NOTES for Sa2 7:12-14
God's covenant with David plays an immense role in both Yahwism and Christianity: the entire messianic tradition, Yahwist, Jewish and Christian, is founded upon it. This covenant was understood differently at different times. In the pre-exilic age, when political messianism predominated, as it sometimes did even after the Babylonian exile, the covenant with David was perceived as a promise that a righteous ruler would arise from David's line, a ruler who, while remaining human, would nevertheless be able with God's help to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.
In pre-exilic times and, to some extent, after the exile as well, especially following the Maccabean wars, messianists envisaged this Kingdom as an ordinary earthly state governed according to the laws of the Torah and headed by a righteous ruler, God's anointed one. The Hebrew word “mashiach”, “messiah”, like the corresponding Greek word “christos”, means precisely “anointed one”. In the context of political messianism, David was regarded first of all as a righteous ruler and God's anointed one, with the expectation that one of his descendants would lead the Kingdom of God, which political messianists understood as the kingdom of the righteous on earth.
Spiritual messianism saw the Messiah less as a ruler than as the embodiment of God's truth, and regarded His ministry as something akin to prophetic ministry. In the context of spiritual messianism the Messiah is, first and foremost, God's witness, whose authority resembles that of a religious and charismatic leader of the pre-state era rather than that of a king. Sometimes this messianism brought to the fore the image of the Messiah as high priest, who would renew the relationship between God and the people as a community, in the spirit of Jeremiah's teaching about the new covenant.
Yet all these messianic traditions, so diverse and reflecting the figure of Christ in such different ways, go back to the image of David, who wished to build a Temple for his God. It is no accident that the promises of support to David's descendants are linked with the Temple: the meaning of the Jerusalem royal dynasty's existence was bound up with it, for the Temple almost always remained the spiritual citadel of pure Yahwism, unreformed and undistorted by any pagan borrowings. When paganism entered the Temple under Josiah's successors, both the Temple and the dynasty collapsed.
The very idea of an authority that protected the altar was a prefiguration of the Kingdom that the Saviour brought into the world. It was, of course, only a prefiguration, but its spiritual meaning, fully unfolded, was to connect the history of the people of God over whom David reigned with the new, messianic people who acknowledge another King over them, the King before whom every true ruler of the people of God would gladly bow.