At the Roots of Messianism. The Book Isaiah on the Coming of the Sovereign Rule of God on Mt. Zion

Abstract

The term “messianism” hampers the inquiry of the Old Testament roots of this  movement if attention is exclusively paid to the one person by whose intervention the God of Israel will realise his ultimate sovereignty over the world. In that view, the impact of the book of Isaiah to messianism may not be spectacular. Just the same, it is fundamental. The coming of God’s reign is the heart of the messianic expectation, and this paradigm dominates the prophetic book. That coming is not a matter of “when?” and “where?” solely but also of “how?”. The conception of how God would implement his rule changed along with the circumstances of the faithful community during and after the exile, yet in the Isaianic tradition it has been integrated into one “drama within the book”. This concerns God’s policy with regard to Israel’s political and moral weakness and the agents whom he would deploy in order to realise his world order. Readers are invited to attach full credence to the message that God will carry through his authority over all the earth by means of his torah from Zion, and to take up position in favour of God’s intermediaries in this process.