Anointing

← Encyclopedia

Anointing is the ritual application of oil — usually to the head or body of a person, sometimes to an object — to mark a change in status: to set apart, to heal, to consecrate, or to honour the dead. The practice is ancient and widespread across the Near East and the Mediterranean, and its meanings layer rather than replace one another. The same gesture could install a king, ready a corpse for the grave, refresh a guest, or seal a covenant, and a given culture often held several of these at once.

The most consequential strand runs through Israelite religion. The Hebrew Bible describes priests and especially kings being anointed with oil as the act that made the office real — Samuel pouring oil over Saul, and later over David. The one so marked became mashiach, “the anointed,” from which English takes messiah; its Greek translation, christos, gives Christ. Within the texts, the oil is not merely a badge of rank but the visible sign of a divine choosing, sometimes paired with the claim that the spirit of the Lord came upon the anointed from that day. Over later centuries the title detached from any sitting king and became the name for a deliverer still awaited — a shift legible in the sources themselves, as the hope outlived the monarchy that first carried it.

Christianity inherited the vocabulary and reapplied it. Believers were understood to be anointed in turn, and the early church developed rites using consecrated oil — chrism — at baptism, in confirmation, and at the ordination of clergy, alongside the distinct anointing of the sick. Practitioners held the oil to convey the Holy Spirit, not to symbolise it only; the Eastern and Western churches preserved the practice with differing emphases. Islam does not carry the royal-messianic rite, though oil and perfume keep their honoured place; al-Masih, the Arabic form of “the anointed,” remains a title of Jesus in the Qur’an.

What scholarship can establish is the spread and the social function: oil was costly, fragrant, and associated with gladness and with the body’s care, which made it a natural medium for marking a person as elevated, dedicated, or mourned. What the traditions themselves claim goes further — that the gesture does something, transferring a charge that ordinary touch could not. The two readings are not finally separable in the ancient sources, where the symbol and the thing symbolised were rarely held apart.

The image has also travelled into figurative use, where to be “anointed” means to be singled out for a destiny by a power beyond one’s choosing. That sense, secular now, still carries the older weight: a mark conferred from outside, which the marked one did not earn and cannot easily refuse.

→ Related: Consecration · Sacramental · Spirit