On his deathbed in Egypt, the patriarch Jacob blessed each of his twelve sons. To Judah he said: 'The sceptre shall not be taken away from Juda, nor a ruler from his thigh, till he come that is to be sent, and he shall be the expectation of nations' (Genesis 49:10, Douay-Rheims; the Hebrew phrase 'until Shiloh come' is rendered by the ancient versions as 'he to whom it belongs').
Both synagogue and Church read the oracle messianically from the earliest times — the Targums paraphrase it 'until the Messiah comes, whose is the kingdom.' The genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3 trace Jesus precisely through Judah and David, and the Apocalypse names Him 'the lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David' (Revelation 5:5).
Christian apologists since the second century have also noted the timing: within a generation of Christ, Judah's last vestiges of self-rule — and with the Temple's destruction in AD 70, the tribal genealogical records themselves — were gone. The scepter did not outlast the one it awaited.