Outside the Prophets and the Psalms we find little expectation of a personal Messiah, but we find almost everywhere the conception of an ideal or Messianic age. What has been called the Protevangelium, the promise to the woman that her seed should bruise the serpent's head (Gen. iii. 15), does not point explicitly to any one person, but simply promises that in man's eternal warfare with temptation he shall at length gain the victory. The prophecy of Balaam (Num. xxiv. 17-19) involves nothing more than the future supremacy of Israel. Jacob's blessing on Judah (Gen. xlix. 10) promises a stable dynasty to that tribe, and the reference to Shiloh is so obscure that nothing can be built upon it (_Shiloh_ may mean peace, but in the Septuagint the phrase is translated: "until that which is his shall come." Another ancient reading is: "till he come whose it is." Shiloh might refer to the town of that name, but this would give no help to the interpretation. The text must be corrupt).
It will be necessary for us to examine the circle of ideas which form the background of the Messianic hope and from which the idea of the Messiah emerges. When the Prophets speak of the future they often use a strange phrase: "the day of the Lord." This is found first in Amos (v. 18), but its occurrence there shows that it was already a term in use among the people, for Amos had to dissent from the popular idea of its character. The term comes from the Hebrew idiom of the "day" of battle, and it comes to be used of the great conflict in which Jehovah will entirely overthrow the enemies of Israel; it is therefore looked for with expectant hope. Amos points out that the manifestation of Jehovah will be fatal to sin, whether in Israel or in other nations: _dies iræ, dies illa_. Thus modified by Amos this is the conception which, with varying details, becomes the prophetic idea of the Day of the Lord. It may therefore come in some threatened invasion; later, it is conceived as a gathering of all the nations against Jerusalem, from which we get the picture of Armageddon, the last great war before the establishment of peace; and finally it becomes the world assize, and so the "day" of judgment of the New Testament. This "day" is to separate the history of God's dealings with men into two distinct periods, and will be the dividing line between the perfect and the imperfect; so that all the bright visions of the future are to be "after those days." The Prophets believe that reconstruction can only come after destruction, that history will reach its ideal over a precipice; they believe in a reform by cataclysm rather than by evolution. Every threatening of political change or national disaster may herald the coming of that day; it is always at hand; to their vision, they are living near the finality of things. There is a great deal in this imagery that fails to appeal to modern ideas of history and progress. It was part of the prophetic scheme and as such was a limitation of perfect vision; but shorn of its mere form it remains a witness to their consciousness of the activity of God in human history and of His judgment in the crises of the world. The form was a limitation essential to their stage of mental evolution and to its intelligibility to their age; its spirit is an eternal message to mankind.