The King as "Messiah" in the Psalms

John I. Durham

The very mention of the word messiah prompts the Christian to think of
Jesus, the Christ, and calls up oratorio, hymn, religious verse, and sermonic
forays into the Bible which have left few allusions and no texts undisturbed. In
fact, it is only by a conscious exertion that those of us whose assignment is
preaching and teaching the Bible can seriously apply the term in any other
manner and to any other personage. Used of any save our Lord, Jesus, the word.
becomes a derisive criticism of someone who has fantastic delusions: "he has a
messiah-complex:' we say, or "she has messianic ambitions." Given the applica-
tion of the title most of us have known through most of our religious experience,
we find it difficult indeed to think of messiah without computing The Messiah.
If we are to think of messiah in relation to the Book of Psalms, however, as
any Christian studying the Psalter is bound to do, we must, at least at the
beginning of that study, force ourselves to think not of The Messiah, the Lord
Christ, but directly and simply of messiah. What and who is messiah in the
Psalms of the Old Testament? The noun Miish~h is used ten times in the
Psalms; its verbal root, Mshh , twice.' The context in which these dozen usages
occur is suggested in a number of additional places in the Psalter and beyond it
in the Old Testament. Who and what is meant?
Th answer these questions, we have first of all to.remind ourselves of what
might be called the dimensions of Holy Scripture.The first of these we may call
the width, for convenience; it represents the span of a concept in its own
context, what a given psalmist meant when he spoke of messiah. The second
dimension, the height, represents the extent of that concept beyond its specific
usage in a given passage-what did messiah mean to the people who first sang
the psalms? The third dimension, the depth, represents the broader range of the
concept through the whole of the Old Testament and even the Bible-who and
what is messiah in the exilic period, or during the ministry of Jesus, or when the
church burst suddenly into visible life.like a flame too long smoldering?
But there is also a fourth dimension of Holy Scripture and a fifth. The
fourth dimension we may call the time of the concept, its range of application
across the years that have elapsed since its genesis, a light that may reach a
later age after the source generating it has changed, and a light that is perceived
in specific relation to the setting in which it is received The fifth dimension of
Holy Scripture, on this analogy, would be the transcendent dimension, the

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space of the infinite pattern, the idea as God himself conceived it and thinks it,
the limitless dimension without dimensions by compare with the width, height,
depth, and time of our imperfect perceptions of the perfect concept.
Any attempt to understand messiah in the Psalms must keep in mind these
several dimensions of the full sense of Holy Scripture and recognize that while
the whole meaning of messiah involves them an. each one of them has its own
meaning, separate and exclusive of all the others. Far too frequently we have
been careless in the study of biblical ideas and the words and sentences and
concepts that forward them. All too often, we have created impossible interpre-
tations by forcing too many dimensions of meaning onto a single plane of usage.
Too many lectures and too many sermons, too many hymns and too many
confessions have limited and compromised biblical ideas by imposing upon
them more than they possibly could have been intended to say. A frequent sin of
the well-meaning but over-zealous (and sometimes under-industrious) inter-
preter is the discrediting of an ancient idea by imputing to it a meaning it did not
have in its own plane of existence. Width cannot be depth and height also at the
same time. One dimension cannot be two or three or even five.
Few biblical concepts have fallen prey to this tendency any more frequently
than has the Old Testament concept of messiah, particularly in its occurrences
in the Psalms. Though there are some understandable reasons for the misinter-
pretation of messiah in the Psalms, they all answer to names like ignorance,
prejudice, eisegesis, undisciplined piety, and over-used imagination, and so are
wrong and unjustifiable reasons. 1b deal with the most frequent misunder-
standing first, the one connected with the "width" of the concept messiah in the
Psalms, we must note that messiah in the Psalms refers always and only to the
rulin~ king, the "Davidic" king who was Yahweh's appointed and so anointed
masnw7l representative. These references are not intended as predictions of
Jesus who is the Christ (Christos, which also means anointed ), though they
have very often been taken as such, beginning as early as the New Testament
period. They belong rather to the Israelite expression of the widespread ancient
Near Eastern respect for royalty as either divine or divinely authorized, a
respect that has been handily surveyed by Henri Frankfort," Ivan Engnell,' and
in the collec.tion of essays edited by S. H. Hooke.' The precise extent to which
Israel's practice and celebration of kingship has been influenced by the concepts
and practices of such larger neighbors as the Egyptians, the Hittites, and the
various peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and such smaller neighborsas
the Canaanites remains a matter of debate (d. A. R. Johnson" and especially
T. N. D. Mettinger-), but no one who has made even a cursory survey of
pertinent texts can deny that some influence is present.
Such references in the Psalter to the kings of David's house as Yahweh's
messiahs has given rise to the designation royal psalms, following upon the
Gattungen-analysis of Hermann Gunkel,' and to extensive research on the

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 The King as "Messiah" in the Psalms
Review and Expositor

subject of sacral kingship. Sacral kingship refers to the religious celebration of

human kingship as instituted and affirmed by God. Divine kingship refers to
the earlier and overarching confession that Yahweh is king, also .reflected in a
number of psalms, and is a solemn reminder of the limitations of all human
ambitions in connection with kingship. Only Yahweh is a permanent King, one
whose kingship is in no way contingent, one whose kingship makes Israel's
kings a possibility, one whose kingship is manifest in theophany (Ps. 97), in
deliverance (Ps. 98), and in holiness (Ps, 99), one who rules over chaos (Ps, 93), all
the earth (Ps, 47) and all peoples (Ps. 96), whether they recognize it or not. Not
only is it important that the concepts of sacral kingship and divine kingship be
understood as separate from one another; they must also be understood in
relationship to one another. The sacral kingship is dependent upon the divine
kingship. The Israelite king is a manifestation of the authority of Yahweh as
king. Yahweh's kingship makes Israelite kingship possible. Yahweh's kingship,
by contrast, is dependent on nothing, and is entirely transcendent of any other
kingship, human or divine."
The psalms that can be classified primarily as royal psalms are, in my view,
these eleven: 2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 72, 89, 101, 110, 132, and 144.' These are more or
less the texts with which Gunkel began the discussion of Konigpsalmen;" and
though some scholars have argued for a much larger group of royal psalms, 11
there is little firm evidence for such an expansion. Each of these eleven psalms is
connectedJlpecifical1y with the rule of the Davidic dynasty in and from J erusa-
lem. Miishillh occurs seven times in five of these psalms (2:2; 18:50; 20:6; 89:38,
51; 132:10, 17); the root Mshh occurs in two of them (45:7; 89:20). Each of the
eleven psalms addresses a separate aspect of the Davidic king's rule:
Psalm 2 treats Yahweh's guarantee of the authority of the Davidic
king, reasserted at the time of his succession to the throne;"
Psalm 18 is a hymn of gratitude of the Davidic king to Yahweh for his
delivering Presence, in combination with a hymn describing
and celebrating the victory given the king by Yahweh;!3
Psalm 20 is a prayer of intercession for the Davidic king, both in battle
and in more general terms;"
Psalm 21 is a hymn of gratitude of the Davidic king to Yahweh for the
gift of joy, success, honor, and even life itself;"
Psalm 45 is an ode to the Davidic king and his bride on their wedding
day:"
Psalm 72 is a prayer for the weal of the Davidic king and his kingdom,
one perhaps connected with coronation;"
Psalm 89 is a hymn celebrating the certainty of Yahweh's promises to
the Davidic king, in combination with a lament from a time of
national defeat;"
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 Psalm 101 is a coronation hymn setting forth the Davidic king's
promises to Yahweh concerning not only his conduct but the
conduct also of his cabinet and his subjects;"
Psalm 110 is also a coronation hymn, in all likelihood, one containing
oracles of Yahweh guaranteeing both the king's authority and
his sacerdotal role;20
Psalm 132 is a hymn commemorating the advent of Yahweh's Pres-
ence in Jerusalem, in the bringing there by David of the Ark,
and restating the promise of continuing kingship to David and
his dynasty;"
Psalm 144 is a coronation prayer requesting Yahweh's help and bless-
ing for the Davidic king; it shows great similarity to Psalms 18,
72, and 89. 12
Each of these psalms was very probably composed within the circle of the
royal court of the Davidic dynasty and for purposes even more specific, in some
instances, than the canonical form of the psalm-texts may suggest. The psalms
in general have undergone a process of democratization by which psalms bound
to quite specific contexts (and in some cases persons) have been universalized to
make them applicable in Israel's worship on a continuing basis. The royal
psalms were subject to this process even more than were some other psalm
texts because they were applicable by design to all the Davidic kings, each
David in succession. Even the psalms dealing with so specific an occasion as a
royal wedding or a national disaster had a repeated use. Otherwise, they would
not have found a place in the canonical Psalter."
An interesting feature of the royal psalms is the Hofstil employed in ad-
dressing the king and in statements about the king, language of praise and
celebration extolling the Davidic king as Yahweh's appointed ruler.. Hugo
Gressmann" referred to this language as idiomatic and customary, but despite
its undoubted literary dependence on ancient Near Eastern royal court speech,
this style of speech is far more than an exaggerated rhetoric of flattery, as
Mettinger' has argued. The king is so glorified not because of himself but
because of Yahweh: he is Yahweh's anointed one, Yahweh's adopted son, Yah·
weh's authorized ruler, Yahweh's representative to Israel. The praise is always
praise of Yahweh, even when the king is the immediate focus for it. Unlike the
Pharaoh of Egypt, III the Israelite king was not considered in any sense divine
and did not, therefore, have hymns directed to him. The praise given him is
praise reflecting Yahweh's choice of him, praise prompted by the prior affirma-
tion of Yahweh's election. His rule is guaranteed by Yahweh, and its extent and
success are under Yahweh's control. This is made clear not only by the prayers
and promises of the Davidic king in the royal psalms, and by the oracles in
which Yahweh's words are addressed to him, but also by the clear implication
throughout these poems of the king's complete dependence on Yahweh.
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Review and Expositor

The perception of the Davidic king communicated by these psalms to the

people of Israel, what I have called the height of the concept, can be suggested
on the basis of their single recurrent and undergirding theme. The Davidic king
as Yahweh's anointed one is mentioned in intimate partnership with Yahweh
(Ps, 20:7), is given heroic victories from Yahweh's holy heavens (Ps, 20:7),and
has a lamp trimmed and made ready for him by Yahweh (Ps, 132:17), a reference
to the light of Yahweh's Presence, described in Psalm 18:29 as guidance for the
Davidic king. Yahwehcan alsoturn aside the face of his messiah (Ps, 132:10)and
reject and repudiate and fall into a rage with him (Ps, 89:39), despising the
covenant of his messiah and profaning his crown in the dirt (Ps, 89:40).
Just as Yahweh is strength for his people, he is also a refuge of deliverances
for his anointed one [Ps, 28:8). Israel's own relationship to Yahweh was itself a
pattern for understanding the relationship of the messiah to Yahweh. His
election was like their election, he received blessings as they received blessings,
his salvation was from Yahweh as was their salvation, and he was punished for
disobedience as they were punished for disobedience. This Davidic king was
indeed human as they were human, a paradigm of the nation, in a way, and a
kind of focus for their hope in Yahweh because of what he symbolized and
embodied; but all the same he was like themselves quite human, and therefore
subject to failure and rebuke.
Inevitably, these royal anointed ones were perceived by Israel as deliverers,
saviors, and, just as inevitably, they were the source of disappointment and
even disillusionment. This was so in part because of the shortcomings of the
kings themselves-some of them were little men, petty, ambitious despots. But
it was at least equally so because of the range of expectation of the people ruled
by kings believed to be authorized and enabled by Yahweh himself. David, to
cite only the most obvious example, became increasingly idealized after his
death and after the tragic dissolution of the united monarchy in 922 B. C. There
developed a longing for the "good old days" that mingled with hopes that
somehow a new "David" might arise, a dream for the return of the ancient
kings" and a longing for the arrival of the "once and future king."28
These hopes and dreams gave rise to what I have called the third dimension
of the concept of messiah, the depth of the concept throughout the entire Old
Testament and in time throughout the entire Bible. This development has been
extensively and fascinatingly surveyed by Sigmund Mowinckel, 29 though of
course with the coloration of some of Mowinckel's theories, such as the theory of
the annual Enthronement of Yahweh, which cannot in my opinion be accepted
on the basis of the evidence Mowinckel provides. Despite these limitations,
however, Mowinckel's survey is an extremely valuable one, not least for its
interweaving of Old Testament ideas of kingship with eschatological hopes, the
concept of the Servant of Yahweh, the "National Messiah" of Judaism, and the
concept of the Son of Man. In some ways a more balanced treatment, certainly

429
one more readily accessible by virtue of its brevity, is Agage Bentzen's King
and Messiah. 10 With his usual flair for trenchant summary, Bentzen begins with
Psalm 2 and ends with what he calls the "eschatologizing and renaissance" of
the concept of messiah, and provides a helpful traversal of what I would call the
evolution of messiah into The Messiah.
When a given Davidic king fell short of the ideal posed by the concept of an
anointed one of Yahweh-and all of them did, of course, even David himself, in
part because Israel's expectations rose with Israel's ever-expanding need-the
nation's hopes were redirected towards a Davidic king yet to come. One king
succeeded another and these hopes continued to be disappointed. With the
successive decline of the nation's political power and the crushing oppression of
Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, Israel's hopes began-by
what may seem now a providential alchemy-to be fixed on something more
than any king could ever be. There are certainly hints of such a prospect in the
assertions of the royal psalms. It is almost as if claims were made for the
Davidic kings that went far beyond their capacity to provide, even under the
most ideal circumstances-and ideal hardly ever, almost never, happens. Then,
when the kings could not measure up to the claims, the kings and not the claims
came to be set aside. This is one of the reasons, surely, why the sacral kingship
in Israel never really made a comeback after the Exile, and why the priesthood
moved with so little resistance into royal functions and even royal vestments,
and with more than a semblance of a royal court.
So the thinkers of the Old 'Iestament began to shift their emphasis from a
human king whose authority is guaranteed by Yahwah to a more-than-human
king who is at once an eschatological figure, a deliverer without parallel, who is
yet to come, and an anointed one who will be Yahweh's servant with a loyalty
and "status" no human king could ever exemplify. The poets of the Psalter
described an anointed one Israel needed but never got. The poet who wrote
Isaiah 40-55, and specifically the four Servant Songs" within those chapters,
gazed into a future yet to be and wrote more than he knew about what Yahweh
would come to do as a result of a new creation and a new exodus, S2 certainly
remarkably apt contexts for a new vision of an old hope and a new version of an
old idea. Mowinckel" has suggested that the terminology and concept of the
Son ofMan also became a part of this process, and Bentzen" has argued for the
inclusion of the concepts First Man and Patriarch. In sum, by the time of Jesus
and the period of the birth and development of the early Church, a rich tapestry
of expectation had developed.
The full depth of messiah in the Bible thus comes only in the New Testa-
ment, and that with (1) Jesus' own concept of his vocation, insofar as it is
reflected in the gospels and (2)with the early Church's understanding of Jesus
and their confession of faith in him as Yahweh's anointed, the one who was to
come, who had indeed come-a confession Israel did not, for a variety of rea-

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sons, accept. When the Davidic king was celebrated as Yahweh's messiah, his
anointed and affirmed ruler, he was very much a figure of the present. When the
Davidic kings failed to measure up to Israel's expectation by failing to deliver,
to rescue, to save, the nation moved, as Bentzen" has quite aptly put it, "from
experience to hope." This hope, an eschatological anticipation, looked toward to
one who was to come, and one who would transcend the human limitations of
the Davidic kings by a divine nature as well as. by a divine authority, a Son of
Man who would in himself represent the coming of a kingdom very different
from that established, ruled, and to a large degree ruined by the royal messiahs
of the Davidic line. 811
With the arrival of Jesus and the birth and development of the Church
following his death and resurrection, the hope for such a one was fulfilled for one
very small and apparently insignificant segment of the community of faith in
Israel. The mainstream of Judaism flowed on, rejecting this small segment just
as it had others who had claimed the arrival of The Messiah. For most Jews in
the first century, whether in Palestine or in the diaspora, faith in The Messiah
remained still a faith in a hope-the anointed Deliverer would come, but he had
not come. For a small group in Jerusalem and Galilee, however, faith was no
longer in a hope but in a reality. For them the kingdom of God was at hand, in
Jesus, whom they designated Christos, anointed one. The Son of Man had come;
the new reign had actually begun, and they believed it would soon be consum-
mated. Thus did the community of faith, from whom the New Thstament
emerged, quite logically take up the Old Testament figures and vocabulary of
Yahweh's anointed ruler, both in terms of the ancient adulation of the Davidic
kings and in terms of the longing from disappointment for a more perfect
anointed one still to come. Of the eleven psalms I have designated as royal
psalms, only two (Pss, 20 and 101)are not cited in the New Thstament, and three
of them (Pss. 2, 89, and 110) are cited repeatedly. S'I For obvious reasons, the use
by the New Thstament writers of what may be called the Old Thstament's
language of messianism, that is, the language connected with the anointed ones,
whether conceived as present or hoped for, was both inevitable and frequent.
Jesus is at least represented by the faith of the four Gospels as having conceived
his own vocation under the impression of these concepts, and the early Church
had no doubt at all that the resurrected Lord Christ was in fact the fulfillment of
Israel's profoundest longing.
Nor was such an application of the ancient vocabulary of kingship in Israel
ended with the conclusion of the biblical period. As I have noted already, there
are fourth and fifth dimensions to Holy Scripture. The fourth dimension of the
concept messiah in the Psalms is the dimension in which messiah is almost
wholly understood as The Messiah within the community of faith. The use by
the New Thstament writers of the Old Testament language of messianism to
describe Jesus had so persuasive an impact upon their Christian descendency
that it has become virtually impossible for any Christian who is not a trained
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and disciplined specialist to read the references to messiah in any other way.
In one sense, this is good, for in sum messiah is about The Messiah. as The
Davidic kings, Yahweh's adopted sons," and the anointed one dreamed for when
those kings failed, were thought of as Yahweh's appointed deliverers and protec-
tors. In one way all that they represented, ideally, was both an anticipation of
and a preparation for what the Church would come to see in and claim for Jesus.
David, or Solomon, or Hezekiah, or J osiah, therefore, might each be said to be a
messiah of Yahweh; all are celebrated by the royal p-salms, each in his own turn.
The hope of Micah 5:2-15 (Hebrew 5:1-14) or Isaiah ~:2-7 (Hebrew 9:1-6)or 11:1-
9, the radical vision of the Servant Songs, and the surrealistic dream of Daniel 7
are all gropings for the more ideal anointed one so desperately needed but so
disappointingly unavailable in Israel's kings. Yet only Jesus, to whom the
Church has appropriately given the title Christos, fulfilled the messianic possi-
bilities and hopes and so has deserved to be called The Anointed One, The
Messiah. Why not therefore apply any biblical reference to messiah, whatever
its original application to him who came to be The Messiah? That is in fact what
the Church, and most Christians who make it up, have done, right through most
of Christian history.
Yet there is also a sense in which such an application of the messianic
passages of the Old Testament is bad-for one thing it is wrong, strictly speak-
ing. Whatever sensus plenior these references may have, they cannot be under-
stood either correctly or fully apart from the sense they originally had, insofar
as that can be recovered. For another thing, the full confession of what The
Messiah claims cannot be perceived apart from a survey of all the dimensions of
the evolving biblical concept. The application of every messianic reference 'to
Jesus alone lessens by at least four-fifths our understanding of what it means'
that Jesus is The Messiah, and makes us insensitive to the swirling corona of
confessional symbolism and rhetoric that surrounds him in the New Testament,
from the genealogies that begin Matthew's Gospel (Mt. 1:1-17) and the Lucan
account of the beginning of Jesus' ministry (Lk. 3:23-38) to the accounts of the
Transfiguration (Mt. 17:1-9; Mk. 9:2-9; Lk. 9:28-36) and the entry into Jerusa-
lem (Mt. 21:1-11; Mk. 11:1-10; Lk. 19:29-44; In. 12:12-19) to the resurrection
narratives and to such passages as the hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 and the
dazzling closing visions of the Book of Revelation.
The concept messiah is a biblical revelation, and the concept The Messiah
cannot be adequately understood apart from the full range of its application and
meaning. When Psalm 2:7 has David reporting that Yahweh has said to him,
"My son you are; I have this day adopted you,":" the authority of the Davidic
king at the crucial moment of his accession to the throne is being affirmed by
reference to Yahweh's own choice and consecration. What Old Testament refer-
ence could more appropriately be applied to the relationship of Jesus the Son to
God the Father? It is little wonder that Paul quoted it in his sermon at Antioch

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Review and Expositor

in Pisidia (Acts 13:32-33) or that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews quoted
this verse in combination with both 2 Samuel 7:14 (the "Nathan prophecy"
regarding the establishment of the Davidic dynasty-see Heb. 1:5) and Psalm
110:4 (the linking of the Davidic kings to sacerdotal as well as political
authority-see Heb. 5:5).
What better text than the psalmist's assertion of the continuity of the
Davidic rule on the king's wedding day (Ps. 45:6-7, Hebrew vv. 7-8) to confess
God's appointment and anointing of Jesus, the Son (see Heb. 1:8-9)? What is
more natural than an application of Yahweh's promise to make the Davidic king
his first-born, the highest king of all the kings of the earth (Ps. 89:27, Hebrew v.
28) to Jesus, who becomes in Romans 8:29 "the first-born among many broth-
ers," in Colossians 1:15 "the first-born of all creation," and in Revelation 1:5
"the first-born of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth"? Indeed, the one text
from the Psalms that is quoted or alluded to throughout the New Testament
more than any other psalm text" is Psalm 110:1: "Sit confidently at my right
hand, while I put your enemies beneath your feet for a foot-rest." In the psalm,
the point is that Yahweh has made the king and will sustain him. In the New
Testament, the point is the samev-sthe verse is quoted in the three synoptic
Gospels in the context of the defense of Jesus against his detractors (see Mt.
22:34-46; Mk. 12:35-40; Lk. 20:41-47), and in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 in the
assertion of the victory of Christ (nota bene) over the last of the enemies, death.
Such reachings into the Psalter by a community of faith eager to make the
confession that the time of a messiah had been superceded by the time of The
Messiah can of course be repeatedly demonstrated on nearly every page of the
New Testament. Every one of them is far more meaningful precisely because of
such reaching, the direction of which is from the New Testament back into the
Old Testament rather than vice-versa. The Old Testament references to mes-
siah, including those in the Psalms, are references that have a significance of
their own, one entirely dependent of the New Testament confession of Jesus as
Christ, and one that is never a prediction of Jesus of Nazareth. The psalm texts,
indeed, do not involve prediction of any kind. The writers of the New Testament,
immersed in their own Holy Scripture, our Old Testament, reached back into a
rich vocabulary of confidence and hope and applied it to the marvelous new
thing God had done in Christ. Those who believed the good news they were
proclaiming certainly must have had a sense of recognition for what they heard
that we have far too often lacked because of our one-dimensional view of what
Holy Scripture is trying to tell us, and our unwillingness to wonder about the
origin of the light that reaches us from sources that are theologically light-years
distant from where we hunker down inside the barriers our ignorance and our
prejudices have set up around us.
I have only mentioned the fifth dimension of Holy Scripture, the transcen-
dent dimension, the dimension where God is at work, making us and freeing us

433
and sending us messages to guide us. That is appropriate, as we cannot enter
that limitless dimension, and as we could not understand it even if we could
enter it. I am comforted in the faith that there is such a dimension, and the
nourishment of that faith comes from the reflections of such a dimension of
divine space that glimmer everywhere in the Bible as in the life of the Church
and in the theological and intellectual excitement of a theological seminary. If I
may be permitted a guess about the meaning of the concept anointed one in that
fifth dimension, I would have to suggest that God has had the entire idea in
view the whole time, with all ofits possibilities of understanding and misunder-
standing, and that he is bothered far less by our stupor in grasping what
messiah really means than by our definition of The Messiah in terms that have
mainly to do only with our own welfare, both now and then.

I See Pss. 2:2; 18:50 (Hebrew, v. 51); 20:6 (Hebrew, v. 5); 28:8; 84:9 (Hebrew, v. 10) 89:38,51

(Hebrew, vv. 39, 52); 105:15; 132:10, 17 for Miishkh and Pss. 45:7 (Hebrew, v. 8); 89:20 (Hebrew, v.
21) for Mshh.
• Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948),
though with an inaccurate epilogue on "The Hebrews," pp. 337·344.
• Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell,1967).
• S. H. Hooke, ed., Myth, Ritual, and Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).
• A. R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in A ncient Israel, 2nd ed. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1967). .
"1tyggve N. D. Mettinger, King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite
Kings (Lund: Liber LaromedellGleerup, 1976).
7 Hermann Gunkel, Einleitung in die Psalmen (Gottdngen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1966),

pp. 1-31.
• See these survey-studies: The Sacral Kingship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959); Karl Heinz
Bernhardt,Das Problem der altorientalischen Konigsideologie im Alten Thstament, Supplements to
Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 8 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961); W. H. Schmidt, Konigtum Gottes in Ugarit
und Israel, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Vol. 80 (Berlin: Verlag
Alfred TOpelmann, 1966); and, with some caution, E. Lipinski, La Royautede Yahw~ dans la Poesie
et le Culte de l'ancien ISreU!1 (Brussels: Paleis der Aeadamien, 19681.
• John I. Durham, "Psalms," Broadman Bible Commentary, Vol. 4 (Nashville: Broadman Press,
1971), pp. 167, 172-174.
10 He listed only verses 1·11 of Psalm 144, and Psalm 89 was for him a "mixed type." Gunkel,

Einleitung, pp. 140-171.

11 See, for example, Ivan Engnell, "The Book of Psalms," Critical Essays on the Old Testament

(London: S. P. C. K., 19701,pp. 80-87; or J. H. Eaton, Psalms (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1967); and
Kingship and the Psalms (London: SCM Press, 1976).
12 Durham, "Psalms," pp. 172-174.

I. Ibid., pp. 201·206.

14 Ibid., pp. 209-210.

" Ibid., pp. 210·212.

11 Ibid., pp. 261-263.

17 Ibid., pp. 316-318.

I. Ibid., pp. 352.356.

11 Ibid., pp. 373.375.

.. Ibid., pp. 396-398.

434
 The King as "Messiah" in the Psalms
Review and Expositor

" Ibid., pp. 433·436.

II Ibid., pp. 453.455.
II Ibid., pp. 158.164.
.. Hugo Gressmann, Der Messias, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen
Testaments, VoL 43 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1929), pp. 7·25 .
.. Mettinger, King and Messiah, pp. 102·105.
.. Georges Posener, De la divinite du Pharaon (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1960).
IT Henry Cazelles, "Shiloh, The Customary Laws and the Return of the Ancient Kings," Procla-

mation and Presence: Old Testament Essays in Honour of Gwynne Henton Davies, New corrected
edition, ed. John 1. Durham and J. Roy Porter (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983), pp. 239-251.
.. The phrase is the title of T. H. White's novel OD the Arthurian romance.
.. Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959).
.. Agage Bentzen, King and Messiah, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970); appeared origi-
nally in 1948 under the title Messias, Moses redivivus, Menschensohn;
., Isa. 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12.
II Bernhard W. Anderson, "Exodus Typology in Second Isaiah," Israel's Prophetic Heritage, ed.

B. W. Anderson and Walter Harrelson (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1962),pp. 177-
195.
II Mowinckel, He That Cometh, pp. 346-450.

.. Bentzen, King and Messiah, pp. 38-47.

.. Ibid., pp. 73-80, influenced by Mowinckel's Psalmenstudien II and HI',That Cometh.
.. Joseph Coppens, Le Messianisme Royal; Lectio Divina 54 (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1968).
IT Cf. Henry M. Shires "Bible Passages Index," Finding the Old Thstament in the New (Philadel-

phia: The Westminster Press, 1974), pp. 219-227.

.. Note J. Becker's view, in Messianic Expectation in the Old Thstament (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1980), pp. 93-96, of the "unique messianic luminosity" of the Old Testament.
.. Durham, "Psalms," pp. 173-174; Bentzen, King and Messiah, p. 19.
.. Durham, "Psalms," pp. 173·174, and n. 3.
•, Shires, Finding the Old Testament, pp. 130·131.
G Durham, "Psalms" pp. 397-398.

435