(urth) IROSF

[Mo Holkar / UKG]

At 12:05 04/04/2009, brunians wrote:
> >                                              Clearly Cyrus was still
> > regarded as an anointed arm of the Lord, but not as "The" Messiah in
> > the Book of Isaiah sense.
>
>Are we talking a Christian or a Jewish interpretation of the Book of
>Isaiah? They are significantly different, you know.


I've been ignoring the Christian interpretation, as irrelevant to the 
historical period under consideration. Although of course it may be 
relevant to the books, as this is Wolfe we're talking about. Perhaps 
someone who knows more than me about it can comment.


> >> What did people mean, then, when they said 'moshiach', anyway?
>
> > An interesting question, which we can only explore by rather
> > imperfect means. Presumably, though, it's safe to say that different
> > people may have meant different things by it.
>
>Significantly, there is the Christian idea of the Messiah being God
>Incarnate, which idea is anathema to the Jews, and the Jewish conception,
>which is much more that of a national redeemer, someone who restores the
>nation - sort of like Cyrus did.


Absolutely. But within Judaism itself there seem to have been variant 
Messiah understandings -- for example, the stipulation in Isaiah 11 
that the awaited Messiah would be Jewish and of the line of David, 
irreconcilable with the acclamation of Cyrus as Messiah in Isaiah 45. 
It is a complex issue, particularly when we don't know exactly when 
the relevant texts were written, or (as in the case of Isaiah) 
suspect they were cobbled together from several authors over a lengthy period.

My point really was, though, that while many Jews of the Soldier 
setting would have been looking back to Cyrus as the good old Messiah 
that was, we can expect that plenty of others would have been looking 
forward to the next one.

best wishes,

Mo


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