Second Temple Jewish Messianism as Social Political Discourse

Abstract

Ancient Jewish authors wrote extensively on Jewish messiahs. Scholars have identified in these works the social, religious, and political agendas of Jewish writers. While some recent research has underlined some aspects of messianism, such as conflict over the place and authority of the Jewish law or the Jerusalem temple in relation to messianism, there has not been an acknowledgement of the pervasiveness, function, or social location of messianism as a social political discourse. My project reframes messianism as a social linguistic discourse, in that the concept of a real or imagined messiah is accentuated in literature as a response to specific ideological concerns within a local community. I argue that ancient Jewish messianism is a linguistic effort by elite leaders to shift or affirm group boundary markers.