Chapter 171 of 404

Background for Jesus’ Kingdom Preaching

Palestinian Jews were quite familiar with the concept of the kingdom.³ The Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek terms generally translated “kingdom” usually signify the concept “reign” or “authority” or “rule.”⁴ Like the Old Testament, Jewish teachers could speak of God’s present rule (especially among the people who obeyed his law).⁵ But Jewish people also looked for the kingdom as God’s future rule, when he would reign unchallenged,⁶ as attested in regular Jewish prayers.⁷ Because “heaven” was a common Jewish periphrasis for “God,”⁸ some other Jewish texts use “kingdom of heaven” as a periphrasis for “kingdom of God.”⁹ Sometimes they also seem to use “kingdom” as a periphrasis for the divine name.¹⁰

Jesus’ picture of the kingdom, as well as of the Son of Man, might derive especially from Daniel 7, a passage less frequently mined by Jesus’ followers than in the Jesus tradition itself.¹¹ With its collocation of language such as a “mystery” about God’s “kingdom,” “Son of man,” and God’s kingdom ending worldly empires, Daniel provided the most fertile (and immediately available) background for Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom.¹² In Daniel, God’s kingdom intervened at the climax of all earthly kingdoms, in the time of the fourth human kingdom, which ancient interpreters (at least in the Roman period)¹³ widely understood as the Roman empire.¹⁴

↑ Back to top