He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism.

He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism. By Sigmund Mowinckel (Eerdmans, $40). This classic treatment of the messiah was first published in English in 1956. Now, fifty years later, it remains the best comprehensive treatment of the subject, though M. was a child of his time and this book was written too early to take advantage of the new information in the Dead Sea Scrolls. M. restricted "eschatology" to mean the end of the present world order and therefore denied that there was true eschatology in the prophets. M. demonstrated the continuity between the royal ideology of the ancient Near East and Jewish messianic expectation and showed how Jewish messianic expectations differed from those espoused by early Christianity. M. recognized the difference between the Servant and the messiah since the servant's task was to bring Israel back to Yahweh, a task not associated with the messiah. M. erred in seeing the Son of Man as a development of the myth of Primordial Man, whereas in Daniel the Son of Man is a heavenly angelic figure, who represents Israel on the heavenly level but is not identical with it. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide evidence that M's notion of a national messiah was alive and well in the first century B.C.E. A foreword and a short bibliography on messianism by John J. Collins gives an appropriate perspective for receiving this great book. RWK