Anointed ; usually a consecrated person (as a king, priest, or saint); specifically, the Messiah
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מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ) means the anointed one — a person set apart by the ritual act of pouring oil, consecrated to a particular office and task under God's authority. The word is a participial noun from the verb מָשַׁח (māšaḥ), to anoint, and in the Old Testament it is not a rare or exclusively eschatological term.
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מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ) means the anointed one — a person set apart by the ritual act of pouring oil, consecrated to a particular office and task under God's authority. The word is a participial noun from the verb מָשַׁח (māšaḥ), to anoint, and in the Old Testament it is not a rare or exclusively eschatological term.
The BSB source-word alignment has 39 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include anointed (12), His anointed (3), Your anointed one (3), My anointed ones (2), the Messiah (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Leviticus 4:3. Its strongest book concentrations include 1 Samuel (12), Psalms (10), 2 Samuel (6), Leviticus (4).
מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ) means the anointed one — a person set apart by the ritual act of pouring oil, consecrated to a particular office and task under God's authority. The word is a participial noun from the verb מָשַׁח (māšaḥ), to anoint, and in the Old Testament it is not a rare or exclusively eschatological term. It is applied with striking breadth: to kings installed by God's appointment, to the high priest set apart for the holy service of the tabernacle and temple, and in one arresting use to Cyrus of Persia, a foreign king enlisted by God as His instrument of liberation. The anointing is not merely ceremonial. It signals that the one designated belongs to God's purpose and operates under God's authority. To lift your hand against the Lord's anointed is to transgress sacred boundaries; to honor the anointed is to honor the One who appointed him.
Yet for all its breadth, the word accumulates a gravitational center through Israel's history. As the monarchy disappoints and the exile deepens, the hope of a coming anointed king — one who will reign in righteousness, deliver God's people, and establish the kingdom that no human dynasty could secure — sharpens and intensifies. The Psalms become Israel's prayer book for that hope. The prophets speak into the long silence of exile with promises that an anointed one is still coming. Daniel sets a timeline that stretches the anticipation further and higher. The word that once named Saul and David and the high priest is now being charged with a weight that no single human office can fully carry.
In that sense, māšîaḥ is a word that the Old Testament is always outrunning its own referents. Each anointed king is a partial answer to an expectation the institution of kingship keeps failing to fulfil. Each high priest mediates but cannot finally atone. The cumulative effect is not disillusionment but forward pressure — a canon leaning toward the One whose anointing will not be by oil poured from a horn but by the Spirit without measure, whose kingship will not end at death, and whose mediation will accomplish what every prior anointed one could only prefigure. The pastoral weight of this word is that it belongs to a story still moving when the Old Testament closes.
1 Samuel 2:10 — Hannah's prayer closes with the first explicit anticipation of a coming māšîaḥ, the Lord's anointed king, even before the institution of monarchy in Israel. The word appears here as a forward-looking promise at the dawn of a new era.
מָשִׁיחַ enters Israel's story as a functional, institutional term. Priests and kings are anointed; the oil sets them apart for sacred service under God. The act is not magic — it is commissioning. When Samuel anoints Saul and then David, the ritual announces that God has chosen this person for this task. The word therefore arrives already loaded with the theology of divine appointment, sacred responsibility, and the protections that accompany God's chosen servant.
David becomes the defining figure around whom the word gathers its deepest resonances. The Davidic covenant (2 Samuel 7) promises that David's line will not end, that God will establish a throne forever, that the son of David will be in a relationship with God that no other human office has held. The Psalms explore this covenant from every angle — celebration, lament, betrayal, trust, eschatological longing. The māšîaḥ of the Psalms is simultaneously the reigning king and the hoped-for king, a figure who is present and yet still coming in his fullness.
The prophets then carry the word through the wreckage of exile. The monarchy has failed catastrophically. The temple has been destroyed. The anointed kings have been carried away. And yet the prophets do not abandon the term — they sharpen it. Isaiah speaks of a servant anointed with the Spirit to proclaim release to captives and good news to the poor. Daniel describes an anointed prince whose arrival and death are fixed in God's calendar. The exile does not extinguish the messianic hope; it refines it into something that no earthly dynasty can satisfy.
When the New Testament opens, the question hanging in the air of Second Temple Judaism is: who is the māšîaḥ? The LXX has been calling him Χριστός for generations. Every Passover, every psalm, every prophetic text read aloud in the synagogue has been shaping the expectation. The New Testament's claim is not that Jesus happens to fit a role — it is that Jesus is the singular fulfillment toward which Israel's prior anointed offices and figures pointed but could never fully become: the king whose throne is eternal, the priest whose offering is once for all, the prophet whose word is God's own self-revelation.
The LXX renders māšîaḥ as χριστός (christos), and that translation becomes the New Testament's primary title for Jesus. The trajectory is direct: Jesus is announced at His baptism as the Spirit-anointed One (Luke 4:18, citing Isaiah 61:1), Peter's confession names Him as the Christ (Matthew 16:16), and the early church's proclamation is precisely that Jesus is the māšîaḥ promised in Israel's Scriptures — the one who fulfils kingship, priesthood, and prophetic office in a single person and a single atoning act.
The connection is not typological by inference alone; the New Testament explicitly claims fulfillment of specific messianic texts (Psalm 2, Isaiah 61, Daniel 9) in Jesus.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Hebrew word. One anointed by God for a divinely appointed office; ultimately Israel's promised king-deliverer.
One anointed by God for a divinely appointed office; ultimately Israel's promised king-deliverer.
anointed; usually a consecrated person (as a king, priest, or saint); specifically, the Messiah BDB: anointed Usage: anointed, Messiah.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 3 selected witnesses from 39 lexical occurrence verses.
מָשִׁיחַ is built from this root:
Demonstrates that God appoints even foreign rulers for his purposes. Isaiah 45:1-7
Greek words that correspond to or develop the meaning of this Hebrew word in the New Testament.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
This word opens a preaching pathway from Israel's concrete, institutional life all the way to the person of Jesus Christ — without skipping the history in between. It allows a congregation to see that 'Christ' is not Jesus's last name but His office, His identity, His role in a story that began long before Bethlehem. It gives the preacher material to show why Israel needed a māšîaḥ, what every previous anointed figure failed to accomplish, and how Jesus fulfils what the whole tradition was reaching toward.
It corrects the habit of treating 'Christ' as a decorative theological suffix rather than the loaded title it is. It also corrects the tendency to read the Old Testament's royal and priestly figures as merely historical, divorced from their forward-pointing canonical function. And it corrects overly individualistic or spiritualized accounts of Jesus's mission — the māšîaḥ is a royal, covenantal, publicly commissioned figure, not merely a private spiritual guide.
Start where the congregation already lives: 'We say the name Jesus Christ so often that we have stopped hearing the second word. Christ is not a surname. It is a title — and it is the Hebrew word māšîaḥ, the anointed one, wearing Greek clothes.' Then trace briefly what anointing meant in Israel: divine appointment, sacred commissioning, God's claim on a person for a purpose. Then ask: what does it mean that Jesus — and only Jesus — carries this title as the thing He is, not merely the role He holds?
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