The Road of Promise - Part I - Article III
TWO MESSIAHS, NOT ONE
Part I, Article 3 — What Israel Was Waiting For
It is tempting to assume that first-century Jews were all waiting for one figure, and that the only open question was what he would be like. The sources do not support that assumption. For a meaningful strand of Second Temple Judaism, the more basic question was not what the Messiah would do, but how many of him there would need to be. That is not a modern scholarly exaggeration read back into the sources with hindsight. It is written, plainly, into documents these communities produced for themselves, for their own internal use, with no eye toward a Christian reader who would one day try to make sense of them. What follows is one of those genuine, unresolved puzzles the Jewish tradition was still working through when Christ arrived — and it is worth sitting with before the resolution is offered, because the puzzle is real and its terms were not invented after the fact to make a later answer look tidy.
A Division Built Into the Law
The difficulty begins in the Torah itself, and it is worth stating precisely because it is easy to read past. The promise of an enduring throne belongs to the tribe of Judah: “the sceptre shall not be taken away from Juda, nor a ruler from his thigh, till he come that is to be sent.”¹ The priesthood, by contrast, belongs exclusively to the tribe of Levi, and within Levi to the house of Aaron — a distinct, hereditary, non-transferable office established at Sinai and guarded with lethal seriousness thereafter, on pain of death for any outsider who dared perform its functions.² These are not two aspects of one job description. They are two separate offices, assigned by God to two separate tribes at two different moments in Israel's founding, and Israel's own history contains a vivid warning against blurring them: when King Ozias, otherwise a capable and successful ruler, presumed late in his reign to enter the temple and burn incense himself — a priestly act reserved to Aaron's sons alone — he was struck with leprosy on the spot, in the sanctuary, before the eyes of the priests who tried and failed to stop him, and he lived out the rest of his life quarantined from public office as a result.³ The lesson could not have been lost on later readers of this story. Kingship and priesthood were not simply two hats one gifted man might wear at his own discretion. They were two thrones, assigned to two tribes, and taking both without divine warrant was, on the scriptural record itself, an act God had already punished severely once before.
Zacharias and the Two Anointed Ones
Scripture itself registers the strain this division created once the monarchy was gone. After the return from Babylonian exile, the restored community was led jointly by two men rather than one: Zorobabel, a descendant of David serving as civil governor under Persian authority, and Jesus the son of Josedec, the high priest who oversaw the rebuilding of the Temple. The prophet Zacharias saw the two of them represented together in a single vision, as two olive trees feeding oil continuously into one golden lampstand, and when he asked what the vision meant, he was told plainly: “these are two sons of oil who stand before the Lord of the whole earth.”⁴ Two men, two distinct offices, one shared vision — a structural pairing presented as the God-given shape of the restored community, not a temporary makeshift awaiting a single figure to replace it.
Yet a few chapters later, the same prophet complicates the picture rather than resolving it, in a way scholars have argued over for centuries. Commanded to take silver and gold and fashion a crown, and to set that crown on the head of Jesus the high priest — a king's crown, on a priest's head — Zacharias is told to address him with a title elsewhere reserved for the coming Davidic king: “BEHOLD A MAN, THE ORIENT IS HIS NAME.”⁵ The oracle continues, of this crowned high priest, that he “shall be a priest upon his throne, and the counsel of peace shall be between them both.”⁶ Commentators have argued for centuries over whether “them both” refers to two offices somehow held by one person, or to two men — a king and a priest — standing in cooperative counsel with each other, with the crown on Jesus functioning as a temporary stand-in for a Davidic king not yet on the scene. The text does not settle the ambiguity itself, and that is precisely the point worth taking from it. Scripture, at the very moment the restored community most needed clarity about how kingship and priesthood would relate to one another in the age to come, left the question open rather than closed.
Qumran's Answer: Two, Not One
The community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls did not leave the question open. They answered it, explicitly and repeatedly, by planning for two distinct Messiahs. The Community Rule found at Qumran instructs the sect to be governed by its earlier statutes “until the coming of a prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel” — a prophet and two anointed figures named side by side, one priestly and one Davidic, awaited together as three separate eschatological offices rather than fused into one.⁷ The Rule of the Congregation, a related Qumran document describing the community's expected eschatological banquet at the end of days, gives the priestly Messiah of Aaron precedence of seating and of blessing over the Davidic Messiah of Israel, who enters and is blessed only afterward and beneath him — a small liturgical detail that reveals a great deal about which office this particular community regarded as ultimately senior in the age to come.⁸ The Damascus Document, another sectarian text connected to the same movement, preserves the same paired formula elsewhere, awaiting “the Messiah of Aaron and Israel” as a fixed phrase, repeated rather than explained, as though the community's own members needed no further gloss on what it meant.⁹ This was not incidental or poetic language. It was the settled, working eschatology of a community that had organized its entire withdrawal from ordinary Jewish life around a grievance about the priesthood specifically.
That grievance supplies the missing motive, and it is worth naming directly rather than leaving as an abstraction. The Qumran sectarians regarded the Jerusalem priesthood of their own day — Hasmonean, and by the first century Herodian-appointed — as illegitimately installed, condemning it in their own writings under the figure of a “Wicked Priest” set against their community's own founding “Teacher of Righteousness.” Their withdrawal into the Judean desert was itself a species of protest, a community physically removing itself from a Temple cult it no longer trusted. For a community founded on precisely that grievance, a Davidic king alone could never be a sufficient answer to what Israel lacked, however gloriously that king might reign. The priesthood needed its own act of restoration, carried out by its own rightful and separately anointed figure, every bit as urgently as the throne did — which is exactly why this sect, alone among the sources that survive to us with this kind of clarity, refused to compress the whole of Israel's hope into a single man.
A Thread Left Untied
There was, buried in Israel's own Psalter, a text that gestured toward a stranger possibility than either a Zecharias-style pairing or a Qumran-style pair of Messiahs — a single figure holding both offices at once, sanctioned not by the line of Aaron but by an older and stranger priesthood altogether. “The Lord hath sworn, and he will not repent: Thou art a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech,” says the same psalm that opens with God enthroning “my Lord” at his own right hand.¹⁰ Melchisedech appears only once before this, briefly, as the king of Salem and priest of God Most High who blessed Abraham — a figure entirely outside the line of Aaron, older than Aaron, with no recorded genealogy at all.¹¹ A priest-king after that order would not be violating the Levitical rule the way Ozias had. He would be operating outside it entirely, under an older warrant.
Nothing in the Second Temple sources available to us shows this thread being pulled. The psalm sat in the Psalter, sung and read, without producing a school of thought that expected a single Melchisedech-style priest-king to resolve what Zacharias left ambiguous and Qumran resolved by doubling. That silence is worth marking rather than explaining away. This article has laid out a real, textually attested tension — a divided law, an ambiguous restoration-era prophecy, and a sectarian community that answered the ambiguity by planning for two men rather than one — and it ends here deliberately unresolved. Whether one man could ever legitimately hold both thrones at once, and on what possible authority, is a question this series will return to. It is not this article's to answer.
Endnotes
1. Genesis 49:10 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
2. Exodus 28:1 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.); Numbers 3:10 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (“Thou shalt appoint Aaron and his sons... and the stranger that approacheth to minister, shall be put to death.”).
3. 2 Paralipomenon 26:16–21 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (in most modern translations, 2 Chronicles 26:16–21; the Douay-Rheims follows the Vulgate's title Paralipomenon, “things omitted,” for 1–2 Chronicles).
4. Zacharias 4:1–14 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (in most modern translations, Zechariah 4:1–14), quoting v. 14.
5. Zacharias 6:12 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.). The Douay-Rheims renders the Hebrew title elsewhere translated “the Branch” as “the Orient,” following the Vulgate's Oriens (“the rising light” or “the dawn”).
6. Zacharias 6:13 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
7. 1QS (Community Rule) 9:11, in Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English 111 (rev. ed., Penguin Classics 2004).
8. 1QSa (Rule of the Congregation) 2:11–22, in Vermes, supra note 7, at 159–60.
9. CD (Damascus Document) 12:23–13:1, 14:19, in Vermes, supra note 7, at 142, 146.
10. Psalms 109:1, 4 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.) (in most modern translations, Psalm 110:1, 4; the Douay-Rheims, following the Septuagint and Vulgate numbering, cites this as Psalm 109).
11. Genesis 14:18–20 (Douay-Rheims, Challoner rev.).
