History of the Old Covenant. By J. H. Kurtz [pp. 451-486]

Kurtz on the Old Covenant.
sovereignty, that the superiority here assigned that tribe
received any marked accomplishment. The denial of the
genuineness of the prophecy even, furnishes no escape from this
difficulty; for no one in the time of David or of the Judges,
could have written this supposing it to describe what had in his
days already occurred. Nor does Tuch mend the matter, by
translating "as long as they shall come to Shiloh" in their
annual festivals, i. e. in the writer's intention, for ever; for
besides violating the grammatical construction, and giving to
the words a sense wholly inadmissible, he obtrudes upon the
writer the expectation that the sanctuary would be for ever
without a fixed place of abode, and makes the future rule of
Judah dependent on the continuance of a state of things, with
the cessation of which, Asaph on the other hand, links the commencement of the sovereignty of that tribe, Ps. lxxviii. 60,
67-72.
What, then, does Shiloh here mean? Calvin follows some
Jewish interpreters, in supposing it to be an obsolete word
meaning his (Judah's) son. But of the existence of such a
word, or of its having this sense, there is no evidence. A large
number of the ancient and most valuable versions render it
"he to whom it belongs," or "for whom it is reserved." This
passage would then find a parallel in Ezek. xxi. 27, "until he
come, whose right it is." The chief, in fact the decisive objection against this explanation of the word is, that it not only
assumes an unusual grammatical form, and an unusual and harsh
ellipsis, but it requires an unwarranted alteration of the text.
The true meaning of Shiloh, according to its derivation, is
rest or peace. This is, by the majority of commentators,
taken as the abstract for the concrete, and understood as a
personal designation of the Messiah, equivalent to the Peacemaker. To this Kurtz objects that Shiloh must, for grammatical
reasons, be the object, and not the subject of the verb; and
that the expectation of a personal Messiah was foreign to the
patriarchal period. The promises and hopes of that period, and
the immediate wants that were felt, all related to the expansion
from one to a great people. The introduction of the future
good was as yet revealed only in the indefinite form, which
made this people in their totality the medium of blessing, the
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