Messianic Birth Texts

Summary

Three Old Testament texts are often offered as predictions of the birth of Jesus:  Isaiah 7:14, the young woman who bears Immanuel;  Micah 5:2, the ruler from Bethlehem;  and Genesis 49:10, the scepter that will not depart from Judah.  This article reads each one in its own setting, sets out how its best Christian defender and its best critic read it, and scores it by the eight tests of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy.  The short answer:  Micah 5:2 is a real prediction of a Bethlehem ruler and carries a little weight;  Genesis 49:10 carries a little weight as an old messianic hope and none as a timetable;  Isaiah 7:14 carries none as a prediction of Jesus.

Isaiah 7:14 (argued in full in Isaiah 7:14 and the Virgin).

1. The verse is a sign to King Ahaz during the war of about 734 BC, when Damascus and Israel threatened Jerusalem. It has a clock: before the child can tell evil from good, the two kings' lands will be desolate (7:16). Damascus fell in 732 BC, Pekah of Israel was replaced by 731, and Samaria fell in 722 or 720.
2. The mother is an almah, a young woman of marriageable age. The word occurs seven times and never says whether the woman is a virgin. The lexicons, from Gesenius to the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, agree that it does not mean "virgin," though an almah could be one.
3. Matthew's "virgin" comes from the Septuagint's parthenos. That Greek reading is Jewish and pre-Christian, but the Septuagint also calls Dinah parthenos after she was raped (Genesis 34:3), and no Jew before Christianity drew a virgin birth from it.
4. No Jewish text before or after Jesus reads the verse as messianic. Craig Blomberg, an evangelical defender of Matthew, concedes that "there are no demonstrably pre-Christian Jewish texts that reflect on the meaning of Isa. 7:14."
5. Conservative scholars defend it in two ways: as a direct prophecy of the Messiah seen "in vision" (Edward Young, Alec Motyer), or as a near sign with a further, providential fulfilment in Jesus (John Oswalt, Craig Blomberg). Both read 7:14 through the royal child of 9:6–7 and the shoot of Jesse in 11:1. Both concede the clock of 7:16.

Micah 5:2.

6. The verse promises a ruler of Israel from Bethlehem Ephrathah, David's town and clan, "whose origins are in the distant past." It was written centuries before Jesus.
7. Matthew quotes it in altered form, joined to God's word to David in 2 Samuel 5:2. John 7:42 reports Jews objecting that the Messiah must come from Bethlehem, an objection John never answers. That is the best evidence that the verse was read as a birthplace prophecy in Jesus's time. The Aramaic Targum and a story in the Jerusalem Talmud also place the Messiah's origin in Bethlehem, but both were written down later.
8. Test 4 cuts here. A birthplace is within reach of a family and of a storyteller, and the only reports of Jesus's birth in Bethlehem come from believers who knew the prophecy. Peter Stoner's "one in 280,000" prices the wrong thing. A report from believers can raise the odds only by the inverse of the chance that they would have reported Bethlehem anyway.

Genesis 49:10.

9. The key word, shiloh, has four serious readings: a name, a town, "tribute," or "to whom it belongs." The name "Shiloh" first appears as a translation in 1534.
10. The verse was read before Christianity as a promise of a ruler from Judah in a Qumran commentary, and later in the Aramaic Targums, which call him the Messiah. The Greek translation is ambiguous: what "comes" in it is "the things laid up for him," not a person.
11. The popular claim that the scepter "departed" when Rome took the Sanhedrin's power of execution in AD 7 misstates its sources. It is copied from the English translation of an 1876 French book. Its "AD 11" is a translation error for "the eleventh year of Jesus's age." The Talmud dates the loss to forty years before the Temple fell, about AD 30. And the rabbis' cry, "Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah, and the Messiah has not come," is in no Talmud text; its cited source is a thirteenth-century Christian anthology.
12. The verse sets no date, and its "until" does not say the scepter must leave Judah. The "departure" can be placed in 586 BC, 37 BC, AD 6, AD 30 or AD 70. That fails Test 2.

The scorecard.  All three pass Test 1.  Micah 5:2 partly passes Test 3 and fails Test 4.  Genesis 49:10 passes Test 3 as a messianic hope and fails Test 2 as a clock.  Isaiah 7:14 fails Tests 2 and 3.  A careful skeptic must grant Micah 5:2 some weight, small and dependent on the historical case argued in The Nativity Accounts, and Genesis 49:10 a little as evidence of an old hope that Jesus fits.  Isaiah 7:14 carries none as a prediction.

Part 1: What is being tested

Three different kinds of claim

The three texts are often listed together, but they make different kinds of claim.

• Isaiah 7:14 is quoted in Matthew 1:23 as a prediction of how Jesus was conceived: "Look! The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel".¹ The claim is about the manner of the birth.
• Micah 5:2 is quoted in Matthew 2:6 as a prediction of where the messiah would be born.¹
• Genesis 49:10 is not quoted in the New Testament. Christian writers from Justin Martyr onward used it as a prediction of when the messiah would come: before the "scepter" left Judah.²

Each kind of claim fails or passes for its own reasons.  A claim about manner can be checked only against the report of the birth.  A claim about place can be met by anyone who controls where a birth happens or where a story places it.  A claim about time needs a clock with a fixed start and end.

How each text is scored

The tests are the eight set out in How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy, cited here by number:  1, written before;  2, committed in advance;  3, read that way before;  4, out of reach;  5, reported independently;  6, all the misses counted;  7, priced honestly;  8, the same rules for everyone.  Each text is first read in its own chapter and century, then as its best Christian defender reads it, then as its best critic reads it, in their own words.  The scoring comes last.

Three questions belong to other articles.  Whether Jesus was in fact born in Bethlehem, and how Matthew's and Luke's birth stories relate, belongs to The Nativity Accounts, The Census of Quirinius and The Star of Bethlehem.  This article states only what the Micah test needs from that question.  What Jews before Jesus expected of a messiah in general belongs to Second Temple Messianic Expectations.  Isaiah 53, Psalm 22 and Daniel have their own articles:  Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Dating Daniel and Daniel 2, 7, and 11.

Test 1 is not the problem here

All three texts were written long before Jesus.  The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, which contains Isaiah 7, was copied between about 180 and 100 BC.³  The Greek translations of the Law and the Prophets were made in the third and second centuries BC,⁴ and a Qumran commentary that reads Genesis 49:10 as messianic was copied in the Herodian period (Part 4).  No scholar cited here, critical or conservative, dates any of the three texts after the birth of Jesus.  So every text passes Test 1, and the whole question is what the texts commit to, how they were read, and who could have made them come true.

Part 2: Isaiah 7:14 in the reign of Ahaz

Verdict on Isaiah 7:14.  The full case is in Isaiah 7:14 and the Virgin.  In its own chapter the verse promises King Ahaz a sign with a clock:  before a child about to be born can "reject evil and choose what is right, the land whose two kings you fear will be desolate."¹  Assyria took Damascus in 732 BC and replaced Pekah of Israel by 731, so the deadline was met within Ahaz's reign.⁵  The mother is an almah, a young woman of marriageable age.  The word is never clearly used of a married woman, but it says nothing about how her son is conceived, and the matching sign in 8:3–4 is an ordinary birth.  The Septuagint's parthenos, "virgin," is a real pre-Christian Jewish rendering, yet it raised no expectation of a virgin birth, and no Jewish reader before or after Jesus took the verse as messianic.  Craig Blomberg, who defends Matthew's use of it, concedes that "there are no demonstrably pre-Christian Jewish texts that reflect on the meaning of Isa. 7:14."⁶  Matthew's "fulfil" works the same way for Hosea 11:1 and Jeremiah 31:15, which evangelical commentators agree are not predictions, so it claims a pattern completed rather than a forecast.  The strongest Christian ground is the chain of royal children in Isaiah 7–11, read as one movement toward the "Mighty God" of 9:6.  That is a reading of the whole book, made after the event.  As a prediction of Jesus the verse fails Tests 2 and 3 and carries no weight.

Part 3: Micah 5:2, the ruler from Bethlehem

Verdict on Micah 5:2.  This is a real prediction.  Written centuries before Jesus, it promises a ruler of Israel from Bethlehem Ephrathah, David's home and clan.  The Gospels report that Jews before or around Jesus's time read it as the messiah's birthplace, and one of those reports, in John, has the shape of an objection to Jesus rather than a proof for him.  It is the strongest of the three texts.  Its weakness is Test 4:  a birthplace is the one detail a family can arrange and a storyteller can supply, and the only reports of Jesus's birth in Bethlehem come from believers who knew the prophecy.  It carries some weight, bounded by that fact, and how much depends on the historical case for the nativity accounts, argued in The Nativity Accounts.

The text in its setting

English Bibles number the verse 5:2;  the Hebrew Bible numbers it 5:1.  The NET Bible reads:  "As for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, seemingly insignificant among the clans of Judah— from you a king will emerge who will rule over Israel on my behalf, one whose origins are in the distant past."¹

The setting is a siege.  The verse before it says, "We are besieged!  With a scepter they strike Israel’s ruler on the side of his face."¹  The verses after it promise that the Lord will give the people up "until the time when the woman in labor gives birth," that the coming ruler "will shepherd the people by the LORD’s strength," and that "Should the Assyrians try to invade our land ... Our king will rescue us from the Assyrians."¹  So the passage looks past a humiliated king in Jerusalem to a new ruler who will come, not from the capital, but from the small town where David's line began.

Two phrases decide what the verse commits to.

"Bethlehem Ephrathah."  Ephrathah is both a place and a clan.  Rachel was buried "on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem)."¹  David's father Jesse was "an Ephrathite named Jesse from Bethlehem in Judah."¹  Naomi's family "were of the clan of Ephrath from Bethlehem in Judah."¹  In Chronicles, Ephrathah is a woman, the mother of Hur, "the father of Bethlehem."¹  Micah's phrase "among the clans of Judah" uses the word for a clan or tribal division, alfei, literally "thousands."  So "from you, Bethlehem Ephrathah" can mean "born in this town" or "from this clan," and in the context of David's line the two overlap.  The Greek translation of the second century BC already read the name as a family:  "Bethlehem, house of Ephratha."⁷

"Whose origins are from of old, from ancient days."  The Hebrew noun, motsa'otav, "his goings-out" or "his origins," occurs only here and, in a different sense, once in a reading note at 2 Kings 10:27.  The standard Hebrew lexicon glosses it "his origin."⁸  The phrase "days of old," yemei olam, is used elsewhere in the Prophets for the past of Israel's history:  Amos 9:11 promises to rebuild "the collapsing hut of David" and restore it "to what it was like in days gone by," where the Hebrew is the same kimei olam, and Micah 7:14 and Malachi 3:4 use it of Israel's earlier days.¹⁹  On that usage the phrase points back to David's ancient line.  Christian readers have long taken it further, to the eternal origin of the ruler.  The Jewish scholar Samson Levey, who studied the messianic passages of the Aramaic paraphrases, concedes that the Hebrew allows this:  "The latter part of v. 1 in the Hebrew text would tend to support the doctrine of a pre-existent Messiah, which is not found in rabbinic thought."¹⁰  The Aramaic paraphrase avoids it.  It turns "whose origins are from of old" into "whose name was spoken from of old," the rabbinic idea that the Messiah's name existed before the world.¹¹

Birthplace or lineage?

The best defender and the best critics divide over what "from you" commits to.

The conservative German commentator C. F. Keil states the defender's case.  "Coming forth out of Bethlehem involves the idea of descent," he grants, but "As the coming forth from Bethlehem implies birth in Bethlehem, so do we see from Matt. ii. 5, 6, and John vii. 42, that the old Jewish synagogue unanimously regarded this passage as containing a prophecy of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem."  On the last clause he goes further:  "The announcement of the origin of this Ruler as being before all worlds unquestionably presupposes His divine nature".  He dismisses the reading that the clause means only David's ancient family as "a very unmeaning thought, since David’s family was not older than any of the other families of Israel and Judah."¹²

The critical commentators read the same words as a promise of a new David.  Hans Walter Wolff:  "Ephrathah means the clan; Bethlehem refers to its place of residence (cf. Ruth 1:2)."  The verb "come forth" "can of course also mean 'to be born,' as in Job 1:21, or 'to descend from' (Gen. 17:6; 35:11); but mostly it has the more comprehensive sense of 'to proceed from,' especially in the context of messianic expectations."  The "ancient origins" are those of Jesse, "similarly with Jesse in Isa. 11:1."¹³  James Luther Mays explains the double name "Bethlehem Ephratha" the same way:  "Both are associated with the origin of David before he became king in Hebron and Jerusalem."¹⁴  Delbert Hillers translates the noun "rising," noting that it "is too rare a word to permit a more precise rendering on the basis of usage" and that "'Rising' is based on thematic consideration."¹⁵

The Hebrew idiom Wolff cites favours the critics on the verb and leaves the place open.  When God tells Abraham "kings will descend from you," the Hebrew is the same verb with the same preposition, mimmekha yetse'u, "from you they will come forth."⁹  So "from you will come forth" addressed to a clan-town naturally means "a ruler of your stock."  It does not exclude a birth there, and a ruler of David's clan from David's town would most likely be born there.  Keil's argument from the eternal origin goes beyond what the words require, as Levey's careful "would tend to support" suggests.  But the words allow it, which is all a defender needs.  For scoring, the safest reading is the one both sides accept:  the verse promises a ruler from Bethlehem's Davidic clan.  A birth in Bethlehem fits that promise.  It is not the only way to fulfil it.

How Matthew quotes it

In Matthew 2, Herod asks the chief priests and scribes "where the Christ was to be born."  They answer, "In Bethlehem of Judea," and quote:  "And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are in no way least among the rulers of Judah, for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel."¹  This is not Micah's wording in either Hebrew or Greek.  Set side by side, it differs in four places.¹⁶

1. "Bethlehem Ephrathah" becomes "Bethlehem, in the land of Judah."
2. "Seemingly insignificant" becomes "in no way least": Micah's point is reversed into its fulfilment.
3. "Among the clans of Judah" becomes "among the rulers of Judah." The Hebrew consonants for "clans," alfei, can also be read allufei, "chiefs," so this may be a reading of the same letters rather than a change.
4. Micah's last clause, "one whose origins are in the distant past," is dropped, and a new one is added: "who will shepherd my people Israel." That clause is God's word to David in 2 Samuel 5:2, "You will shepherd my people Israel," and Matthew's word for "ruler," hēgoumenos, is the word the Greek of 2 Samuel 5:2 uses for David.⁷¹

So Matthew's quotation is a composite.  It joins Micah's Bethlehem to God's promise to David, which is a fair summary of what Micah's oracle is about, a new David from David's town.  But it also drops the clause Christians later used for the ruler's eternal origin, and it is worded to fit the event.  Craig Blomberg notes that this is "the only OT text in Matt. 1-2 not explicitly described as 'fulfilling' prophecy," and that it is also "the only text of the five in the infancy narrative that can be viewed via a very straightforward scheme of prediction and fulfillment, with no multiple or deeper levels of meaning or use of typology."⁶

Was it read as messianic before Jesus?

Partly, and the evidence is better than for Isaiah 7:14, though none of it is a pre-Christian Jewish document.

• John 7:42. When some in a Jerusalem crowd say Jesus is the Christ, others object: "No, for the Christ doesn’t come from Galilee, does he? Don’t the scriptures say that the Christ is a descendant of David and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?"¹ John does not name Micah, but no other Old Testament text places a coming ruler's origin in Bethlehem. The report matters because of its shape. John presents the Bethlehem expectation as a Jewish objection to Jesus, and he never answers it. A writer inventing evidence for Jesus would not leave an unanswered objection in his opponents' mouths. Many readers take John's silence as irony, the reader being expected to know that Jesus was in fact born in Bethlehem, but either way the passage reports an expectation that John did not create.
• Matthew 2:5. The chief priests and scribes cite the text as the answer to "where the Christ was to be born."¹ This is a Christian report, and Test 4 discounts it, but it agrees with John.
• Targum Jonathan. The Aramaic paraphrase adds the word Messiah: "from you before me the Messiah will come forth, to exercise dominion over Israel."¹¹ Its date is the problem. Kevin Cathcart and Robert Gordon, who translated it, accept the conclusion of the Israeli scholar Abraham Tal that the Targum of the Prophets "took shape in Palestine (probably Judaea) not later than the Bar-Kochba rebellion," that is, by about AD 135, while warning that claims for a date before AD 70 "can seldom, if ever, be demonstrated with anything approaching absolute certainty."¹⁷ Levey puts the final editing centuries later.¹⁰ The Targum therefore shows an early rabbinic reading, not a pre-Christian one.
• A Jewish Bethlehem tradition after AD 70. The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled about AD 400, tells of a Jew ploughing near Arbel whose ox lowed twice. An Arab passer-by explained that the Temple had been destroyed and that "the king Messiah" had been born. Asked where, he answers, "from the king's fortress of Bethlehem in Judah."¹⁸ The story does not quote Micah, names no Christian source, and places the birth on the day the Temple fell. It shows that the rabbis, too, located the Messiah's birth in Bethlehem.

No Qumran text, apocryphal book, Philo or Josephus cites Micah 5:2.¹⁹  So the case for Test 3 rests on John 7:42 and Matthew 2:5, both written in the second half of the first century, read alongside a Targum and a Talmud that are later.  That is enough to say that Jews of Jesus's era probably expected the Messiah to come from Bethlehem, which is what the method article's scorecard grants.²⁰  It is not a pre-Christian document.

Test 4: a birthplace can be supplied

Micah 5:2 is the clearest case in the Bible of a prediction that Test 4 cuts.  Three parties could have made a Bethlehem birth come true, or seem to.

1. A family. A Davidic family that believed the prophecy could arrange for a child to be born in Bethlehem, a village a few hours' walk south of Jerusalem.
2. Followers. People who believed a man was the Messiah, and knew that the Messiah was expected from Bethlehem (John 7:42), had a reason to believe he was born there, and a reason to tell it.
3. The narrator. A Gospel writer who knew Micah could place the birth in Bethlehem without any other source.

This is not an accusation.  It is the reason a reported birthplace carries less weight than an event no one could arrange.  The historical case for and against a Bethlehem birth belongs to The Nativity Accounts and The Census of Quirinius.  For the test here, three facts matter, and they pull both ways.

• Matthew and Luke both place the birth in Bethlehem, and they do so independently. They agree on almost nothing else in their birth stories: in Matthew the family lives in Bethlehem and moves to Nazareth after Egypt; in Luke it lives in Nazareth and travels to Bethlehem for a census. Two sources that do not share a story but share a fact are evidence that the fact came before both stories. Robert Miller, a critical scholar of the Jesus Seminar who argues that the Gospel writers "retrofitted" prophecies, grants that Luke attests the Bethlehem birth "independently."²¹
• Mark and John, the other two Gospels, never say where Jesus was born. Mark introduces him as coming "from Nazareth in Galilee," and in John, Philip calls him "Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."¹¹ John 7:42 lets the objection that the Christ must come from Bethlehem stand unanswered.
• No source outside the Christian movement reports where Jesus was born. By the third century, Origen says a cave at Bethlehem was shown as the birthplace and that "this sight is greatly talked of in surrounding places, even among the enemies of the faith."²² That is a local tradition two centuries after the event, not an independent first-century report.

What the Bethlehem match can weigh

Peter Stoner's well-known probability argument priced Micah 5:2 at one chance in 280,000, the ratio of Bethlehem's population to the world's.²³  That number answers the wrong question.  It is the chance that a person chosen at random from the whole human race was born in Bethlehem.  The test asks how much more likely a Bethlehem birth report is if the prophecy was fulfilled than if it was not.

The report comes from believers who knew the prophecy.  So the weight of the report depends on one quantity:  how likely it is that such believers would have placed the birth in Bethlehem even if it happened elsewhere.  Nobody has published an estimate of that, and none is offered here as a finding.  But the arithmetic is simple.  If the chance was one in two, the report can raise the odds of a real Bethlehem birth by at most two to one.  If one in ten, ten to one.  Even at one in a hundred, the report can carry at most a hundred to one, which is 2,800 times less than Stoner's figure.²⁴  The real weight of the Bethlehem match depends on the historical case for the nativity accounts, and it cannot be larger than what those accounts can bear.

Test 6: the rest of the oracle

Test 6 asks that the misses in the same oracle be counted, and that a condition used to rescue one part also discount the parts called fulfilled.  Micah's ruler does more than come from Bethlehem.  "He will give us peace.  Should the Assyrians try to invade our land ... Our king will rescue us from the Assyrians," and the shepherd-rulers raised against Assyria "will rule the land of Assyria with the sword."¹  Assyria fell in 612 BC, six centuries before Jesus, and Jesus ruled no land with the sword.  Christian readers take these verses as figures for spiritual victory, and some take Assyria as a type of the enemies of God's people.  That reading may be right.  But by the symmetry rule of Test 6, if the Assyrian verses are figurative, the reader cannot then insist that the Bethlehem verse be taken as a literal birthplace and scored as a precise hit.  A reading that takes one verse literally and the next figuratively, according to what happened, is reading the oracle from the event backward.

The fair reading of Micah 5:2–6 as a whole is the one both its Jewish and its Christian readers share:  a promise of a new David, from David's town and clan, who would rescue his people.  Jesus was presented by his followers as that new David.  The birthplace detail adds a little to that claim, and only as much as the reports of it are worth.

Part 4: Genesis 49:10, the scepter

Verdict on Genesis 49:10.  The verse is obscure, and its key word, shiloh, has four serious readings.  It was read as a promise of a coming ruler from Judah before Christianity in a Qumran commentary copied in the Herodian period, and the later Aramaic paraphrases call him the Messiah.  The Greek translation of the third century BC is ambiguous, because the thing that "comes" in it is "the things laid up for him."  So it passes Test 3 as a messianic hope, on the strength of the Qumran commentary.  It fails as a timetable.  The verse sets no date, its "until" does not say the scepter must leave Judah when the ruler comes, and the date usually given for the "departure" can be moved to fit:  586 BC, 37 BC, AD 6, about AD 30, or AD 70.  The popular claim that the scepter departed when Rome took the Sanhedrin's power of execution in AD 7 misstates its sources:  the Talmud says forty years before the Temple fell, the "AD 11" in the chain is a translation error, and the rabbis' cry of "Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah" is in no Talmud text.

The text and the word shiloh

Jacob's blessing on Judah reads, in the NET Bible:  "The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs; the nations will obey him."¹  The Hebrew of the clause NET renders "until he comes to whom it belongs" is ad ki yavo shiloh, literally "until shiloh comes" or "until he comes to shiloh."  The written consonants are שילה, which the Masoretes read as shilo.  That exact spelling occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.⁹  The four main readings are these.

1. A name or title, "until Shiloh comes." This is the King James reading. The commentator S. R. Driver showed in 1916 that it is the youngest of the four: "the rend. ‘until Shiloh come’ is found in no known version of the OT. till that of Seb. Münster in 1534." "Shiloh" first appears as a messianic name in a list of playful names in the Talmud (b. Sanhedrin 98b), in which the school of each rabbi derives the Messiah's name from its master's: Shila's school says "Shiloh," Yannai's says "Yinnon," Hanina's says "Hanina."²⁵
2. A place, "until he comes to Shiloh." Shiloh was the sanctuary town of the Judges period. John Skinner's critical commentary calls this reading "grammatically unexceptionable," but rejects it because "there is no evidence that Judah ever went to Shiloh."²⁶
3. "Tribute," shay lo, "until tribute comes to him." This reading divides the word in two. It is followed by the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation: "So that tribute shall come to him."²⁷
4. "Whose it is," shelloh, "until he comes to whom it belongs." This reading takes the word as she-lo, "which is his," and is the reading of almost every ancient version, including the Greek, Syriac and Aramaic. It matches Ezekiel 21:27, where God overthrows the last king of Judah: "this will not be until he comes to whom is the right, and I will give it to him."¹ Skinner names its weakness: the clause then has no subject, and the short relative she- is rare in early Judean texts. This "widely accepted interpretation," he concludes, is "extremely precarious."²⁶

Skinner's own view is the critical one:  the verse is "a prophecy of David and his dynasty,—a vaticinium ex eventu, like all the other oracles in the chapter," a prophecy written after the event it describes.²⁶  Even on that view it was written centuries before Jesus.  Driver's summary of the ancient evidence is the fair one:  "antiquity, both Jewish and Christian, interpreted the passage in a Messianic sense: but this sense was not bound up with a personal name ‘Shiloh,’ but partly with an entirely different vocalization and interpretation of the Heb. word in question, and partly with the general promise of ideal sovereignty to Judah, expressed in the verse."²⁵

Read as messianic before Christianity

Genesis 49:10 has the best Test 3 credentials of the three texts.

• The Greek, third century BC. The Septuagint reads: "A ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until the things laid up for him come; and he is the expectation of nations."⁷ The translator turned the obedience of the peoples into "the expectation of nations" and gave it a person: "he is." But what "comes" is neuter and plural, ta apokeimena, "the things laid up for him," not a person. The nearest person for "he" is the ruler from Judah whose line does not fail, not a single future ruler who comes. John Collins reads the Greek the same way: the majority reading "fails to associate the future glory of Judah with an individual ruler."²⁸ So the Greek is ambiguous, and the pre-Christian messianic reading rests on Qumran.
• Qumran. A commentary on Genesis from Qumran Cave 4, 4Q252, copied in what palaeographers call the Herodian period, which began under Herod the Great,²⁹ reads: "The sceptre shall [no]t depart from the tribe of Judah. While Israel has the dominion, there [will not] be cut off someone who sits on the throne of David. ... Until the messiah of righteousness comes, the branch of David. For to him and to his descendants has been given the covenant of the kingship of his people for everlasting generations".³⁰ The community that wrote it had no interest in Jesus. It read the verse as a promise that David's line would always rule until the Messiah came, and that the kingship would then be his forever. The Hebrew of its quotation already differs from the Masoretic text: it has "a ruler," shalit, where the Masoretic text has "scepter," and it reads shevet, "scepter," in its other sense of "tribe."³¹
• The Aramaic paraphrases. Targum Onqelos, the Aramaic Torah read in the synagogues: "until Messiah comes, whose is the kingdom." The Palestinian targums say "until the time when the King Messiah comes."²⁵ The targums were written down after the first century, so they show how the verse was read in early Judaism, not that it was read so before Jesus.

What none of these sources does is use the verse as a clock.  They read it as a promise that a ruler would come from Judah.  The idea that the "departure" of the scepter dates the Messiah's arrival appears first in Christian writers.

What "until" commits to

The Christian timing argument needs the scepter to leave Judah at or just after the ruler's coming.  The Hebrew does not say that.  "The scepter will not depart ... until he comes" has the same shape as God's promise to Jacob in Genesis 28:15:  "I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you!"¹  No reader takes that to mean God would leave Jacob afterward.  In both verses "not ... until" sets a floor, not an end.  On the most natural reading Judah's rule lasts until it reaches its goal in the ruler, who then holds it.  Skinner, who doubts the verse is messianic at all, makes the same point about the messianic reading:  "It is difficult, however, to believe that the climax of a blessing on Judah is the expectation of a world-ruler who takes the sceptre out of Judah’s hands".²⁶

So the verse commits to a ruler from Judah to whom the peoples will submit.  It does not commit to a date, and it does not predict that Judah will lose its scepter.  A timing argument built on the verse adds both.

The oldest timing argument: Justin

Justin Martyr, about AD 155, is the first writer known to use the verse as a clock.  He tells the Roman emperor:  "It is yours to make accurate inquiry, and ascertain up to whose time the Jews had a lawgiver and king of their own.  Up to the time of Jesus Christ ... and after He (i.e., Christ) appeared, you began to rule the Jews, and gained possession of all their territory."²  He makes the same case to Trypho, and in doing so shows its weakness.  Judah had no king during the Babylonian exile, and Herod, the king when Jesus was born, was not of Judah.  Justin bridges both gaps by widening the scepter to include prophets and priests:  "though you affirm that Herod ... was an Ashkelonite, nevertheless you admit that there was a high priest in your nation ... there never failed to be a prophet among you, who was lord, and leader, and ruler of your nation."³²

That move is the Test 2 problem in miniature.  If the scepter means a king of Judah, it departed in 586 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar put out Zedekiah’s eyes and "carried him off to Babylon."¹  The Jewish kings who ruled from the 140s to 37 BC were Hasmoneans, descended from Mattathias, "a priest of the order of Joarib," of the tribe of Levi, not Judah.³³  If the scepter means any Jewish authority, Justin himself admits it included the high priests, who lasted until AD 70.  Each choice of meaning moves the date.

The modern form: McDowell and the Sanhedrin

Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict, an apologetics handbook first published in 1972 and revised in 1979, 1999 and 2017, gives the argument its modern form.  In the 1972 edition, under the heading "The Removal of the Scepter," McDowell writes that the Sanhedrin lost "the power to pass the death sentence."  "This occurred after the deposition of Archelaus, who was the son and successor of Herod, 11 A.D., or 7 V.E."³⁴  He then quotes the Talmud:  "‘A little more than forty years before the destruction of the Temple, the power of pronouncing capital sentences was taken away from the Jews.’ (Talmud, Jerusalem, Sanhedrin, fol. 24, recto.)"  He adds that "it hardly seems possible that the ‘jus gladii’ remained in the Jewish hands until that time.  It probably had ceased at the time of Coponius, 7 A.D."  Then comes the climax:  "Rabbi Rachmon says, ‘When the members of the Sanhedrin found themselves deprived of their right over life and death, a general consternation took possession of them; they covered their heads with ashes, and their bodies with sackcloth, exclaiming: ‘Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah, and the Messiah has not come!’"³⁴  On the next page he concludes, "Yes, the scepter was removed and Judah lost its royal or legal power.  And the Jews knew it themselves!"³⁴  The 1979 and 1999 editions keep the passage with small changes.³⁵

Every source in the passage can be checked, and the check finds four problems.

1. The passage is copied from a French book of 1876. McDowell's footnote points to the English translation of Augustin Lémann's Jesus before the Sanhedrim, and his paragraphs follow it nearly word for word. Lémann's own source for the AD 7 date is the Jewish historian Joseph Derenbourg (1867).³⁶
2. "11 A.D." is a translation error. Lémann's French says the deposition of Archelaus happened "l'an onze de l'âge de Jésus-Christ (7 de l'ère vulgaire)": in the eleventh year of Jesus's age, which is AD 7 in the common era.³⁷ The English translator turned "the eleventh year of Jesus's age" into "11 A.D.," and McDowell copied it.
3. The Talmud does not say AD 7. The baraita McDowell quotes is real. The Jerusalem Talmud reads: "Forty years before the Temple was destroyed, criminal jurisdiction was removed from Israel."³⁸ The Temple was destroyed in AD 70, so this points to about AD 30, the time of Pilate. The Babylonian Talmud tells a related story with a different cause: "Forty years before the destruction of the Second Temple, the Sanhedrin was exiled from the Chamber of Hewn Stone," and it explains that the judges moved because "they saw that the murderers were so numerous and they were not able to judge them and punish them with death."³⁸ Elsewhere it dates the end of capital cases to the Temple's destruction itself.³⁸ The AD 7 date is Derenbourg's inference, and he says so. He calls the forty years "un nombre rond," a round number, for Pilate's time, and adds that "il n'est guère probable que le jus gladii soit resté aux Juifs jusque-là": "it is hardly probable that the right of the sword remained with the Jews until then."³⁹ McDowell drops the round number and Pilate, and keeps the guess.
4. The rabbis' cry is not in the Talmud. No passage of either Talmud contains "Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah." Lémann's footnote for "Rabbi Rachmon" cites no Talmud tractate. It cites "Raymond Martin, Pugio fidei, 872": the Pugio Fidei, an anti-Jewish handbook written by the Dominican friar Raymond Martini in 1278.³⁶ On the next page, where McDowell repeats the cry and cites "Talmud, Bab., Sanhedrin, Chap. 4, fol. 37, recto," Lémann had not quoted the Talmud at all. He had written that the members "should have exclaimed" those words, and attached the footnote to his own sentence.³⁶ Sanhedrin 37 discusses how judges warn witnesses in capital cases and says that the Sanhedrin ceased when the Temple was destroyed.³⁸⁴⁰ The cry is a medieval Christian report at best, not a first-century Jewish confession.

One part of the claim is right, and it should be said plainly.  Rome did take capital power in Judea in AD 6.  Josephus says that when Archelaus's territory became a province, Coponius was sent as governor, "having received from Caesar authority as far as killing."⁴¹  John 18:31 has the Jewish leaders tell Pilate, "We cannot legally put anyone to death."¹  But the Roman grant did not stop every Jewish execution.  Josephus reports that in AD 62 the high priest Ananus convened the Sanhedrin and had James, the brother of Jesus, stoned.  The complaint against him was that "it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent," the governor's, not that the court had no such power.³³  And Titus reminded the Jews in AD 70 that Rome had let them kill any foreigner who passed the Temple barrier, "though he were a Roman."⁴²

Set against the verse, the claim has the same problem as Justin's.  It needs "scepter" to mean the Sanhedrin's right to execute, a meaning the verse does not give, and it needs a date that the sources do not fix.  With "scepter" as a Judean king, the date is 586 BC.  As the Sanhedrin's capital power, AD 6, about AD 30, or AD 70, depending on which source is followed.  An endpoint that can be placed anywhere in a six-century range does not pass Test 2.

Part 5: The three texts scored

The scorecard

"Pass" and "Fail" are for a reader who does not already accept the Gospels' authority.  The tests are those of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy.

What a careful skeptic must grant

Micah 5:2 carries some weight.  It is a real prediction, written centuries before Jesus, that a ruler of Israel would come from Bethlehem Ephrathah, David's town.  Jews of the first century probably read it as the Messiah's birthplace, and the report that they did is shaped like an objection, not an invention.  Two Christian sources that do not share a birth story both place Jesus's birth in Bethlehem.  A skeptic who doubts the birthplace must say why both did so, and the answer "because of Micah" is a real answer but not a free one.  The weight is small, because a birthplace is within reach of a family and a storyteller, and it rises or falls with the historical case for the nativity accounts.

Genesis 49:10 carries almost none as a prediction of Jesus.  It was read before Christianity as a promise of a ruler from Judah whom the nations would obey, and a skeptic must grant that much.  Jesus was presented by his followers as a ruler of Judah's line, and the nations that came to honour him make a striking match to "the nations will obey him."  But any Davidic claimant could fit the verse, and the nations' allegiance was within reach of his followers' preaching.  As a timetable, the verse carries no weight at all.  It names no date, and every date proposed for the "departure" of the scepter is chosen after the event.

Isaiah 7:14 carries none as a prediction.  Read in its chapter, it is a sign to Ahaz with a short deadline, and the deadline was met.  The word for the mother does not mean "virgin," the Greek "virgin" raised no expectation of a miraculous birth, and no Jewish reader before or after Jesus took the verse as messianic.  What remains is the Christian theological claim that the book of Isaiah, read as a whole, points from the child of 7:14 to the royal child of 9:6–7 and the shoot of Jesse in 11:1–10.  That is a claim about the meaning of Scripture, and many Christian scholars hold it.  It is not evidence of foreknowledge that a skeptic should accept.

Objections and responses

Objections about Isaiah 7:14 (that almah is never used of a married woman, that an ordinary birth is no sign, the Septuagint's "virgin," the charge that Jews changed the Greek, double fulfilment, and the theory that the story grew from a mistranslation) are answered in Isaiah 7:14 and the Virgin.

"'Whose origins are from of old, from the days of eternity' proves the ruler is divine."  Keil argues this, and Levey, a rabbi, grants that the Hebrew "would tend to support" a pre-existent Messiah.  But the phrase "days of old" is used elsewhere for the past of Israel's history, as in Amos 9:11's promise to restore David's fallen hut, and the critics read it of David's ancient line.  Even granted, a claim about an eternal origin cannot be checked by any event, so it adds nothing under Test 2.

"The Gospels made up the Bethlehem birth to fit Micah."  That is possible, and it is why Micah 5:2 scores low on Test 4.  But two writers who do not share a birth story both report it, and John leaves the Bethlehem objection to Jesus unanswered, which a writer inventing evidence would not do.  The question cannot be settled from the prophecy;  it belongs to The Nativity Accounts.

"The scepter departed when Rome took the Sanhedrin's power of execution in AD 7, while Jesus was alive.  The Talmud admits it."  The Talmud dates the loss of capital jurisdiction to forty years before the Temple's destruction, about AD 30, or to the destruction itself.  The AD 7 date is a nineteenth-century scholar's inference, the "AD 11" in the English chain is a translation error, and the rabbis' cry "the scepter has departed" is in no Talmud text.  Rome did take capital power in AD 6, by Josephus's account.  But the verse does not say the scepter will depart when the ruler comes, and the scepter, read as Judah's kingship, departed in 586 BC.

"The scepter means Judah's tribal identity, which lasted until the Temple fell in AD 70.  So the Messiah had to come before 70."  On that reading the verse is fulfilled by any claimant born before 70 who could claim descent from Judah, and would-be kings were common in those decades.  Josephus describes Manahem, son of Judas the Galilean, who in AD 66 armed his men from Herod's armoury at Masada "and returned in the state of a king to Jerusalem."⁴²  And Judah's identity did not end in 70:  the Jewish people are named for it.

"No other ruler from Judah has had 'the obedience of the peoples' as Jesus has."  This is the best Christian use of Genesis 49:10, and it is a real fit:  the nations did come to honour a ruler of Judah's line.  But the verse names no ruler, no date and no number of nations, and the spread of a faith among the nations is within the reach of the faith's own missionaries.  A skeptic can grant the fit and still give it little weight.

"Testing these texts as predictions is anachronistic.  Matthew used them as fulfilments in a deeper sense."  For Matthew, this is fair, and the conservative scholars quoted here say so.  The tests do not judge Matthew.  They judge the apologetic claim, made in books like McDowell's and Stoner's, that these texts are predictions whose fulfilment proves foreknowledge.  A text offered as proof must meet the standard of proof.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Isaiah 7:14. Its open questions, including Gordon Wenham's 1972 study of betulah and Tsevat's count of 51 against the Leningrad text's 50, are listed in Isaiah 7:14 and the Virgin. That article also checks the Great Isaiah Scroll's reading of the verse against Ulrich's edition: it has almah, and "and he will call" for the Masoretic "and you will call."
2. The Pugio Fidei, page 872. Lémann's source for "Rabbi Rachmon" is the 1687 Leipzig edition of Raymond Martini's Pugio Fidei. That page was not located. One manuscript of the Pugio quotes a "Rabbi Rahmon" on Isaiah 55:4, not the scepter cry. Whether the cry is in the Pugio at all is open.
3. The date of Targum Jonathan's reading of Micah 5:1. The Targum as a whole was edited after AD 70; whether its "Messiah" in Micah 5:1 is older is not known.
4. Whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem is argued in The Nativity Accounts. The Micah score here depends on it.
5. The numbers in the Micah pricing are illustrative. No one has estimated how often early Christians would have placed a birth in Bethlehem if it happened elsewhere. The point stands for any value one chooses: the ratio is the inverse of that chance, not Stoner's population ratio.

Verdict

None of the three texts is the knock-down proof it is often made out to be, and one of them is not a prediction of Jesus at all.

Isaiah 7:14 promised Ahaz a sign that ran out within a few years.  Its word for the mother means "young woman," its Greek "virgin" was a translator's choice that raised no Jewish expectation, and no Jewish reader before or after Jesus took it as messianic.  It carries no weight as a prediction.  Christians who read it through Isaiah 9 and 11 are making a theological claim about the book, not offering evidence a skeptic should accept.

Micah 5:2 is a real prediction of a ruler from David's town and clan, and Jews of Jesus's time probably expected the Messiah to come from Bethlehem.  Two independent Gospels report that Jesus was born there.  It carries some weight, but a birthplace is the kind of detail a family can arrange and a believer can supply, so the weight is small and depends on the nativity accounts.

Genesis 49:10 was read before Christianity as a promise of a ruler from Judah whom the nations would obey.  That hope is real, and Jesus fits it, as other Judean claimants could.  As a clock it fails.  It sets no date, and the modern claim that the scepter departed in AD 7 rests on a mistranslated year, a Talmud passage that says something else, and a rabbinic cry no rabbinic text contains.

Sources