Messianic Expectations: The Prophet, The Anointed, And The Text: Devarim 18:15, Mashiach, And The Claim That Moshe (Moses) Wrote Of Yeshua (Jesus). (Part 2 of 2)
A Critical Examination of Hermeneutics, History, and Honest Reading.
(Written By Rohan Palmer).
“The text has disappeared under the interpretation.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Nietzsche’s remark is a pointed critique of what happens when the layers of commentary, tradition, and ideological interest piled on top of a text become so thick that the original text is no longer what anyone is actually engaging with. The interpreter’s framework — whether religious, philosophical, or political — quietly replaces the source itself, so that readers are really encountering the interpretation passed down to them, not the words on the page. For Nietzsche, this was especially visible in how philosophers and theologians handled ancient texts, bending them to serve systems of thought the original authors never intended. There is also a self-implicating edge to the observation: Nietzsche knew that his own work would be subject to the same fate, and indeed it was — his sister famously distorted his writings to serve nationalist ends he would have despised. The line functions simultaneously as a diagnosis of intellectual history and a warning about the will to power that lurks inside every act of interpretation.
This Essay Is The First Esaay In The Messianic Expectation Series.
V. “Moses Wrote of Me”: Yeshua’s Claim and Its Honest Assessment.
In Yochanan (John) 5:39–47, Yeshua (Jesus) addresses his opponents in the Temple: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that testify about me… If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?” In Luke 24:27, after the resurrection, he is described as expounding to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets,” the things concerning himself in all the scriptures.
These are bold and sweeping claims. They deserve careful examination on several levels…
What he does not do. In Yochanan (John) 5, Yeshua (Jesus) does not cite a single specific passage from the Torah. He makes the claim that Moshe (Moses) “wrote about him” without identifying what Moshe (Moses) wrote. In Luke 24, the gospel writer tells us that Yeshua (Jesus) expounded the scriptures, but does not record the content of that exposition. We have the claim without the evidence. Everything proposed afterward as “what Moses wrote about Yeshua” is the work of later interpreters — not Yeshua’s own recorded exegesis.
The two categories of alleged Mosaic testimony. Christian tradition has historically proposed two different kinds of Mosaic witness to Yeshua (Jesus). The first is explicit prediction: passages that can be read as forward-looking prophecy — Devarim (Deuteronomy) 18:15 (the prophet like Moshe/Moses), Bereishit (Genesis) 3:15 (the seed of the woman), Bereishit (Genesis) 49:10 (the scepter of Judah), Bamidbar (Numbers) 24:17 (the star out of Yakov/Jacob). The second, far broader, is typology: retrospective pattern-recognition in which earlier figures and events are understood as foreshadowing later ones. The binding of Yitzchak (Isaac) prefigures sacrifice; the Passover lamb prefigures redemption through blood; the brazen serpent in the wilderness (which Yeshua himself invokes in Yochanan (John) 3:14 prefigures one “lifted up”; the manna (which he invokes in Yochanan/John 6:32) prefigures “bread from heaven.”
The critical distinction. Prophecy and typology are fundamentally different interpretive operations. Prophecy, in the strict sense, means a forward-looking statement whose meaning was determinate before its fulfillment — a statement that could be recognized as referring to a specific future event independently of knowing that event. Typology, by contrast, is retrospective: it is the recognition, after the fact, that an earlier event or person structurally resembles a later one. Typology works backward from conclusion to text; prophecy, if genuine, works forward from text to event.
Most of what Christian interpreters find in Moshe (Moses) is typological, not strictly predictive. The original Israelites receiving the Torah did not read the binding of Isaac, the Passover lamb, or the brazen serpent as prophecies about a future individual. These connections are visible only to someone who already believes in Yeshua and then looks back at the Torah through that theological lens. This does not make the connections fictitious — typology is a legitimate hermeneutical mode — but it means they do not constitute independent evidence. They demonstrate that the Torah can be read in a certain way once a prior theological commitment is in place; they do not demonstrate that the Torah demands that reading on its own terms.
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Devarim (Deuteronomy)18:15 is the one passage that could, at least in principle, be argued as something closer to genuine forward-looking prediction. But as the foregoing analysis shows, even that claim is contested at the levels of grammar, literary context, historical interpretation, and the meaning of the very words used.
The deeper structure of the claim.Yeshua’s (Jesus’) statement in Yochanan (John) 5 is, in a deep sense, self-referential. He is asking his interlocutors to read the Torah differently — not as a legal code to be obeyed for its own sake but as a testimony pointing toward him. From a traditional Jewish perspective, this is precisely the problem: the Torah is not a prophecy-code but God’s direct instruction to Israel. Its purpose is covenantal obedience, not christological anticipation. The Rambam and Rashi do not read the Torah as secretly about a future individual; they read it as God’s living word addressed to a living community. When Yeshua says “the scriptures testify of me,” he is performing a hermeneutical act — an argument about *how to read* — that cannot be evaluated by simply looking at the texts, because the texts look different depending on who you already believe Yeshua (Jesus)to be.
VI. The Hermeneutical Divide: What Is at Stake.
The disagreement over Devarim (Deuteronomy) 18:15 and Yeshua’s (Jesus’) claim about Moshe (Moses) is not, at bottom, a disagreement about grammar or ancient history, though those matter. It is a disagreement about hermeneutics — about what kind of text the Torah is and how its meaning is determined.
The Jewish tradition, crystallized especially after 70 CE in rabbinic Judaism, reads the Torah as God’s covenant instruction to Israel: perpetually binding, communally lived, not principally about a future individual. The Torah’s authority is its directness — this is what God requires of you, now. A reading that transforms the Torah into a prophetic scroll about someone else deflects from that directness.
The Christian tradition, including the tradition Yeshua (Jesus) himself represented in some form, reads the Torah through a teleological lens: everything points forward, all institutions and events are shadows of a coming reality, and the whole narrative finds its resolution in one person. This is a coherent hermeneutical stance — but it is a choice, not an exegetical necessity. The text does not compel it.
What honest inquiry requires is the acknowledgment that neither reading falls simply and obviously out of the text itself. Both are interpretive frameworks brought to the text from communities of faith with prior theological commitments. The grammar supports the institutional-collective reading. The literary context supports the institutional reading. The absence of the word mashiach (Messiah/Anointed One) undermines the messianic bridge. The silence of the text about any specific fulfillment undermines the singular-prediction reading. And Yeshua’s (Jesus’) own claim in John 5, for all its force, is unaccompanied by the exegetical specificity that would make it verifiable on its own terms.
VII. Conclusion: Reading Honestly.
Several conclusions emerge from this analysis that can be stated with confidence regardless of theological commitments. The word mashiach (Messiah/Anointed One) does not appear in Devarim (Deuteronomy) 18:15. The passage uses navi, and functions within a governance section as an institutional provision for ongoing prophetic guidance. Its grammar, context, and internal test-criteria all point toward a succession of prophets, not a singular distant figure. The eschatological-singular reading is a development of Second Temple Judaism, not the plain sense of the text, and it was the foundation on which the Christian application to Yeshua was built — not the text itself.
The developed Jewish concept of HaMashiach (The Messiah/The Anointed One) is primarily a royal-Davidic figure whose criteria are political and halachic: rebuilt Temple, gathered exiles, restored Davidic kingship. This figure is a king, not a prophet. Devarim 18:15 describes a prophet. The bridge between them is not supplied by the Torah. Yeshua’s (Jesus’) claim that Moshe (Moses) “wrote about him” is a hermeneutical assertion, not a verse-by-verse demonstration. It is made without citing specific passages, and its content must be inferred from what his followers subsequently read into the Torah — a mixture of typological correspondence and selective proof-texting that is visible and compelling from within a prior faith in Yeshua, but not self-evidently demanded by the texts on their own terms.
None of this determines whether Yeshua (Jesus) is or is not who he claimed to be. It does determine what kind of argument can legitimately be made from Devarim (Deuteronomy) 18:15. That passage, read in its own terms, is about Israel’s ongoing prophetic tradition. To make it carry the weight of a specific prediction about Yeshua requires an interpretive journey whose steps must be named honestly: from institutional provision to eschatological prediction (a Second Temple move), from navi to mashiach (a category shift the text doesn’t authorize), from mashiach-as-king to mashiach-as-prophet (another category reversal), and finally from there to Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth (a theological conviction, not an exegetical conclusion).
Those who make that journey may do so with conviction and integrity. But they should make it with their eyes open — knowing they are reading toward the text from faith, not out of the text toward a conclusion the text compels on its own.
The Torah says what it says. What we make of it says something about us.
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This essay draws on the Hebrew text of Devarim, the JPS Torah Commentary (Jeffrey Tigay), Rashi’s commentary on Devarim, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah and Hilchos Melachim), the Gospel of John and Luke in Greek, scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, and the work of scholars including David DeJong (A Prophet Like Moses, Brill, 2022) and Walter Brueggemann on the Deuteronomistic tradition.
