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Isaiah 10:34 and the Jewish Messianism in the Great Revolt

junghwa Choi 1

1부산장신대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims at reconstructing Jewish messianic expectation during the Great Revolt(AD 66-70). Reconstructing Jewish messianic expectation during the Great Revolt is not an easy task because Josephus remains silent on anything messianic. Thus, instead of taking passages directly from Josephus, an alternative approach will be taken by focusing on the socio-political behaviour of the Jews at the eve of the destruction of the Second Temple(B.J. 6. 285): when thousands of Jews were waiting for divine intervention, a zealot prophet delivered an oracle that God wanted the Jews to go up to the Temple and to wait for the "signs of deliverance." The paper attempts to demonstrate that the socio-political behaviour in B.J. 6. 285 was caused by messianic expectation, and also that, at the centre of the messianic expectation, there might have been Isaiah 10: 34 as a scriptural basis. It is also highly likely that there existed two different interpretation of Isaiah 10: 34 available during and after the Great Revolt. On the one hand, the participants of the Great Revolt might have interpreted Isaiah 10:34 as a prophecy for the Messiah coming to destroy the Romans, while others, as appears in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and rabbinic literature, interpreted the same verse as applied to Vespasian and Titus. The messianic expectation in the Great Revolt, in general, seems to have been varied and individual during the most part of the Great Revolt. Several leaders came up along with their followers possibly with some sort of messianic expectation. Therefore, there was no reason for the early Christians not to take part in the revolt. At the end of the revolt, upon impending fall of the Jerusalem Temple, two groups of zealots stopped fighting each other, and a collective hope for miraculous divine salvation became powerful amongst the Jews possibly right after the proclamation of the zealot prophet as testified in B.J. 6. 285. The messianic hope, as mentioned above, was based on the interpretation of Isaiah 10: 34.

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