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a perfect right (on the ground of 2 Sam 7) to the direct son of David. Also in Ps 45 it is a son of David, contemporary with the Korahite singer, to whom the Messianic promise is applied as a marriage benediction, wishing that the promise may be realized in him.
But it soon became evident that He, in whom the full realization of the idea of the Messiah is to be found, had not yet appeared either in the person of this king or of Solomon. And when in the later time of the kings the Davidic line became more and more inconsistent with its vocation in the sacred history, then the hope of the Messiah was completely weaned of its expectation of immediate fulfilment, and the present became merely the dark ground from which the image of the Messiah, as purely future, stood forth in relief. The בן־דוד, in whom the prophecy of the later time of the kings centres, and whom also Psa 2:1-12 sets forth before the kings of the earth that they may render homage to Him, is an eschatological character (although the אחרית was looked for as dawning close upon the border of the present). In the mouth of the congregation Ps 45 and 132, since their contents referred to the future, have become too prophetically and eschatologically Messianic. But it is remarkable that the number of these psalms which are not merely typically Messianic is so small, and that the church of the period after the Exile has not enriched the Psalter with a single psalm that is Messianic in the stricter sense. In the later portion of the Psalter, in distinction from the strictly Messianic psalms, the theocratic psalms are more numerously represented, i.e., those psalms which do not speak of the kingdom of Jahve's Anointed which shall conquer and bless the world, not of the Christocracy, in which the theocracy reaches the pinnacle of its representation, but of the theocracy as such, which is complete inwardly and outwardly in its own representation of itself, - not of the advent of a human king, but of Jahve Himself, with the kingdom of God manifest in all its glory. For the announcement of salvation in the Old Testament runs on in two parallel lines: the one has as its termination the Anointed of Jahve, who rules all nations out of Zion, the other, the Lord Himself sitting above the Cherubim, to whom all the earth does homage. These two lines do not