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The oppression of the Jews by the foreigner aroused in them thoughts of a Messiah and the need for a Redeemer!
Though the Christian idea of the Messiah, or in Greek parlance, the Christ, is one of a divine redeemer, it is quite different from the older, Jewish conception of a Messiah, a warrior who would free them from their enemies and institute the kingdom of God on earth in which the Jews would be the elite.
The Messiah is perfectly described in the Book of Daniel written about 200 years before Yeshua [notice the real Daniel did not write it] when the Jewish state was oppressed by the Greeks. Even then Jews were seeking a Saviour.
...and, behold, one like unto the son of man came with the clouds of Heaven, and came even to the ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. Daniel 7:13 -14
The description above should be familiar to most Christians as it parallels the description of the expected Messiah from the Gospel of John where we find more of a "super-human" Messiah than a "human" Messiah.
In the non-canonical Psalms of Solomon, written not by Solomon, the king, but by unknown authors between 70 and 40 BC - only about 70 years before Yeshua, we get a detailed description (edited here for brevity) of what Israel expected and looked forward toward in their Messiah. In this book [The Psalms of Solomon] which is unfortunately not in our Bibles, the Messiah of the house of David shall gather the nation together and evict the foreigners from Jerusalem.
Take time and re-read the above description of the expected Messiah of Israel. You will note that a pacifist preaching goodwill to all men was not the Jews' best idea of a leader suitable to free them from the yoke of their oppressors. The chief heathen nation was, by the time of Yeshua in the first century AD, the Romans. The political position of the Jews under the Romans seemed hopeless. Consequently popular Jewish hopes were of this imminent redeemer, this warrior king, born in the image of and of the line of King David, a supernatural being sent by God who would overthrow the foreigners, impose Jewish authority over the world and institute a kingdom of God on earth which he would rule assisted by the Jews as the elite. The Messiah had become a fervent belief.
These visions of God giving dominion of a kingdom to his Messiah, an everlasting kingdom which encompassed all peoples and nations, ignited the torch of Jewish nationalism for several centuries. Leaders of varying degrees of credibility were to step forward from the death of Herod to the defeat of Bar Kosiba claiming to be the Messiah of God.
Both the Hebrew word, "Messiah," and the Greek word, "Christos," mean one who is anointed, or rather it is always given as meaning one who is anointed. Actually Messiah is made up of the Egyptian root "MS," as in Moses, meaning a child or, if the child is male, a son, and the Hebrew word, "iah" which is God. Thus Messiah means literally "Son of God".The Christian gospel writer Matthew identified Jesus Christ with Moses, whose name is also of course "a son".
Answer For Yourself: If Moses is the Egyptian word for a son who was he a son of? If you know anything about Egypt and their religion Moses was the "son of God" or the "son of Ra."
Answer For Yourself: Was Moses also a Messiah? He was! Moses was adopted by Pharaoh's daughter who found him in the bulrushes. And a Pharaoh was a god (according to Egyptian religion).
Moses's brother, the priest Aaron, died and was buried at a place called Moseroth, Moserah or Mosera, the site of the Israelite camp near Mount Hor. Curiously Mosera can be read as Egyptian for Son of Ra or Son of God, Ra being the Egyptian word for god. The father of Moses and Aaron, according to the Old Testament, was Amram interpreted as the Hebrew for exalted people when it is plainly a corruption of the Egyptian Amun-Ra. Amun-Ra was the high God - Amun meaning the Hidden One - of the Egyptians. From the time of the pyramid builder, Cephren in the IVth dynasty all Pharaohs were considered to have been Ra's son, in other words they were Sons of God or Messiahs. Mosera is the purely Egyptian word from which the compound word Messiah was constructed. It is the same word, with roots in a different order, as Rameses, the name of several Pharaohs - Sons of God. One of the inscriptions of Rameses the Great records Amun-Ra addressing the Pharaoh with words familiar to a modern Christian:
I am thy father. I have begotten thee like a god.
The Pharaoh replies:
I am thy son. Thou hast given me the power of a god.
Thus both Moses and his brother were considered Sons of God, both were literally Messiahs. Moses and Aaron combine the roles of king, priest and prophet. Later David was identified as the Great King and Moses took the single role of the prophet, but it is plain that, in leading the Israelites out of Egypt, his role was that of king as well as prophet.
Jochebed, Amram's wife was also his Aunt. This ties in with the practice of the Pharaohs whose title came through the female line. Thus they usually married their sisters to become king but could marry their mother's sister - their maternal aunt - or even their mother - to succeed to the throne. Plainly the Israelites led away from Egypt by Moses, a Messiah, were thoroughly Egyptianised and ruled by a Pharoah-like king, if not an actual dissident Pharoah. It seems the word Messiah, a Son of God, came into the Jewish religion from Egypt.
From the time of exile in Babylonia the word messiah took on the meaning of a God-sent saviour or deliverer. The Jewish concept was not of a divine Messiah: as the extract from the Psalms of Solomon makes clear, he was entirely human, though possessing God-given supernatural powers. Judaism had become strictly monotheistic - it had only one god and it was a heresy for Jews to think otherwise - even their Messiah could not be regarded as divine. A Jew proclaiming a Messiah as a god at the time of Yeshua would have been stoned for blasphemy. But it was no blasphemy to claim to be a Messiah, a man. Under the Romans most Jews felt they had suffered enough and were expecting a man of power backed by the supernatural might of God to lead the people to freedom. The idea of a saviour Messiah spurred Jewish nationalism. From 4 BC to 135 AD several Messiahs were proclaimed as the Jews yearned for an end to the trials and indignities of Roman rule. Each led an unsuccessful revolt and died.
Failure fertilized the growth of another concept, the suffering servant. The despised and rejected servant of God in Isaiah would suffer to redeem the world in a spiritual rather than physical sense. The suffering servant was a personification of the sufferings of the Jewish people rather than a model for their Messiah. But the Messiah had to be demonstrably of the highest morals as the moral judge of mankind. Possibly some Jews thought that suffering ensured great virtue and gave supernatural power. A suffering Messiah could have been part of God's plan to save the people. They expected the Messiah to suffer as the Jewish nation had. There is evidence of this in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The contradiction of Daniel which pictured a glorious Messiah was resolved by the Messiah's glorious second coming when the world would end and the faithful would be saved. From this probably came the Christian idea of Christos meaning a divine redeemer, an incarnate God Yeshua who deliberately suffers, dies and is resurrected to atone for the inherent sins of mankind. Certainly the importance of the suffering Messiah concept largely emerged out of the events of the intertestamental years rather than before - many scholars believe it only reached prominence as a justification of Christianity.
Most ordinary Jews, though, were fed up with suffering. They had incessantly been humiliated by foreign rulers with only the Maccabees providing any hope. Submission had got them nowhere. Gentle Yeshua could not have fitted their preferred image - a warrior, a king David, a superman on the lines described in Daniel.
