This post is Claude.ai’s summary on 9/19/2026 of an essay by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine published and downloaded from TheTorah.com at the links below. The essay presents a core Jewish-Christian divide: Christianity’s belief that Jesus is both messiah and God’s “only begotten” son, versus Judaism’s rejection of a divine “son of God” as incompatible with monotheism.
Prompt – Summarize the post at this link maintaining the headings and flow of the article. The article is at https://www.thetorah.com/article/psalm-2-is-the-messiah-the-son-of-god. A PDF of it is in Amy-Jill Levine’s directory in DropBox.
Psalm 2: Is the Messiah the Son of God?
Original article is by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine (TheTorah.com)
Introduction
The essay opens by framing a core Jewish-Christian divide: Christianity’s belief that Jesus is both messiah and God’s “only begotten” son, versus Judaism’s rejection of a divine “son of God” as incompatible with monotheism. Early Christians pointed to Psalm 2:7 — where YHWH tells his anointed king, “You are my son; today I have begotten you” — as a prooftext, along with the psalm’s broader imagery of enemies opposing God’s anointed and ultimately being defeated. Jewish readers understood the verse very differently.
The Original Context
The authors identify Psalm 2 as a royal psalm centering on YHWH’s backing of the Davidic king against hostile foreign rulers. The “anointed one” (mashiach) is the king of Judah, confirmed by the psalm’s reference to Zion. Military imagery (the king smashing enemies like pottery) expresses confidence in victory, while later verses warn foreign kings to submit. The likely setting is a royal coronation, based on the anointing language and the reference to “today” as the moment the king’s status changes.
Possibility 1: The King Becomes YHWH’s Son and So Becomes Divine
One reading holds that the king actually becomes divine upon coronation, paralleling Egyptian royal ideology in which Pharaoh becomes “son of Ra.” The authors note Psalm 45’s calling the Davidic king “God” as supporting evidence that some ancient Israelites may have viewed the king in quasi-divine terms.
Possibility 2: YHWH’s Metaphorical Son
Alternatively, the “son” language is metaphorical, akin to other figurative descriptions of God (king, shepherd, warrior, even a woman in labor in Deutero-Isaiah). Under this view, Psalm 2 draws on the wider biblical father-son metaphor connecting YHWH and Israel (e.g., Exodus 4:22, Deuteronomy 32:6).
A Royal Oracle — This subsection argues the psalm may be reworking Nathan’s oracle to David in 2 Samuel 7:14, though the emphasis differs: Nathan stresses divine discipline, while Psalm 2 stresses divine protection. A parallel father-son motif appears in Psalm 89, elevating the king above other rulers.
A Future Davidic King: Second Temple Interpretation
After the monarchy’s fall in 586 B.C.E., and especially after Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E., Psalm 2 was reread eschatologically — no longer about a reigning king but about a future messianic deliverer. The authors trace this shift through the Psalms of Solomon (17:21–24) and the Dead Sea Scroll text 4Q174, both applying the psalm to an end-times redeemer.
Jesus as God’s Son in the New Testament
By the first century, “messiah” (mashiach/christos) had become a technical eschatological title, setting the stage for Christian use of Psalm 2.
- The Gospel of Mark: Mark’s opening line (“Son of God”) and the baptism scene, where a heavenly voice declares Jesus God’s son, echo Psalm 2:7 and counter Roman claims of Caesar’s divine sonship. The title recurs at the Transfiguration and, notably, in the centurion’s declaration at Jesus’s death (Mark 15:39). The authors note that Matthew, Luke, and John differ from Mark by presenting Jesus as having always been God’s son, via birth narratives or the Logos theology of John.
- Acts and Hebrews: Psalm 2:7 as a Prooftext: Paul’s synagogue speech in Acts 13 explicitly quotes Psalm 2:7 as fulfilled in Jesus’s resurrection. Hebrews cites the same verse twice, using it to argue Jesus’s superiority to angels and his fitness as high priest.
- Jesus’s Opponents are Psalm 2’s “Kings of the Earth” (Luke-Acts): In Acts 4, the apostles apply Psalm 2:1–2 to Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate as the psalm’s conspiring “kings,” an interpretive move the authors compare to the pesher technique found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Revelation later draws on the psalm’s “rod of iron” and “kings of the earth” imagery for Jesus’s eschatological victory.
Rabbinic Interpretation of Psalm 2:7 — The Messiah
Classical rabbinic sources (3rd–7th centuries) largely read Psalm 2 non-polemically, connecting it to the future war of Gog and Magog and to the messiah — a continuity with Second Temple and even some New Testament readings. The authors attribute the lack of polemic partly to the political context (pre-Constantinian or Eastern settings where Christianity wasn’t dominant). Midrash Shocher Tov, however, does include an explicit rebuttal of the Christian “son of God” reading, insisting the language is affectionate metaphor rather than literal sonship.
Medieval Jewish Interpretation
Jewish commentators under Muslim rule (e.g., Saadiah Gaon) generally kept the traditional messianic reading. Those under Christian rule increasingly avoided or polemicized against it, since it now resembled Christian doctrine too closely. Rashi shifts partly toward reading the psalm as being about David himself, explicitly “for a refutation of the Christians.”
Radak’s Screed: The article gives particular attention to Radak (David Kimchi, 1160–1235), writing in Provence amid intense Christian missionizing. Radak interprets the “son” language as metaphorical and mounts an extended, multi-pronged logical polemic against the Christian doctrine: that a son must share his father’s nature (making Jesus either fully divine or not God’s literal son); that a divine unity cannot be divided into father and son; that biblical “son of God” language elsewhere is clearly metaphorical; that a son who must “ask” the father for the nations can’t be co-equal in power; and that most of humanity does not, in fact, accept Jesus by faith. Radak explicitly coaches Jewish readers on how to counter Christian missionaries with these arguments.
From David to Messiah Back to David
The concluding section traces the full interpretive arc: an original royal coronation hymn, reinterpreted in the late Second Temple period as a messianic prophecy amid Roman rule, adopted by early Christians as proof of Jesus’s divine sonship, and then — in reaction — reclaimed by medieval Jewish commentators in Christian lands as being about David himself, circling back toward the psalm’s original historical meaning. The authors close by underscoring how historical context shapes both a text’s original meaning and its long reception history.
