Another possibility is that “son of David” is a messianic category here, not a biological one. Some of Jesus’s contemporaries expected that the Messiah would be “son of David” in the sense of being a king like David—a warrior who presided over Israel in the time of its greatest power and glory. This seems more likely. The message here then is that the Messiah will not be a king like David, not “son of David” in this sense. Rather, the Messiah will be the kind of king symbolized by Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the final week.
