11]; and a prophetic teacher [CD 6.11 and 4QFlor].’
What is clear is that the intertestamental hopes for a deliverer of some kind were highly diverse. No synthesis is on offer, much like the Old Testament testimony itself. As Walther Eichrodt says of the Old Testament literature:
Thus at the close of its career the form of the Old Testament hope cries out for a critique and a reconstruction which will be able to reach out and grasp the unchanging truth hidden under its bewildering diversity, and set this in the very center where it can dominate all else, while at the same time unifying its struggling contradictions, its resting in a timeless present and its tense waiting for a consummation at the end of history. Both needs are fully met in the NT confession of Jesus as the Messiah.
Importantly for our purposes no expectation of an incarnation is plainly in view in the pages of the Old Testament. But is that all that can be said? Recent work in the area of typology suggests no.
Typology and incarnation
The human mind looks for patterns. This is part of the human endeavour to make sense of our environment. Ideally both reason and imagination are involved. Imagination posits a hidden likeness between things that are at first sight unalike. Reason assesses claims that a pattern has been discovered and not merely imposed. When only imagination is involved we get the bizarre – such as the woman trying to sell a half-eaten piece of toast on eBay, while claiming that an image of the Virgin Mary is on it.
Any attempt at a typological reading of Scripture can invite the criticism that reason has been left behind and the religious imagination has triumphed. And yet the imagination is vital to human knowing, even theological knowing – as Karl Barth maintained. He wrote, ‘But human possibility of knowing is not exhausted by the ability to perceive and comprehend. Imagination, too, belongs no less legitimately in its way to the human possibility of knowing. A man without imagination is more of an invalid than one who lacks a leg.’ Walter Brueggemann helpfully describes this use of the religious imagination as ‘good-faith extrapolation’. Caution is needed though because imagination may work in unconvincing ways. I recall a sermon that allegorized the colours of the curtains of the tabernacle. One colour stood for the deity of Christ and another for his humanity. This is not typology but allegory. What the preacher said was true but not true to the passage in view. What distinguishes typology from allegory? A. T. Hanson describes the difference well: ‘If used excessively or indiscriminately, typology can pass over into allegory. Allegory means using any person or event, or object in the Old Testament arbitrarily to signify a corresponding event or thing in the New Testament.’
Caution should not mean timidity. After all, there is precedent within special revelation for the typological reading of Scripture that starts with the Old Testament itself. Isaiah looks back to the exodus from Egypt and sees a pattern relevant to God’s future dealings with Israel (cf. Exod. 1 – 15; Isa. 43:1–19; 51:9–11). So too in the New Testament Matthew’s Gospel looks back to the Egyptian captivity of God’s people and subsequent escape as interpreted by Hosea, and applies that pattern to Jesus (cf. Hos. 11:1; Matt. 1:14–15). A. T. Hanson captures the essence of a typological reading of Scripture: ‘The practice in the New Testament and the early church whereby a person or a series of events occurring in the Old Testament is interpreted as a type or foreshadowing of some person (almost invariably Christ) or feature in the Christian dispensation.’ Helpfully Hanson’s phrase ‘feature in the Christian dispensation’ is broad enough to cover both an event (e.g. exodus) and an institution (e.g. priesthood).
The attentive reader will have noticed that very little has been made of typology in the present study. This is not because I have an issue with a typological reading of Scripture. Far from it! The question is not whether there is a typological preparation in the providence of God for Christology in general. I would argue there most definitely is such a preparation in relation to Christ’s prophethood (a greater than Moses), kingship (a greater than David and Solomon), priesthood (a greater than Levi) and sacrifice (a greater than any tabernacle- or temple-offered precursor) inter alia. But the incarnation? Recent work on typology may indeed answer that question, albeit in a finely finessed way that respects both reason and imagination.
In his work Jesus the Son of God D. A. Carson writes of trajectories found in Old Testament texts that lead ultimately to Christ as the Son of God who is both human and divine. In particular the texts that speak of David and the hope connected with his house provide a case in point. A text such as 2 Samuel 7:14 in the first instance ‘certainly’ applies to Solomon. Another key text, Psalm 2:7, first ‘probably’ applies to David and his immediate successors, and a third one, Psalm 45:6–7, ‘certainly applies, initially, to kings who had their heirs who replaced their fathers, not to Jesus’. Even so, for Carson the significance of these texts cannot be left there: ‘Yet in all three cases the context drops hints of a fulfillment that outstrips local petty monarchs.’ He acknowledges that ‘this Davidic trajectory is subtle’. Subtle, yes, but also crucially important. He argues, ‘If these trajectories are not identified and understood, however, we will be at a loss to understand how the Old Testament texts that are said to be fulfilled in Jesus actually “work.”’ By ‘trajectory’ he means, ‘to use the more traditional terminology, this Davidic typology’. In his view such Davidic texts are ‘inherently forward looking’. Because the writer to the Hebrews is aware of this Davidic trajectory in the Old Testament he can legitimately apply Psalms 2:7 and 45:6–7 to Jesus. Another example for Carson is provided by Ezekiel 34, which twenty-five times refers to Yahweh as coming to be the shepherd of his people in the face of the failure of their human shepherds (leaders), and yet the chapter ends with David as the shepherd. He concludes, ‘The visitation of the Lord and the coming of his servant David become more than a little blended’ (Ezek. 34:23–24).
Given this approach one can see how the Old Testament provides anticipatory texts whose deeper significance in the light of the incarnation event can be both seen and drawn out in a way that is neither fanciful not arbitrary. Again Hebrews 1 is the case in point. Carson is aware of what such subtlety means:
It takes some hard work to uncover how these trajectories, these typologies, actually work. But when we take the time and effort to examine them, we are hushed in awe at the wisdom of God in weaving together intricate patterns that are simultaneously so well hidden in their development [in the Old Testament] and so magnificently obvious in their fulfillment [in the New Testament].
The emphasized words are important because, as we shall see in the next chapter, Christ’s appearing in the flesh is described as a mystery in the Pauline sense of something hidden in the plan of God but now revealed. This subtle typological argument does not undermine that Pauline claim, although an argument that the Old Testament explicitly expects an incarnation would subvert it. To that discussion we now turn.
Conclusion
When arguing whether or not the idea of the Trinity was to be found in the Old Testament, B. B. Warfield asserted that the Old Testament was like a dimly lit room:
This is not an illegitimate reading of New Testament ideas [trinitarian ideas] back into the text of the Old Testament; it is only reading the text of the Old Testament under the illumination of the New Testament revelation. The Old Testament may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lit; the introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before; but it brings out into clearer view much of what was in it but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before.
Point taken! However, in contrast Warfield had no such reticence in relation to what he believed was a clear expectation in the Old Testament that a divine Messiah would come. I am unable to follow either Warfield or Ortlund, Jr., all the way in this. There are Old Testament texts that prima facie when read together are consistent with that idea but do not demand it (e.g. Ps. 45:6; Isa. 9:6; Dan. 7:13). There are other readings of these texts that are also defensible. Significantly, though, when other texts that are relevant to Israel’s messianic hope are considered, the picture becomes much more problematical for the Warfield and Ortlund, Jr., thesis. For example, on any reckoning 2 Samuel 7:14a is salient for Israel’s messianic hopes: ‘I will be his father, and he will be my son.’ However, the next part of the verse, 14b, shows that the figure in view is all too human: ‘When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.’ And as for Psalm 45:6, the psalm goes on to describe the king’s queen (Ps. 45:9–17).
The results yielded in this chapter then may appear limited. The Old Testament expected human agents or even divine agents of the divine purpose to come to Israel’s aid at some juncture in its future: a prophet like Moses, a Davidic king, the Son of Man, the child born bearing the name ‘Mighty God’, and the Old Testament writers also expected God himself to come. But an incarnate divine-human deliverer? On the surface of it there seem then to have been two distinct but unsynthesized lines of expectation – one concerning God and another concerning a human agent – that constituted the mainsprings of Israel’s hope. How then can this chapter be dealing with the preparation for the incarnation in Israel’s hope? Recent developments in the typological reading of Scripture help us address that question. And that question will be further addressed in the next chapter when I shall draw on Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s fertile idea of data-background beliefs as we consider the New Testament testimony to the Word who became flesh.