Genesis 49:10

"The scepter shall not depart from Judah, Nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, And to him shall be the obedience of the peoples."

In this widely accepted messianic passage, the Patriarch, Jacob, prophesies that the tribe of Judah would not lose its tribal identity and capability to apply and enforce Mosaic law upon the people (i.e., the right to adjudicate capital cases and administer capital punishment) until Messiah came.

In Jewish teachings, "Shiloh" is a word for Messiah. The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b, says: "The world was created for the sake of the Messiah, what is this Messiah's name? The school of Rabbi Shila said 'his name is Shiloh, for it is written; until Shiloh come.'" And Targum Onkelos states: "The transmission of domain shall not cease from the house of Judah, nor the scribe from his children's children, forever, until Messiah comes." So, this prophecy gives a specific indicator regarding the time of the coming of the Messiah: namely, that Judah would be stripped of authority at the time of the Messiah.

When was this fulfilled? Judah lost its ability to adjudicate capital cases and enforce the law during the first quarter of the first century A.D. Around the year A.D. 6 -7, when Herod Archelaus was dethroned and banished to Vienna (a city of Gaul), he was replaced not by a Jewish king but by a Roman Procurator named Caponius. The legal power of the Sanhedrin was then immediately restricted---they lost their ability to adjudicate capital cases. Josephus writes: "Archelaus' part of Judea was reduced into a province, and Caponius, one of the equestrian order of the Romans, was sent as a procurator, having the power of life and death put into his hands by Caesar."

Did the Jews of that time view the removal of their authority on capital cases as the removal of the scepter from Judah? The Talmud says: "A little more than forty years before the destruction of the Temple, the power of pronouncing capital sentences was taken away from the Jews." The scepter had departed from Judah. Its royal and legal powers were removed.

But where was Shiloh (Messiah)? Rabbi Rachmon's statement in the Talmud reads thus: "When the members of the Sanhedrin found themselves deprived of their right over life and death, a general consternation took possession of them: they covered their heads with ashes, and their bodies with sackcloth, exclaiming: 'Woe unto us for the scepter has departed from Judah and the Messiah has not come'" The scepter was smitten from the hands of the tribe of Judah. The kingdom of Judea, the last remnant of the greatness of Israel, was debased into being merely a part of the province of Syria.

While the Jews wept in the streets of Jerusalem, there was growing up in the city of Nazareth the young son of a Jewish carpenter: Jesus of Nazareth. The Messiah had indeed come.