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The Word You Can Barely Find in Your Own Bible
Open a King James Bible and go looking for the word Messiah in the Old Testament. You will find it twice. Daniel 9:25 and Daniel 9:26, one verse apart, and that is the entire haul across thirty-nine books. The Hebrew word underneath it is sitting there thirty-nine times. English quietly set it down as “anointed” and carried on. So what does Messiah mean? It turns out to be a question about a word your Bible has been translating in front of you your whole life, under a different name.
What Does Messiah Mean in Hebrew? Oil, and a Job to Do
The word is mashiach (Strong’s H4899), and it is built off the verb mashach (H4886), which means to rub something with oil. That is the whole of it. Not “holy one,” not “saviour,” not “divine.” Someone tipped a horn of olive oil over a person’s head, and from that moment the person was marked for an assignment.
Here is the part that surprised me. The verb is not a religious word at all. It builds houses: “and it is cieled with cedar, and painted with vermilion” (Jeremiah 22:14) — painted is mashach. It cooks: “wafers unleavened anointed with oil” (Exodus 29:2). It maintains military kit: “arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield” (Isaiah 21:5). Out of sixty-nine appearances of the verb, sixty-eight are translated “anoint” and one is a man decorating his new house.
So the sacred word is a household word. Oil on bread, oil on a shield, oil on a head.
You can watch it happen to a teenager nobody had shortlisted. “Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward” (1 Samuel 16:13). In the middle of his brothers — the ones who had all been looked over first.
And then there is the verse that stops the whole comfortable version of this. Leviticus 4:3 opens a case in law: “If the priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people…” The Hebrew there is literally the anointed priest — a mashiach — and the statute is calmly working out what he sacrifices when he sins. Israel’s law did not treat anointing as proof of character. It budgeted for the anointed man getting it wrong.
The Anointed King Who Had Never Heard of God
Then the word does something nobody quotes on a Sunday.
“Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him” — Isaiah 45:1
Cyrus was the Persian emperor who took Babylon and let the exiles go home. He was not an Israelite. He had no covenant, no temple, no share in the story — and Isaiah puts the word mashiach on him anyway. The Lord’s anointed. The same title David carried.
Our short video said Cyrus worshipped other gods, and that is the usual shorthand. The text makes a narrower and stranger claim, and it makes it twice in four verses: “I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me” (Isaiah 45:4), and again, “I girded thee, though thou hast not known me” (Isaiah 45:5). Not that he served rivals. That he did not know God was there. What Cyrus personally believed is genuinely unsettled among historians — the clay cylinder recovered from Babylon credits the Babylonian god Marduk with his victory, but it was written for Babylonians in their own house style, and Cyrus’s own inscriptions never name the Persian god that later kings named openly. The record does not close that question. Isaiah is not interested in it either. Isaiah’s point is that God was working through a man who had no idea whose errand he was running.
Which explains a scene that otherwise makes no sense. David is hiding in a cave from a king trying to kill him, gets a clean shot, and refuses: “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing unto my master, the LORD’s anointed” (1 Samuel 24:6). Saul had long since stopped being any good at the job. He kept the title regardless. Anointing was never a report card. It marked what a person had been handed, not how well they were carrying it — which is also why the Hebrew word for servant lands as an honour rather than an insult.
Actions to Take This Week
- Read Isaiah 45:1-5 tonight and count how many times God tells a foreign emperor that he does not know God.
- Write “messiah” in the margin every time you hit the word “anointed” this week, and watch how ordinary the word becomes.
- Thank one person today who has done you real good without ever calling it faith — the Cyrus in your own life.
Want to read the case for this title being handed to Jesus, in full? Matthew is the gospel that argues it from the opening genealogy onward, and we have made the complete Book of Matthew free — the whole text as a PDF, plus a 28-chapter audiobook you can listen to on the commute.
A Prayer About Being Chosen and Sent
God, I have used this name for years and never once asked what it meant. Thank You that it turns out to be about oil and an assignment, and not about my qualifications, because I have never had many. You called a shepherd boy in from the field. You named a foreign king who did not know You were there. So I will stop waiting to feel worthy before I move. Put me where I am needed this week, and give me the nerve to go. Amen.
Journal Prompts
- What are you waiting to feel qualified for? Name the specific signal you are waiting on, then ask whether anyone in Scripture ever got it.
- Cyrus was sent without knowing who sent him. Who has done you good without ever framing it as God’s work?
- Saul kept the title long after he had stopped honouring it. Is there a role you are still holding — parent, friend, colleague — that you have quietly given up on inside?
- If “anointed” means assigned rather than admired, what did you do this week that you have been calling ordinary?
Share This
Messiah was never a surname. It means anointed — oil tipped over a head to mark someone for a job. Israel used that same word for a shepherd boy, a priest who sinned, and a foreign emperor.
#Messiah #BibleStudy #FaithForEveryday #WhoIsJesus #BGodInspired
Q&A: What Does Messiah Mean? The Title That Was Never a Name
What does Messiah mean in Hebrew?
Messiah is mashiach (Strong’s H4899), “anointed one,” from the verb mashach, to rub with oil. It appears 39 times in the Hebrew Bible, and the King James Version renders it “anointed” 37 of those times and “Messiah” only twice — both in Daniel 9, verses 25 and 26.
Is Christ Jesus’ last name?
No. “Christ” is Christos (G5547), the ordinary Greek word for anointed, from the verb chriō, to smear with oil. It is a translation of mashiach, not a family name — Jesus’ contemporaries would have known him as Jesus son of Joseph, of Nazareth. The word became so attached to him that his followers were nicknamed after it: “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26).
Why does Isaiah call Cyrus the Lord’s anointed?
Because in Hebrew the title marks an assignment, not an allegiance. Cyrus, the Persian king who ended the Babylonian exile, is called “his anointed” in Isaiah 45:1, and the same passage says twice that Cyrus did not know God (Isaiah 45:4-5). The word is describing what he was given to do, not what he believed.
Does the word Messiah mean divine?
Not by itself. Kings, priests, prophets and one foreign emperor all carry it in the Old Testament, and Leviticus 4:3 even legislates for an anointed priest who sins. The Christian claim that Jesus is more than an appointed man rests on what he said and did and on what the New Testament goes on to say about him — not on the meaning of this one word.
Why did Jesus tell his disciples not to call him the Messiah?
When Peter answered “Thou art the Christ,” the very next line is “And he charged them that they should tell no man of him” (Mark 8:29-30). The title carried a public expectation of a soldier and a throne, and Jesus was about to redefine it in a way that would have been shouted down if announced first. He let the meaning arrive before the label did.
The Word Andrew Shouted in the Street
The word your Old Testament will barely print out loud is the word one fisherman could not keep in his mouth. “He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ” (John 1:41). Andrew had spent an afternoon with a man and came out running.
Everyone within earshot knew what the word promised, and most of them were wrong about it. The expectation was cavalry. What arrived was a carpenter — Mark’s neighbours call him exactly that (Mark 6:3) — who borrowed a colt nobody had ever ridden, sent two friends to collect it with the message that “the Lord hath need of him” (Mark 11:2-3), and rode it toward a cross. Chosen and sent, exactly as the word says. Just not sent where anyone had planned.
Which puts the question back on us, and it is a smaller one than it sounds. Anointing in the Bible almost never lands on the person the room expected. It landed on the brother left in the field, on a priest the law knew would fail, on an emperor who had never heard the name of the God directing him. If it were going to land on your week, you would probably miss it too — and it might look a lot like an ordinary afternoon.
If you grew up hearing “Christ” as a surname, what changed for you when you found out it was a job description? Tell us in the comments — and send this to whoever first taught you the name.
Watch the original: What Does Messiah Mean? The Title That Was Never a Name on YouTube.
