ABSTRACT
We are all familiar with the way in which New Testament writers pick up an extraordinary variety of Old Testament themes and apparently read into them royal (that is, messianic) significance. Very often these appear to be entirely forced to a modern reader, who is perhaps impressed as much by the naivety as by the ingenuity of the tradition. But many of these quasi-typological connections turn out, in the light of a broader examination of the cultural milieu in which the Hebrew Bible came to be written, to be genuine if obscure echoes of a whole repertoire of royal ideological motifs which the biblical authors, far from inventing, have absorbed from the surrounding world. Before we turn to discuss one particular nexus of ideas, let us consider a few general examples of the filtering of such ideas into the New Testament, which appear to have escaped even the orientalists who have so painstakingly recovered the materials.
