FINAL CONFLICT AND DELIVERANCE 441
" It is more correct to interpret the passage of Messiah, the son of Joseph, as our Rabbis, of blessed memory, have interpreted it in the treatise Sukkah, 1 for he shall be a mighty man of valour of the tribe of Joseph, and shall at first be captain of the Lord s host in that war (namely, against Gog and Magog), but in that war shall die."
This interpretation is of interest and importance to the Christian student, in so far as it shows that the disciples of Christ, when the New Testament was written, were not alone in interpreting this scripture of the Messiah. The Jewish Rabbis explained it in the same way, only they applied it to Messiah ben Joseph, who does not exist in Scripture, and is an invention of their own brains.
Let me, while dwelling on the Jewish interpretation of this passage, reproduce a striking passage from Alshech, 2
1 The passage will be found in Bab. Talmud, Sukk. 520.
2 Moses Alshech flourished in Safed, Palestine, in the second half of the sixteenth century. The doctrine or theory of two Messiahs a Messiah ben Joseph, who should suffer and die, and the Messiah ben David, who shall reign in power and glory can be traced back to the third or fourth century A.D., and very probably originated in the perplexity of the Talmudists at the apparently irreconcilable pictures of a suffering, and yet a glorious Messiah, which they found in the prophecies. Instead of finding the solution in two advents of the one person, they explained the different scriptures as referring to two different persons.
"But whom did the Rabbis mean by the epithet Messiah ben Joseph?" writes a learned Hebrew Christian brother. We do not hesitate to answer : " None other person than Jesus, whom, after their great disappointment in the revolution of Bar-Cochba, they tacitly acknowledged as the suffering Messiah, and denominated Him by the name that He was commonly called in Galilee, in order perhaps to screen themselves against the hatred and persecution of their own followers, or of their Roman masters. This idea has been hinted at by the Rev. M. Wolkenberg in his translation of The Pentateuch according to the Talmud, p. 156, and broadly asserted by Dr. Biesenthal in his Hebrew com mentary on St. Luke (chap, xxiii. 48). This accounts for the remarkable fact that on the Feast of Trumpets, before the blowing of the ram s horn, God s mercy is besought through Jesus, the Prince of the Presence of God, the Metatron, or the One who shares the throne of God. At this same service, verses, mostly from Ps. cxix., are repeated, whose first letters form the name of Christon, but so ingeniously chosen, that they should at the same time read JBty jnp, the Bruiser of Satan. This name also is written on amulets and in Jewish houses when a child is born, as well as the name of the angel, TXDXD, which is mentioned in the said service, with alteration of only one accountable
