What was the larger deed, and how was it to be accomplished? However disproportionate it may seem to us, it was nothing else than the dominion over the whole world, to be accomplished by sudden and miraculous conversion of men’s souls for the most part, or by force of arms, if it should prove necessary. And, as was natural enough, it was in the ancient royal line, the stock of David, that the leader, the Anointed of God, was to be found. The family of David, which was still important and powerful when Zechariah xii. was written (perhaps the fourth century B.C.E.), had evidently since fallen on evil days. It cannot, of course, have entirely disappeared, but no member of undoubted Davidic lineage arises to make political pretensions. It is even likely that, in the absence of adequate records, and with the loss of importance which the family suffered during the fourth and third centuries B.C.E., it had become impossible for anyone to prove descent from David. None the less, perhaps because of the decline of the family, popular imagination clung to the royal house. In the bitter days of exile, the writer of Psalm lxxxix. loses no faith in the destiny of David’s line: I have made a covenant with My chosen, I have sworn unto David, My servant, Thy seed will I establish forever, And build up thy throne to all generations. So the author of First Maccabees, a loyal supporter of a non-Davidic dynasty, puts in the mouth of the dying Mattathiah the acknowledgment of the ultimate sovereignty of the ancient house: “David for being merciful possessed the throne of an everlasting kingdom” (I Macc. ii. 57). The certainty of this high destiny grew inversely with the political fortunes of the people. But when even the Hasmoneans fell, and Judea, so far from increasing the possessions of Solomon, found herself a hopelessly insignificant fraction of a huge empire, it was not merely the political side of the Messianic idea that fed upon its non-realization. Obscure economic and religious factors had long been operative, and all these raised popular temper to a point of high and, as it proved, destructive tension. It must always be remembered that those who undertook to lead the people against the Romans did not aim at the restoration of the Hasmonean or even Solomonic kingdom. The establishment of a throne in Jerusalem was the first step of that triumphant march through the world which would inaugurate the reign of the God-anointed son of David. The Judean zealots fought for no mean prize.