The Road of Promise - Part I - Article II
A KING LIKE DAVID, NOT A KING LIKE CAESAR
Part I, Article 2 — What Israel Was Waiting For
If a single hope united more Jews across more factions in the Second Temple period than any other, it was this one: a son of David would come, break the power of the pagans, and reign in Jerusalem as king. Pharisee, Sadducee, ordinary villager, and eventually the sword-bearing rebel in the hills all drew, in their own ways, from the same well. This was not a hope confined to religious specialists or apocalyptic sectarians on the margins — it was, by all the evidence available to us, close to the common inheritance of an occupied people who remembered, generation after generation, that their nation had once had a king of its own line, and had been promised, in writing, that it always would. Before this series can show how Christ answered that hope, it has to be shown plainly for what it was — not a vague longing for spiritual comfort, but a specific, textually rooted, and ultimately violent expectation of national kingship restored.
The Promise That Would Not Die
The root of the hope was old, and it was covenantal rather than merely sentimental. When David proposed to build the Lord a house, the prophet Nathan answered instead with a promise running the other direction: David's own house would be built, his throne established, his kingdom made sure “for ever.”¹ The promise survived the division of the kingdom after Solomon, the fall of the northern tribes to Assyria in the eighth century before Christ, and even the fall of Jerusalem itself to Babylon and the extinguishing of the monarchy in 587 B.C. — which is itself remarkable. Most ancient peoples treated a fallen dynasty as a broken promise from a broken or indifferent god, and moved on to the god of whichever empire had proven stronger. Israel did the opposite. In exile, and after the return from exile, under Persian, then Greek, then Hasmonean, then Roman masters, the nation kept copying out Nathan's oracle by hand and reading it aloud in the ruins of what it had promised, generation after generation, as though the promise's non-fulfillment were only a matter of delay rather than error.
Isaias supplied the fullest portrait of what this restored king would be. A child would be born, a son given, bearing government upon his shoulder, and called “Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace,” his throne established “with judgment and with justice, from henceforth and for ever.”² A later oracle pictured him as a shoot from the stump of a fallen dynasty — “a rod out of the root of Jesse” — resting under the sevenfold spirit of the Lord, judging the poor with justice, and presiding over a peace so total that the wolf lies down with the lamb.³ Read together, these are not modest texts. They describe a king who rules with something closer to divine authority than any Israelite monarch ever exercised, ruling forever, over a transformed world.
What the Streets Actually Expected
Isaias and the Davidic oracle gave the hope its scriptural shape. What gave it its emotional temperature — what an ordinary Jew under foreign occupation actually felt when he prayed for the son of David to come — is preserved outside the canon, in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish collection usually dated to the first century before Christ, likely composed in the wake of Pompey's conquest of Jerusalem in 63 B.C.⁴ The seventeenth and eighteenth psalms of that collection are the single clearest surviving statement of popular, non-sectarian messianic hope from this period, and they are worth taking seriously precisely because no one wrote them to prove a Christian point centuries later. They were written by Jews, for Jews, out of the specific grievance of watching a pagan general walk uninvited into the Holy of Holies, and they tell us, better than any retrospective apologetic could, what the wound actually felt like from the inside.
The hope they express is unambiguously political. The psalmist asks God to raise up for Israel her king, the son of David, at the time God knows, that he may reign over Israel; to gird him with strength to shatter unrighteous rulers, to purge Jerusalem of the Gentile nations that trample her, to drive out the sinners from the inheritance with a word of his mouth, and to gather a holy people whom he will lead in righteousness, dividing the tribes once again upon their own land as in the days of old.⁵ Crucially, the violence imagined here is not the king's own sword — he is explicitly said to rule “not by human might,” relying instead on the strength of his own righteousness and the power of his word, because “the Lord Himself is his king.”⁶ This is worth pausing on, because it means the hope was not, at its most careful and reflective, a demand for a mere warlord. It was a demand for a righteous king who would win by holiness what other kings won by armies — which makes the tension this series is building all the sharper, since even this comparatively refined version of the hope still assumed a literal, visible, national throne restored in Jerusalem, with the nations either subdued or excluded from a purified holy city.
From Prayer to Sword
Not every Jew waited as patiently as the Psalms of Solomon counsel. The same hope that produced careful poetry also produced armed revolt, and the historian Josephus — no friend to messianic movements, writing for a Roman audience after the Temple's destruction, with every incentive to downplay rather than dramatize Jewish resistance — supplies the clearest evidence of how quickly the wait could turn to war. In A.D. 6, when Rome imposed a direct census and tax on Judea, a Galilean named Judas raised a revolt on the argument that paying tribute to Caesar was tantamount to slavery and that God alone should be called Master — language soaked in exactly the Davidic-kingship expectation this article has traced, redirected into open rebellion.⁷ Josephus treats Judas as the founder of what would become, two generations later, the “fourth philosophy” underlying the Zealot and Sicarii movements that helped bring on the catastrophic war of A.D. 66–70 and the Temple's final destruction.⁸ The line from Nathan's oracle to that war is direct and traceable: the same expectation that produced patient, prayerful poetry in one generation produced daggers hidden in cloaks in the next.
This is the emotional and political weather Christ's own ministry moved through, and it did not evaporate at Pentecost. Even after the Resurrection — after forty days in which the risen Christ himself instructed the apostles concerning the kingdom of God — the question his closest followers actually asked him, at the moment of his Ascension, was: “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?”⁹ That question is not evidence of apostolic density. It is evidence of how deep and how specific this expectation ran, even in men who had walked with the risen Lord himself for over a month, had heard him teach daily of the kingdom of God, and still could not help asking whether that kingdom meant what every other Jew of their generation had been raised to assume it meant. If the apostles could still be asking for a restored national throne in the very last minutes before the Ascension, the hope traced in this article was not a fringe belief. It was close to the default setting of the Jewish religious imagination in this period, shared by fishermen and zealots and Pharisees and psalmists alike.
The Shape of the Question Left Open
This article has deliberately stopped short of Christ. That withholding is the point. Before the fulfillment series can show how the Son of David actually came — riding an ass rather than a warhorse, refusing the crowd that wanted to make him king by force, telling a Roman governor that his kingdom was not of this world — the reader needs to feel the full weight and specificity of what was being asked for instead: a visible throne, a purged Jerusalem, a righteous king who would settle the account with Rome the way David had once settled it with the Philistines. Nathan's oracle, Isaias's throne of judgment and justice, the Psalms of Solomon's purged and holy Jerusalem, Judas the Galilean's doomed revolt, and the apostles' own question at the Ascension are not five unrelated data points. They are one continuous line, running from a tent in the hill country of Judah to a mountain outside Jerusalem forty days after the Resurrection, and every point on that line expects the same thing. The chapters ahead will show what Christ actually did with that expectation — and it is neither a simple yes nor a simple no.
Endnotes
1. 2 Kings 7:12–16 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (in most modern translations, 2 Samuel 7:12–16; the Douay-Rheims follows the Vulgate's four-book division of Kings, in which 1–2 Kings correspond to 1–2 Samuel and 3–4 Kings to 1–2 Kings in other versions).
2. Isaias 9:6–7 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (in most modern translations, Isaiah 9:6–7).
3. Isaias 11:1–10 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (in most modern translations, Isaiah 11:1–10).
4. Psalms of Solomon, in R.B. Wright, Psalms of Solomon, in 2 The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 639, 639–41 (James H. Charlesworth ed., Doubleday 1985) (introduction dating the collection to the mid-to-late first century B.C., against the background of Pompey's conquest of Jerusalem). The Psalms of Solomon are not part of the Catholic biblical canon and are cited here as historical evidence of Second Temple Jewish belief, not as Scripture.
5. Psalms of Solomon 17:23–27, 33–35, 46, in Wright, supra note 4, at 665–69 (paraphrasing the substance of the passage rather than quoting the translation at length).
6. Psalms of Solomon 17:37–38, 51, in Wright, supra note 4, at 667, 669.
7. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews bk. 18, ch. 1, § 1 (William Whiston trans., 1737); Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War bk. 2, ch. 8, § 1 (G.A. Williamson trans., Penguin Classics rev. ed. 1981).
8. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews bk. 18, ch. 1, § 6; see also Acts 5:37 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (the Pharisee Gamaliel citing “Judas of Galilee” and his revolt “in the days of the enrolling” as recent history within living memory).
9. Acts 1:3, 6 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
