Bible Study · A Word With Oil On It

Messiah Meaning: The Anointed One Israel Waited For

Messiah is the Hebrew mashiach, anointed one. It began as a word for kings and priests with oil on their heads, grew into the great hope of a nation, and Jesus took it somewhere nobody expected.

By Apostle Johnny Ova · Sound of Heaven · 10 Min Read
The Short Answer The Hebrew Word How The Word Grew What Israel Hoped For What Jesus Did With It Saying It Plainly Where This Lands
The Short Answer

Anointed One, And Usually A King

Straight Answer

The Messiah meaning is anointed one. Messiah comes from the Hebrew mashiach, a person marked out by God with poured oil for a task, and most often that person was a king.

The Greek form of the same word is christos, which is where we get Christ. When Christians call Jesus the Messiah, we are saying He is the anointed King that Israel's Scriptures were leaning toward, and that He reigns right now.

The word has a history, though, and it did not start out as the name of one person. It started with oil on the heads of ordinary, flawed men.

The Hebrew Word

Mashiach: Someone With Oil On Their Head

Mashiach is a plain, physical word. It comes from the verb mashach, to smear or pour oil on something, and it names the person that was done to. In Israel you did not become a king or a high priest by announcement. Somebody poured oil over your head in front of witnesses, and from then on you were set apart for the job.

HebrewMashiachמָשִׁיחַAnointed One
The root

From mashach, to smear or anoint with oil. The noun describes the person who has been anointed.

Priests

Leviticus 4:3 calls the high priest “the anointed priest,” using this same word.

Kings

David will not touch Saul because he is “the LORD's anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6). Saul, jealous and dangerous, was still a messiah in the Hebrew sense.

Into Greek

The Greek translation of the Old Testament rendered it christos, and John 1:41 shows the translation happening: “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ).

So Christ is not a surname and never was. We covered that in what Jesus' last name was, and the Greek side of the word gets its own study in what Christ means. This post stays with the Hebrew word and the hope that grew around it.

In the Hebrew Bible there are many messiahs, lowercase. Priests, kings, even a foreign emperor. When the New Testament says “the Messiah,” with the article, it is picking one anointed figure out of a long line of them.

Takeaway

Messiah began as a job description, not a divine title. It was worn by real people with real failures long before it became a hope about one person.

How The Word Grew

From Oil On Saul To The Hope Of A Nation

Exodus 29 · Leviticus 8
The Priests

Moses pours oil on Aaron's head. The priest who stands between the people and God is the first anointed figure in the story.

1 Samuel 10 · 1 Samuel 16
The Kings

Samuel anoints Saul, then David. With David, the oil and the Spirit arrive together, and the Spirit stays on him from that day on.

2 Samuel 7 · Psalm 2
The Promise

God promises David a house and a throne that will stand. Psalm 2 pictures the nations raging against the LORD and His anointed. The son of David becomes a title with a future in it.

586 BC
No King At All

Babylon destroys Jerusalem and the line of David loses the throne. Psalm 89 grieves openly that God seems to have rejected His anointed.

539 BC
A Persian Gets The Word

Cyrus of Persia conquers Babylon and lets the exiles go home, and Isaiah calls him God's anointed.

Daniel 9
An Anointed One Is Coming

Daniel 9:25 speaks of “an anointed one, a prince” at the end of a measured period. We walk through that count, honest margins included, in the 70 weeks of Daniel.

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and to loose the belts of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”

Isaiah 45:1, ESV

Cyrus did not worship Israel's God. Isaiah 45:4 says it outright: God called him though he did not know Him. That one verse clears up a lot. Anointed never meant a special kind of being. It meant commissioned by God for a task, and God could commission whoever He pleased.

After the exile, though, there was no son of David on a throne. The promise to David was still in the Scriptures and still unanswered. That gap is where the capital letter came from. The word slowly shifted from the king you had to the King you were waiting for.

Which ruler does Isaiah 45:1 call the LORD's anointed?

King David of Israel
Cyrus, the king of Persia
Elijah the prophet

Cyrus, a foreign king who did not know Israel's God. Anointed describes a commission from God, not a pedigree, which is why the word could stretch that far.

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The First Century

What Israel Actually Hoped For

By the time Jesus was born, there was no single job description for the Messiah. Different Jewish groups hoped for different things, and it is worth hearing them in their own words rather than in a Christian caricature of them.

A royal Messiah

The Psalms of Solomon, written in the century before Jesus, ask God to “raise up unto them their king, the son of David” to purge Jerusalem of the nations, and end with “their king the anointed of the Lord” (G. Buchanan Gray's translation of Psalm 17).

A priest and a king

The Community Rule from Qumran looks ahead “until there shall come the Prophet and the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel”. Two anointed figures, one priestly and one royal, with a prophet alongside them.

Healing and good news

A Qumran fragment known as 4Q521 says heaven and earth will listen to God's messiah, and describes the Lord healing the wounded, raising the dead and bringing good news to the poor. Scholars debate who does the healing there, God or the messiah.

A king who wins

A century after Jesus, the revolt led by Bar Kokhba against Rome drew messianic hopes, and Maimonides later noted that Rabbi Akiva backed him as king without asking him for signs.

The common thread in the popular hope was a son of David who would deal with Rome. That was not a silly hope. It came straight out of the prophets and the Psalms.

Jewish expectation after the New Testament kept that shape. In the twelfth century Maimonides summarized it as a king from the house of David who would “build the Temple and gather the dispersed of Israel”. Many Jewish people hold that hope today, and they hold it with a seriousness Christians should respect. For how the church and Israel fit together, see Israel in the Bible.

Caesarea Philippi

Jesus Took The Title And Changed The Job

Jesus hardly ever called Himself Messiah out loud. In Mark 8 He takes His disciples north to Caesarea Philippi and asks them who they say He is. Peter answers, “You are the Christ.” Jesus does not deny it. Then He does two things nobody expected.

“And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

Mark 8:31, ESV
He Silenced The Title

Mark 8:30 says He strictly charged them to tell no one. The word carried a sword in most people's minds, and He would not let it be heard that way.

He Filled It With Suffering

He reached for Son of Man instead, and joined it to rejection and death. We walk through that choice in the meaning of Son of Man. The New Testament reads Him through Isaiah's suffering servant, a passage preserved whole in the Great Isaiah Scroll. Most Jewish readers take that servant as Israel, and they have reasons. We read it as fulfilled in the one faithful Israelite.

He Owned It When It Cost Him

At His trial in Mark 14:61 to 62, the high priest asks whether He is the Christ. For the first time in Mark, Jesus answers plainly, I am. He said it openly only when saying it would get Him killed.

He Showed What The Oil Was For

In Nazareth He read Isaiah and applied it to Himself: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). Healing, release and good news. That is what His anointing looked like.

So He kept the word and rewrote the job. The Messiah people hoped for would defeat the enemy. The Messiah God sent was killed by the enemy and raised by God, and that is how He won.

Saying It Plainly

Jesus Is The Messiah, And He Reigns Now

Where We Stand, Plainly

At Sound of Heaven we believe Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the anointed King, Priest and Prophet, and that He is on the throne today. Peter said it at Pentecost: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The Kingdom He announced is present and active. We are not waiting for the Messiah to start reigning.

The strongest objection deserves a fair hearing. Many Jewish readers say the Messiah is supposed to rebuild the Temple, gather the exiles and bring peace to the world, and that none of that visibly happened. That is a real argument from real texts, and it is not stubbornness.

Our answer is that Jesus fulfilled those hopes in a form bigger than the one expected. The Temple He built is a people. The gathering reached past Israel to the nations, as the prophets said it would. And the old covenant age closed within that same generation, when Jerusalem fell in AD 70, the city Jesus wept over in Luke 19. We hold that position with confidence, and we hold it without contempt.

What Gets Said

The Jews rejected their Messiah, so they carry the blame. Or the opposite mistake: Messiah just means a hero figure, a good teacher with no throne.

What Is True

Jesus was Jewish, and so were all His first followers. Contempt for Jewish people is sin. And Messiah is a royal claim, so a Jesus with no throne is not the Jesus of the Gospels.

This cuts both ways, and we mean both. The church has a shameful record of using this word as a weapon against Jewish neighbors, and Paul warns Gentile believers not to boast in Romans 11. The other failure is quieter. It shrinks Messiah into a vague spiritual hero so the claim never costs anybody anything.

A smaller correction too, even though it sounds like it helps our side. You will hear that Daniel predicts the Messiah's arrival to the exact year, or that Jesus fulfilled a precise count of prophecies. The calculations vary, and the counts depend on how you define a prophecy. We explain why in how many prophecies Jesus fulfilled. The case for Jesus is stronger than any tidy number.

Takeaway

Jesus is the Messiah, reigning now. Say it boldly, and never say it with a sneer at the people who first carried the hope.

Where This Lands

You Have A King

If Messiah means anointed King, then calling Jesus the Messiah is not a label on a religious figure. It is a statement about who is in charge of your life.

It also tells you what kind of King He is. He was anointed to bring good news to the poor, to heal and to set people free. His throne came through a cross, not a sword. That means He is safe to trust with the parts of your life you would never hand to someone who rules by force.

And because He is the final revelation of God, the Messiah is also the lens for reading everything that came before Him. Every anointed king in the Old Testament was a partial picture. Jesus is the full one.

For related reading, see the names of Jesus, our study on the anointing and what we believe. If you are on Long Island, plan a visit and meet the King's people in person.

The Whole Thing In One Line

Messiah means anointed one, a word once worn by Israel's priests and kings and even a Persian emperor, which grew into the hope for a son of David and was fulfilled in Jesus, who took the title, filled it with the cross, and reigns now.

Wrestling With Who Jesus Is?

Questions about the Messiah are welcome here. Send yours in or ask for prayer, and someone at Sound of Heaven will get back to you.

Questions People Ask

Questions About The Messiah

What is the Messiah meaning in the Bible?

Messiah comes from the Hebrew mashiach, which means anointed one. In ancient Israel, oil was poured on the heads of priests and kings to mark them out for a task from God, so the word first described people already serving in those roles. Over time, especially after the exile left Israel without a king, it came to name the hoped for son of David who would restore God's people. The Greek form is christos, which gives us Christ. When the New Testament calls Jesus the Messiah, it is claiming He is that anointed King.

Are Messiah and Christ the same thing?

Yes. They are the same word in two languages. Messiah comes from the Hebrew mashiach and Christ comes from the Greek christos, and both mean anointed one. The Greek translation of the Old Testament used christos for mashiach long before Jesus was born, so the gospel writers, writing in Greek, used it naturally. John 1:41 even shows the translation in the text, where Andrew says they have found the Messiah and John adds that it means Christ. Christ is a title, not Jesus' last name.

Why was Cyrus called God's anointed?

Isaiah 45:1 calls Cyrus, the Persian king, the LORD's anointed because God used him for a specific task, conquering Babylon and allowing the Jewish exiles to return home and rebuild. Cyrus was not Jewish and did not worship Israel's God, and Isaiah 45:4 says so directly. That shows what the word meant in the Hebrew Bible. Anointed did not describe a special kind of being or even a faithful believer. It described someone commissioned by God for a job.

What did the Jews expect the Messiah to do?

There was no single expectation in the first century. Many hoped for a king from David's line who would free Jerusalem from foreign rule, as in the Psalms of Solomon. The community at Qumran looked for a prophet and two messiahs, one priestly and one royal. Some texts connected the messianic age with healing and good news for the poor. Later Jewish tradition, summarized by Maimonides, expects a Davidic king who rebuilds the Temple and gathers the exiles of Israel.

Why do Jewish people not believe Jesus is the Messiah?

The main reason is that the traditional Jewish expectation is a king who visibly rebuilds the Temple, gathers the exiles and brings peace to the world, and many Jewish readers do not see that in history. They also read passages like Isaiah 53 as describing Israel rather than one person. Christians believe Jesus fulfilled those hopes in a deeper form, through the cross and a Kingdom that is present now. It is a real disagreement, and it should always be discussed with respect, never contempt.