In this book, Novenson gives a revisionist account of messianism in antiquity. He shows that, for the ancient Jews and Christians who used the term, a messiah w

Messianism is one of the great themes in intellectual history. But because it has done so much important ideological work for the people who have written about

He then traces the rise and fall of "the messianic idea"' in Jewish studies and gives an alternative account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention wo

A compendium of approximately three hundred texts--in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Coptic, and other languages--that are important for the s

Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian fu