The Prophet Moses,
living 1500 years before the birth of Christ, recorded in his books the most
ancient prophecies about the Savior of the world, which in the course of many
millennia were kept through the oral legends of the Jews. Our foreparents, Adam
and Eve, heard the first prediction of the Messiah in Eden, right after their
savoring of the forbidden fruit. Then God told the devil, who had taken on the
appearance of a snake: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman,
and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise [destroy] thy head,
and thou shalt bruise His heel” (Gen. 3:15). With these words the Lord
passed judgment on the devil and consoled our foreparents with the promise that
at some time a Descendant of the Woman will strike the “head” itself
of the snake-devil, who tempted them. But along with this, the woman’s
Descendant Himself will suffer from the snake, who will as if “bruise his
heel,” i.e., will cause Him physical suffering. Noteworthy also in this
first prophecy is the nomenclature of the Messiah as the “Seed of the
Woman,” which points to His extraordinary birth of a Woman, Who will
conceive without the participation of a man. Here the absence of a physical
father is significant considering in Old Testament times descendants were always
identified paternally, not maternally. The given prophecy about the
extraordinary birth of the Messiah is supported with a later prophecy of Isaiah
(7:14), which we will discuss further on. According to the
translations of the Targums of Onkelos (a number of translations or paraphrases
of the various divisions of the Hebrew Old Testament in the Aramaic language)
and of Jonathan, the Jews always considered the prophecy of the Seed of the
Woman as pertaining to the Messiah. This prophecy about bruising was
fulfilled, when the Lord Jesus Christ, having suffered on the Cross with His
body, defeated the devil — that “old serpent” (Rev. 20:2) and took away
from him any power over the human race.
The second prophecy about the Messiah is also found in the book of Genesis and
speaks of the blessing, which will extend to all people from Him. This
is spoken to the righteous Abraham, when he, through his willingness to bring
his only son Isaac as a sacrifice, revealed his extreme devotion and obedience
to God. Then God through an Angel promised to Abraham: “And in thy Seed
shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my
voice” (Gen. 22:18).
In the original text of this prophecy the word “Seed” stands in the
singular, thus indicating, that in this promise the question is not about many,
but about one definite Descendant, from Whom
the blessing will extend to all people. The Jews always attributed this
prophecy to the Messiah, understanding it, nevertheless, in the sense that the
blessing must extend mainly on the chosen people. In the sacrifice, Abraham was
the prototype of God the Father, and Isaac — of the Son of God, who would
suffer on the cross. This parallel is mentioned in the Gospel, where it is
said: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
everlasting life” (John 3:16). The
importance of this prophecy about the blessing of all nations in the Descendant
of Abraham is evident from the fact, that God confirmed His promise with a vow.
The third prophecy about the Messiah was pronounced by the patriarch Jacob, the
grandson of Abraham, when before his death, he blessed his 12 sons and
predicted the future fate of his descendants. For Judah he predicted: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,
nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh
come, and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen. 49:10). According to the translation of the 70
interpreters this prophecy has the following alternative: “until comes He,
to Whom it is given (determined) to come, and He will
be the hope of nations.” Here the scepter symbolizes power. This
prophecy states that the descendants of Judah will have their own leaders and lawgivers until the time
when the Messiah-Shiloh (Conciliator) comes. The word Shiloh
(Conciliator) reveals a new feature in the characterization of His activities:
He will eliminate the enmity between people and God, arising as a result
of sin (the Angels sang about this elimination of hostility between heaven and
earth when Christ was born: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
PEACE, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14).
The Patriarch Jacob lived more than two thousand years before the birth of
Christ. From then on the tribe of Judah was King David, the descendant of Judah, living more than one thousand years before the birth of
Christ. From then on, the tribe of Judah had its kings, then, after the
Babylonian captivity, its leaders right up to Herod the Great, who ascended the
throne in Judea in 47 B.C. Herod, being the son of the Idumean Antipater, was
the first foreign king over the Jews. During his time the tribe of Judah completely lost its self-governing status and Jesus Christ
was born as predicted.
It would be fitting at this point to mention an historical fragment found in
Mishnah, one of the oldest parts of the Talmud, where it says that the members
of the Sanhedrin [in 30 AD, when the right of criminal justice was taken from
them, more than 40 years before the destruction of the temple], clothed in rags
and tearing at their hair, cried: “Woe to us, woe to us: long has the
king from Judah been impoverished, but the promised Messiah has not yet come!”
Of course, they expressed themselves this way because they did not recognize in
Jesus Christ that Peacemaker, whom the patriarch Jacob had prophesied.
It should be stressed that because two millennia have passed since the tribe of
Judah has lost all its civil authority and the Jews as a tribal entity have
long intermixed by blood with other Hebrew tribes and even other nations, to
apply the given prophesy of Jacob to any new candidate to the messianic title —
is utterly impossible.
The next prophesy about the Messiah represented as a “Star” rising from
the descendants of Jacob, was pronounced by the prophet Balaam, a contemporary
of the prophet Moses, more than 1500 years BC. At that time the princes of Moab invited the prophet Balaam to curse the Hebrew nation,
which threatened to invade their land. The princes hoped that this curse by the
prophet would help them defeat the Israelites. The prophet Balaam, looking on
the approaching Hebrew people from a hill, in a prophetic vision also saw afar
the distant Descendant of this people. In spiritual ecstasy, instead of a
curse, Balaam exclaimed: “I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him,
but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise
out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children
of Sheth” (Numbers 24:17). The symbolic naming of the
Messiah as a star and sceptre point to His guiding and
hierarchical significance. Balaam foretells the defeat of the princes of
Moab and the descendants of Seth in an allegorical way, having
in mind here the defeat of the powers of evil, taking up arms against the
Kingdom of the Messiah. In this way, the present prophesy of Balaam supplements
the more ancient prophesy of the bruising of the head of the snake (Gen. 3:15).
He will bruise not only the “serpent,” but also his servants.
The prophesy of Balaam about the Star from the tribe of Judah gave birth to the
conviction, among the Israelites (as well as the Persians, from whom came the
wise men of the Gospel), that the coming of the Messiah will be prefaced by the
appearance of a bright star in the sky. Such an unusually bright star, as we
know, truly began to shine in the sky not long before the birth of Christ.
The fifth and last prophecy about the Messiah, which we find in the books of
Moses, is said by God to the prophet Moses himself, when the earthly life of
this great leader and lawgiver of the Hebrew nation was coming to its close.
The Lord promised Moses, that at some time He will raise up to the Hebrew
nation another Prophet, similar to him in significance and spiritual strength,
and the He (God) will speak through the lips of this Prophet. “I will raise
them up a Prophet from among their brethren and will put My
words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command Him.
And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which
he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him” (Deut. 18:18-19). The
postscript, made at the end of the book Leviticus by the contemporaries of
Ezdra more than 450 years B.C., bears witness to the fact that, among the many
prophets with which the Hebrew nation abounded during the course of its
many-centuried history, not one prophet could be found comparable to Moses. It
follows, then, that the Hebrew people from the time of Moses expected to see in
the person of the Messiah the greatest prophet-lawgiver.
Ralbag (Gersonides, ancient rabbinik literature) comments on the above text:
“A prophet from the midst of thee. In fact the Messiah is such a Prophet...
“
To sum up the aforementioned prophecies recorded by Moses, we see, that long
before the formation of the Hebrew nation, still in the patriarchal time, the
ancestors of the Jews knew many valuable and essential facts about the Messiah,
in particular: that He will defeat the devil and his servants, will bring a
blessing to all nations; He will be the Peacemaker and Leader, and His Kingdom
will be eternal. This information was passed on to many heathen nations
from the Hebrews, the Hindus, Persians, Chinese, and later — the Greeks. It was
passed on in the form of folk tales and legends. True, with the passing of ages
the notion of the Savior of the world among the heathen peoples became dulled
and distorted, but still the unity of the origin of these legends is certain.
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