NOTES for Gen 49:8-10
Jacob’s prophecy concerning Judah has often been interpreted in a messianic sense: in the Russian Synodal translation, the enigmatic Hebrew word “shiloh” is rendered as “Reconciler”—and, written with a capital letter, it becomes an epithet of the coming Messiah. Yet in the Hebrew original there is not only no distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters, but the word itself is most likely a proper name. Shiloh is the name of a town usually called Silom in Russian translations. It was there that the Tabernacle was moved some time after the Hebrews’ conquest of Palestine, and it remained there for quite a long time.
The development of statehood and royal power in Israel is also connected with Judea, the land of the tribe of Judah. After God rejects the first king, Saul the Benjaminite, David of the tribe of Judah becomes king and makes Jerusalem, which was situated in Judea, his capital. First he, and later his son Solomon, having brought all the tribes of Israel together, “reconciled” all the surrounding tribes to themselves—that is, conquered them.
It may seem that, with this interpretation of the prophecy, its messianic meaning is lost entirely. Yet this is not quite so. We need only recall that the entire Yahwistic—and later Jewish—messianic tradition is bound up with the special covenant God makes with David as the founder of the dynasty ruling in Jerusalem. Without this covenant, the messianic tradition would have been quite different. Of course, God’s promises to David concern first and foremost David himself and his descendants. Yet these promises also imply a special relationship between God and Jerusalem as His own city. Both the prophets and the authors of the Yahwistic hymns found in the Book of Psalms have much to say about this. If so, both Jerusalem itself and its king are a reality not only historical but also metahistorical. It is no accident that, for the prophets of the post-exilic period, Jerusalem becomes a symbol of the messianic Kingdom and its capital, while Isaiah of Jerusalem already regards the Messiah as a descendant of David.
Of course, as time passes and the messianic tradition develops, Jerusalem comes to resemble an ordinary earthly city less and less, and the Messiah an ordinary earthly ruler. Yet for all this, they retain their connection with earthly history. And this matters: although the Kingdom is not of this world, it enters precisely our world—enters it to transform it, not to destroy it. And the transformed world is precisely the world with all its history: the history of its relationship with God, the history of revelation, and the history of salvation. And therefore it also includes the history of the covenant, into which both Jerusalem and its king David have already been inscribed—forever.