The Messiah in the Old Testament

God’s Messiah in the Old Testament: Expectations of a Coming King. 
Andrew T. Abernethy & Gregory Goswell
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020. 

Reviewed by Daniel Zeunert

Two Old Testament professors - Andrew Abernethy from Wheaton, Illinois and Gregory Goswell from Christ College, Sydney - team up to tackle one of the biggest topics in the field of messianism: “What hopes does the Old Testament set forth pertaining to a future royal agent who will carry out God’s kingdom purposes?” In other words, Abernethy and Goswell are looking exclusively at how the Old Testament Scriptures show that the coming messiah will be God’s king. While making clear that prophetic and priestly strands of this study are legitimate and necessary, this book is helpfully focussed on, “royal messianic expectation.”

The book’s outline is straightforward in that it follows the Hebrew canonical ordering. One chapter on the Pentateuch, followed by several chapters in each of the former and latter prophets, and the writings. However, what really puts in the icing on this metaphorical cake of lucid scholarly writing, is that each chapter concludes with a “Postlude: Canonical Reflections,” in which Abernethy and Goswell give us a taste of how the royal messianic expectations in the Old Testament prepare the way for Jesus. These sections add a flavour of redemptive-historical theology that is refreshing for people from all levels of Old Testament knowledge and experience. In other words, for those of us with slightly less than 50 years of combined Old Testament research wisdom, the complexities are cleared up at the end of each chapter. The book concludes as any good evangelical Old Testament study should, by “Looking forward to the New Testament.”

The importance of such a work as this cannot be overstated. To have such an exegetically rigorous resource on royal messianic expectation in the Old Testament will prove invaluable to evangelicals seeking to stay off the tide of scholarship suggesting that messianism has little or no place in Old Testament studies. 

Abernethy and Goswell have done a service to reformed evangelical scholarship and the wider Christian world by showing that Jesus’ claim to kingship is firmly rooted within the Hebrew Scriptures. One could only wish for a similarly thorough work to be done on the prophetic and priestly aspects of Old Testament messianism.