At the heart of the earliest Christian self-understanding, explicit or implicit in much Christian use of the Old Testament, and crucial for Christian theology and interpretation, the concept of 'messiah' in the Old Testament has, however, been eclipsed by the pursuit of other goals in the Old Testament studies. Few recent sustained treatments have appeared from any school of thought. The Lord's Anointed aims to redress the balance. It also recognizes that the study of this topic must always be contemporary: Old Testament studies have changed dramatically in recent years, giving rise to new challenges as well as new opportunities for Christian reading of it.
“The great advantage of the present collection of essays is that (unlike many previous treatments of the messianic passages in the Old Testament) books and texts are treated here by different scholars, who are therefore able to draw out the riches of their material in its own terms without moving too quickly to synthesize all the data into a single picture. As a result, this collection informs the reader’s journey from the Old Testament to the New, rather than simply reading the New back into the Old.”
—H.G.M. Williamson, Regius Professor of Hebrew, University of Oxford