In his classical study of byzantine imperial art, andré Grabar has made an argument about the impact of imperial representational techniques on Christian images from the fourth century onward. Among other examples, Grabar singles out images of the majestically enthroned Christ which share multiple artistic elements with contemporaneous images of frontally enthroned emperors. The enthroned figure of the emperor was a common motif in Late Roman and Byzantine art. It was designed to convey the ideas of motionless serenity and eternal grandeur. The enthroned emperor was an ageless, haloed figure exercising universal dominion. Artistic representations of the imperial Christ and Christlike emperors were part of a broader trend within the religio-political discourse of Late Antiquity that assimilated the imperial office to a divine prototype. As a result, it was not an individual emperor who was divinized or rendered Christlike, but rather the imperial office itself that deified by participation those persons who happened to hold it at any given moment.

In the text that follows I shall argue that at least some late antique and Byzantine Jewish texts imagine the office of the Messiah in a similar way. I have noted in the previous chapter that it was not so much the personality of the Messiah as his association with and assimilation to the Davidic archetype (or the Davidic office) that were emphasized in Jewish messianic speculations of the time. In this chapter I shall draw further parallels between the office of the Messiah and the office of the emperor.