Many older Bible commentaries discuss the type of messiah that the Jews at the time of Jesus were looking for. These older commentaries often state that a King David-type king that would free the Jews from the Romans was the archetypical messianic figure. However, the "Dead Sea Scrolls" shed a different light on Second Temple Jewish messianic expectations. There is, for example, some evidence in the scrolls that the messiah would be divine and that the messiah would suffer.
Israel Knohl, Chair of the Bible Department at Hebrew University, bases his argument on two hymns found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. One is a first-person account of what it means to be a "Suffering Servant" doing the will of God and seeking to bring the Jews to a time of sinless joy. According to Knohl, these are not words put in the mouth of some future Messiah, but were instead the writings of someone who considered himself to be the Messiah - decades before Jesus. Knohl argues that Judaism just before the time of Jesus began to develop the concept of a "catastrophic" messianism.…
