A "Strictly Political" Messiah?
How one scholar's take on a famous Christmas text exposes the shortcomings of our own hopes.
If you’re not nerdy and bookish, you might not know the name Robert Alter. Alter served for decades as a literature professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018 he published the great work of his life, a magisterial translation and commentary on the Hebrew Bible.
I have the three volumes on my shelf, and I pull the relevant one down for any Old Testament text I study and teach. Alter’s translation consistently reveals insights and textures in the text that my two-semesters-of-biblical-Hebrew-20-years-ago can’t approach on its own.
So when I started our church’s Advent/Christmas series on Isaiah 9:6, I put Alter’s work on top of my stack of books. We’re engaging one title of the Messiah’s name on each of the four weeks before Christmas: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
Mighty God?
I was struck by Alter’s comment on the text, and especially his take on the Hebrew term El Gibor, “mighty God.” When you see the word “God” in the Old Testament, it usually translates the Hebrew word “El/Elohim.” And the word “gibor” means “might, power, or victory.” So this title of the Messiah is “God of might,” “God of power,” “God of victory.”
Claiming that the descendant of David will actually be called God startles the Hebrew reader. “A child will be born for us, a son will be given to us…and his name will be called…God of power.”
Alter, though, doesn’t think that the verse talks about the Messiah in the traditional sense, or even that it refers to God. He says:
What the prophet has in mind is not ‘messianic’ except in the strictly political sense: he envisages an ideal king from the line of David who will sit on the throne of Judah and oversee a rule of justice and peace. The most challenging epithet in this sequence is ‘el gibor, which appears to say ‘warrior god.’ The prophet would be violating all biblical usage if he called the Davidic king ‘God,’ and that term is best construed here as some sort of intensifier.
Alter opts to translate the term “divine warrior” — a powerful yet solely human king who is filled with the power of God and fights for God.
There’s only one problem with Alter’s view of this text. The text itself. The text, Alter concedes, “appears to say ‘warrior god.’”
Because it does say “warrior God.” God of might. God of power. God of victory. The term shocks the Hebrew reader, because the true, living God of the Bible is unique, transcending humanity and creation. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4).
We can understand why someone wouldn’t have a category for calling a human son of David “God of might,” even if that person is the Messiah. But when Jesus shows up, we understand more clearly: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). God himself took on human nature, God in human body and soul.
The only explanation for Isaiah 9:6 as written is the biblical doctrine of the incarnation. The only other option is interpreting away what the text itself actually says. This connects directly with the meaning of the messianic hope itself.
A Strictly Political Messiah?
In the first half of Alter’s interpretation of Isaiah 9:6, he argues that Isaiah views the “messiah” figure in a “strictly political sense.” This view envisions a human king, empowered by God, David’s heir who establishes political, national Israel in the land.
People who encountered Jesus on the pathways around Capernaum and in the alleys of Jerusalem expected the same “strictly political” messiah. They wanted a king who would overthrow Rome and elevate Jerusalem’s throne above the nations. They wanted Rome, just in Jerusalem instead. Land, power, people, politics.
These two things—the denial of the Godness of the Messiah and the reduction of messianic ministry to politics—often go together. They combine into a human, creaturely view that can’t imagine prophetic hope in anything but political terms.
Isaiah says “the government will be on his shoulders”—and everyone expected a government that looked like David’s and Solomon’s government. Or Cyrus’s. Or Alexander the Great’s. Or Caesar’s.
They expected a strictly political messiah. They were shocked (and some dismayed) that El Gibor—God of might, the Messiah, arrived and inaugurated a different kind of government.
We still struggle with this expectation and hope today. We want a strictly political messiah, who will deliver us political victory. We want the kingdom of the world, just on our own religious terms.
This reverses the way that God is actually doing things. The great, final hope of the Kingdom is that “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).
Reducing our hopes and ambitions to politics inverts this pattern. Instead of the kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of Christ, we want the kingdom of God in the terms of the kingdom of the world. We want the Kingdom of our Lord to become the kingdom of the world.
We want Rome on top of Mount Zion.
But Jesus is named Mighty God himself, and he has plans that exceed our capacity to imagine. Scripture says that God is “able to do far above and beyond all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20). We often consider this “far above and beyond” as just more of our own dreams. We see a quantitative difference. More of what we ask and think. We ask for $1 and God gives us $100. God does give us more sometimes. He’s generous like that.
The real difference, however, is not a quantitative difference, but a qualitative one. A different kind of purpose altogether. God works in entirely different categories, wavelengths, and priorities. He is God. We’re not.
When the Messiah arrived and we saw the Godhead veiled in flesh, hailing the incarnate Deity, we saw how Isaiah 9:6 is truer than we ever could’ve imagined. Our small, strictly political hopes have always been way too small.