_THE BOOK OF ZEPHANIAH_
The Book of Zephaniah is one of the most difficult in the prophetic
canon. The title is very generally accepted; the period from which
chap. i. dates is recognised by practically all critics to be the reign
of Josiah, or at least the last third of the seventh century. But after
that doubts start, and we find present nearly every other problem of
introduction.
To begin with, the text is very damaged. In some passages we may be
quite sure that we have not the true text;[71] in others we cannot be
sure that we have it,[72] and there are several glosses.[73] The bulk
of the second chapter was written in the Qinah, or elegiac measure, but
as it now stands the rhythm is very much broken. It is difficult to
say whether this is due to the dilapidation of the original text or to
wilful insertion of glosses and other later passages. The Greek version
of Zephaniah possesses the same general features as that of other
difficult prophets. Occasionally it enables us to correct the text;
but by the time it was made the text must already have contained the
same corruptions which we encounter, and the translators were ignorant
besides of the meaning of some phrases which to us are plain.[74]
The difficulties of textual criticism as well as of translation are
aggravated by the large number of words, grammatical forms and phrases
which either happen very seldom in the Old Testament,[75] or nowhere
else in it at all.[76] Of the rare words and phrases, a very few (as
will be seen from the appended notes) are found in earlier writings.
Indeed all that are found are from the authentic prophecies of Isaiah,
with whose style and doctrine Zephaniah’s own exhibit most affinity.
All the other rarities of vocabulary and grammar are shared only by
_later_ writers; and as a whole the language of Zephaniah exhibits
symptoms which separate it by many years from the language of the
prophets of the eighth century, and range it with that of Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, the Second Isaiah and still later literature. It may be useful
to the student to collect in a note the most striking of these symptoms
of the comparative lateness of Zephaniah’s dialect.[77]
We now come to the question of date, and we take, to begin with, the
First Chapter. It was said above that critics agree as to the general
period—between 639, when Josiah began to reign, and 600. But this
period was divided into three very different sections, and each of
these has received considerable support from modern criticism. The
great majority of critics place the chapter in the early years of
Josiah, before the enforcement of Deuteronomy and the great Reform in
621.[78] Others have argued for the later years of Josiah, 621—608, on
the ground that the chapter implies that the great Reform has already
taken place, and otherwise shows knowledge of Deuteronomy;[79] while
some prefer the days of reaction under Jehoiakim, 608 ff.,[80] and
assume that the phrase in the title, _in the days of Josiah_, is a late
and erroneous inference from i. 4.
The evidence for the argument consists of the title and the condition
of Judah reflected in the body of the chapter. The latter is a definite
piece of oratory. Under the alarm of an immediate and general war,
Zephaniah proclaims a vast destruction upon the earth. Judah must fall
beneath it: the worshippers of Baal, of the host of heaven and of
Milcom, the apostates from Jehovah, the princes and house of the king,
the imitators of foreign fashions, and the forceful and fraudulent,
shall be cut off in a great slaughter. Those who have grown sceptical
and indifferent to Jehovah shall be unsettled by invasion and war. This
shall be the Day of Jehovah, near and immediate, a day of battle and
disaster on the whole land.
The conditions reflected are thus twofold—the idolatrous and sceptical
state of the people, and an impending invasion. But these suit,
more or less exactly, each of the three sections of our period. For
Jeremiah distinctly states that he had to attack idolatry in Judah for
twenty-three years, 627 to 604;[81] he inveighs against the falseness
and impurity of the people alike before the great Reform, and after it
while Josiah was still alive, and still more fiercely under Jehoiakim.
And, while before 621 the great Scythian invasion was sweeping upon
Palestine from the north, after 621, and especially after 604, the
Babylonians from the same quarter were visibly threatening the land.
But when looked at more closely, the chapter shows several features
which suit the second section of our period less than they do the
other two. The worship of the host of heaven, probably introduced
under Manasseh, was put down by Josiah in 621; it revived under
Jehoiakim,[82] but during the latter years of Josiah it cannot possibly
have been so public as Zephaniah describes.[83]
Other reasons which have been given for those years are
inconclusive[84]—the chapter, for instance, makes no indubitable
reference to Deuteronomy or the Covenant of 621—and on the whole we
may leave the end of Josiah’s reign out of account. Turning to the
third section, Jehoiakim’s reign, we find one feature of the prophecy
which suits it admirably. The temper described in ver. 12—_men who are
settled on their lees, who say in their heart, Jehovah doeth neither
good nor evil_—is the kind of temper likely to have been produced
among the less earnest adherents of Jehovah by the failure of the
great Reform in 621 to effect either the purity or the prosperity of
the nation. But this is more than counterbalanced by the significant
exception of the king from the condemnation which ver. 8 passes on
the _princes and the sons of the king_. Such an exception could not
have been made when Jehoiakim was on the throne; it points almost
conclusively to the reign of the good Josiah. And with this agrees the
title of the chapter—_in the days of Josiah_.[85] We are, therefore,
driven back to the years of Josiah before 621. In these we find no
discrepancy either with the chapter itself, or with its title. The
southward march of the Scythians,[86] between 630 and 625, accounts for
Zephaniah’s alarm of a general war, including the invasion of Judah;
the idolatrous practices which he describes may well have been those
surviving from the days of Manasseh,[87] and not yet reached by the
drastic measures of 621; the temper of scepticism and hopelessness
condemned by ver. 12 was possible among those adherents of Jehovah who
had hoped greater things from the overthrow of Amon than the slow and
small reforms of the first fifteen years of Josiah’s reign. Nor is a
date before 621 made at all difficult by the genealogy of Zephaniah
in the title. If, as is probable,[88] the Hezekiah given as his
great-great-grandfather be Hezekiah the king, and if he died about 695,
and Manasseh, his successor, who was then twelve, was his eldest son,
then by 630 Zephaniah cannot have been much more than twenty years of
age, and not more than twenty-five by the time the Scythian invasion
had passed away.[89] It is therefore by no means impossible to suppose
that he prophesied before 625; and besides, the data of the genealogy
in the title are too precarious to make them valid, as against an
inference from the contents of the chapter itself.
The date, therefore, of the first chapter of Zephaniah may be given as
about 625 B.C., and probably rather before than after that year, as the
tide of Scythian invasion has apparently not yet ebbed.
The other two chapters have within recent years been almost wholly
denied to Zephaniah. Kuenen doubted chap. iii. 9-20. Stade makes all
chap. iii. post-exilic, and suspects ii. 1-3, 11. A very thorough
examination of them has led Schwally[90] to assign to exilic or
post-exilic times the whole of the little sections comprising them,
with the possible exception of chap. iii. 1-7, which “may be”
Zephaniah’s. His essay has been subjected to a searching and generally
hostile criticism by a number of leading scholars;[91] and he has
admitted the inconclusiveness of some of his reasons.[92]
Chap. ii. 1-4 is assigned by Schwally to a date later than Zephaniah’s,
principally because of the term _meekness_ (ver. 3), which is a
favourite one with post-exilic writers. He has been sufficiently
answered;[93] and the close connection of vv. 1-3 with chap. i. has
been clearly proved.[94] Chap. ii. 4-15 is the passage in elegiac
measure but broken, an argument for the theory that insertions have
been made in it. The subject is a series of foreign nations—Philistia
(5-7), Moab and Ammon (8-10), Egypt (11) and Assyria (13-15). The
passage has given rise to many doubts; every one must admit the
difficulty of coming to a conclusion as to its authenticity. On the
one hand, the destruction just predicted is so universal that, as
Professor Davidson says, we should expect Zephaniah to mention other
nations than Judah.[95] The concluding oracle on Niniveh must have
been published before 608, and even Schwally admits that it may be
Zephaniah’s own. But if this be so, then we may infer that the first
of the oracles on Philistia is also Zephaniah’s, for both it and the
oracle on Assyria are in the elegiac measure, a fact which makes it
probable that the whole passage, however broken and intruded upon, was
originally a unity. Nor is there anything in the oracle on Philistia
incompatible with Zephaniah’s date. Philistia lay on the path of the
Scythian invasion; the phrase in ver. 7, _shall turn their captivity_,
is not necessarily exilic. As Cornill, too, points out, the expression
in ver. 13, _He will stretch out His hand to the north_, implies that
the prophecy has already looked in other directions. There remains the
passage between the oracles on Philistia and Assyria. This is not in
the elegiac measure. Its subject is Moab and Ammon, who were not on the
line of the Scythian invasion, and Wellhausen further objects to it,
because the attitude to Israel of the two peoples whom it describes
is that which is attributed to them only just before the Exile and
surprises us in Josiah’s reign. Dr. Davidson meets this objection by
pointing out that, just as in Deuteronomy, so here, Moab and Ammon are
denounced, while Edom, which in Deuteronomy is spoken of with kindness,
is here not denounced at all. A stronger objection to the passage is
that ver. 11 predicts the conversion of the nations, while ver. 12
makes them the prey of Jehovah’s sword, and in this ver. 12 follows
on naturally to ver. 7. On this ground as well as on the absence of
the elegiac measure the oracle on Moab and Ammon is strongly to be
suspected.
On the whole, then, the most probable conclusion is that chap. ii.
4-15 was originally an authentic oracle of Zephaniah’s in the elegiac
metre, uttered at the same date as chap. i.—ii. 3, the period of the
Scythian invasion, though from a different standpoint; and that it has
suffered considerable dilapidation (witness especially vv. 6 and 14),
and probably one great intrusion, vv. 8-10.
There remains the Third Chapter. The authenticity has been denied by
Schwally, who transfers the whole till after the Exile. But the chapter
is not a unity.[96]
In the first place, it falls into two sections, vv. 1-13 and 14-20.
There is no reason to take away the bulk of the first section from
Zephaniah. As Schwally admits, the argument here is parallel to that
of chap. i.—ii. 3. It could hardly have been applied to Jerusalem
during or after the Exile, but suits her conditions before her fall.
Schwally’s linguistic objections to a pre-exilic date have been
answered by Budde.[97] He holds ver. 6 to be out of place and puts
it after ver. 8, and this may be. But as it stands it appeals to the
impenitent Jews of ver. 5 with the picture of the judgment God has
already completed upon the nations, and contrasts with ver. 7, in which
God says that He trusts Israel will repent. Vv. 9 and 10 are, we shall
see, obviously an intrusion, as Budde maintains and Davidson admits to
be possible.[98]
We reach more certainty when we come to the second section of the
chapter, vv. 14-20. Since Kuenen it has been recognised by the majority
of critics that we have here a prophecy from the end of the Exile or
after the Return. The temper has changed. Instead of the austere and
sombre outlook of chap. i.—ii. 3 and chap. iii. 1-13, in which the
sinful Israel is to be saved indeed, but only as by fire, we have a
triumphant prophecy of her recovery from all affliction (nothing is
said of her sin) and of her glory among the nations of the world. To
put it otherwise, while the genuine prophecies of Zephaniah almost
grudgingly allow a door of escape to a few righteous and humble
Israelites from a judgment which is to fall alike on Israel and the
Gentiles, chap. iii. 14-20 predicts Israel’s deliverance from her
Gentile oppressors, her return from captivity and the establishment
of her renown over the earth. The language, too, has many resemblances
to that of Second Isaiah.[99] Obviously therefore we have here, added
to the severe prophecies of Zephaniah, such a more hopeful, peaceful
epilogue as we saw was added, during the Exile or immediately after it,
to the despairing prophecies of Amos.
FOOTNOTES:
[71] i. 3_b_, 5_b_; ii. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 last word, 14_b_; iii. 18, 19_a_,
20.
[72] i. 14_b_; ii. 1, 3; iii. 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 17.
[73] i. 3_b_, 5_b_; ii. 2, 6; iii. 5 (?).
[74] For details see translation below.
[75] i. 3, מַכְשֵׁלוֹת, only in Isa. iii. 6; 15, משואה, only in Job
xxx. 3, xxxviii. 27—cf. Psalms lxxiii. 18, lxxiv. 3; ii. 8, גדפים, Isa.
xliii. 28—cf. li. 7; 9, חרול, Prov. xxiv. 31, Job xxx. 7; 15, עליזה,
Isa. xxii. 2, xxiii. 7, xxxii. 13—cf. xiii. 3, xxiv. 8; iii. 1, נגאלה,
see next note but one; 3, זאבי ערב, Hab. i. 8; 11, עליזי גאותך, Isa.
xiii. 3; 18, נוגי, Lam. i. 4, נוגות.
[76] i. 11, המכתש as the name of a part of Jerusalem, otherwise only
Jer. xv. 19; נטילי כסף; 12, קפא in pt. Qal, and otherwise only Exod.
xv. 8, Zech. xiv. 6, Job x. 10; 14, מַהֵר (adj.), but the pointing
may be wrong—cf. Maher-shalal-hash-baz, Isa. viii. 1, 3; צרח in Qal,
elsewhere only once in Hi. Isa. xlii. 13; 17, לחום in sense of flesh,
cf. Job xx. 23; 18, נבהלה if a noun (?); ii. 1, קשש in Qal and Hithpo,
elsewhere only in Polel; 9, מכרה ,ממשק; 11, רזה, to make lean,
otherwise only in Isa. xvii. 4, to be lean; 14, ארזה (?); iii. 1,
מראה, pt. of יונה ;מרה, pt. Qal, in Jer. xlvi. 16, l. 16, it may
be a noun; 4, אנשי בגדות; 6, נצדו; 9, שכם אחד; 10, עתרי
בת־פוצי (?); 15, פנה in sense to _turn away_; 18, ממך היו (?).
[77] i. 8, etc., פקד על, followed by person, but not by thing—cf. Jer.
ix. 24, xxiii. 34, etc., Job xxxvi. 23, 2 Chron. xxxvi. 23, Ezek. i.
2; 13, משׁסה, only in Hab. ii. 7, Isa. xlii., Jer. xxx. 16, 2 Kings
xxi. 14; 17, הֵצֵר, Hi. of צרר, only in 1 Kings viii. 37, and Deut.,
2 Chron., Jer., Neh.; ii. 3, ענוה; 8, גדופים, Isa. xliii. 28, li. 7
(fem. pl.); 9, חרול, Prov. xxiv. 31, Job xxx. 7; iii. 1, נגאלה, Ni, pt.
= impure, Isa. lix. 3, Lam. iv. 14; יונה, a pt. in Jer. xlvi. 16, l.
16; 3, זאבי ערב, Hab. i. 8—cf. Jer. v. 6, זאב ערבות; 9, ברור, Isa.
xlix. 2, ברר, Ezek. xx. 38, 1 Chron. vii. 40, ix. 22, xvi. 41, Neh. v.
18, Job xxxiii. 3, Eccles. iii. 18, ix. 1; 11, עליזי גאוה, Isa. xiii.
3; 18, נוּגֵי, Lam. i. 4 has נוּגות.
[78] So Hitzig, Ewald, Pusey, Kuenen, Robertson Smith (_Encyc. Brit._),
Driver, Wellhausen, Kirkpatrick, Budde, von Orelli, Cornill, Schwally,
Davidson.
[79] So Delitzsch, Kleinert, and Schulz (_Commentar über den Proph.
Zeph._, 1892, p. 7, quoted by König).
[80] So König.
[81] Jer. xxv.
[82] Jer. vii. 18.
[83] i. 3.
[84] Kleinert in his Commentary in Lange’s _Bibelwerk_, and Delitzsch
in his article in Herzog’s _Real-Encyclopädie_², both offer a number
of inconclusive arguments. These are drawn from the position of
Zephaniah after Habakkuk, but, as we have seen, the order of the Twelve
is not always chronological; from the supposition that Zephaniah i.
7, _Silence before the Lord Jehovah_, quotes Habakkuk ii. 20, _Keep
silence before Him, all the earth_, but the phrase common to both is
too general to be decisive, and if borrowed by one or other may just as
well have been Zephaniah’s originally as Habakkuk’s; from the phrase
_remnant of Baal_ (i. 4), as if this were appropriate only after the
Reform of 621, but it was quite as appropriate after the beginnings
of reform six years earlier; from the condemnation of _the sons of
the king_ (i. 8), whom Delitzsch takes as Josiah’s sons, who before
the great Reform were too young to be condemned, while later their
characters did develop badly and judgment fell upon all of them, but
_sons of the king_, even if that be the correct reading (LXX. _house of
the king_), does not necessarily mean the reigning monarch’s children;
and from the assertion that Deuteronomy is quoted in the first chapter
of Zephaniah, and “so quoted as to show that the prophet needs only to
put the people in mind of it as something supposed to be known,” but
the verses cited in support of this (viz. 13, 15, 17: cf. Deut. xxviii.
30 and 29) are too general in their character to prove the assertion.
See translation below.
[85] König has to deny the authenticity of this in order to make his
case for the reign of Jehoiakim. But nearly all critics take the phrase
as genuine.
[86] See above, p. 15. For inconclusive reasons Schwally, _Z.A.T.W._,
1890, pp. 215—217, prefers the Egyptians under Psamtik. See in answer
Davidson, p. 98.
[87] Not much stress can be laid upon the phrase _I will cut off the
remnant of Baal_, ver. 4, for, if the reading be correct, it may only
mean the destruction of Baal-worship, and not the uprooting of what has
been left over.
[88] See below, p. 47, n. 105.
[89] If 695 be the date of the accession of Manasseh, being then
twelve, Amariah, Zephaniah’s great-grandfather, cannot have been more
than ten, that is, born in 705. His son Gedaliah was probably not
born before 689, his son Kushi probably not before 672, and his son
Zephaniah probably not before 650.
[90] _Z.A.T.W._, 1890, Heft 1.
[91] Bacher, _Z.A.T.W._, 1891, 186; Cornill, _Einleitung_, 1891; Budde,
_Theol. Stud. u. Krit._, 1893, 393 ff.; Davidson, _Nah., Hab. and
Zeph._, 100 ff.
[92] _Z.A.T.W._, 1891, Heft 2.
[93] By especially Bacher, Cornill and Budde as above.
[94] See Budde and Davidson.
[95] The ideal of chap. i.—ii. 3, of the final security of a poor
and lowly remnant of Israel, “necessarily implies that they shall no
longer be threatened by hostility from without, and this condition
is satisfied by the prophet’s view of the impending judgment on the
ancient enemies of his nation,” _i.e._ those mentioned in ii. 4-15
(Robertson Smith, _Encyc. Brit._, art. “Zephaniah”).
[96] See, however, Davidson for some linguistic reasons for taking the
two sections as one. Robertson Smith, also in 1888 (_Encyc. Brit._,
art. “Zephaniah”), assumed (though not without pointing out the
possibility of the addition of other pieces to the genuine prophecies
of Zephaniah) that “a single leading motive runs through the whole”
book, and “the first two chapters would be incomplete without the
third, which moreover is certainly pre-exilic (vv. 1-4) and presents
specific points of contact with what precedes, as well as a general
agreement in style and idea.”
[97] Schwally (234) thinks that the epithet צדיק (ver. 5) was first
applied to Jehovah by the Second Isaiah (xlv. 21, lxiv. 2, xlii. 21),
and became frequent from his time on. In disproof Budde (3398) quotes
Exod. ix. 27, Jer. xii. 1, Lam. i. 18. Schwally also points to נצדו as
borrowed from Aramaic.
[98] Budde, p. 395; Davidson, 103. Schwally (230 ff.) seeks to prove
the unity of 9 and 10 with the context, but he has apparently mistaken
the meaning of ver. 8 (231). That surely does not mean that the nations
are gathered in order to punish the godlessness of the Jews, but that
they may themselves be punished.
[99] See Davidson, 103.