_THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH (I.-VIII.)_
The Book of Zechariah, consisting of fourteen chapters, falls clearly
into two divisions: _First_, chaps. i.—viii., ascribed to Zechariah
himself and full of evidence for their authenticity; _Second_, chaps.
ix.—xiv., which are not ascribed to Zechariah, and deal with conditions
different from those upon which he worked. The full discussion of the
date and character of this second section we shall reserve till we
reach the period at which we believe it to have been written. Here an
introduction is necessary only to chaps. i.—viii.
These chapters may be divided into five sections.
I. Chap. i. 1-6.—A Word of Jehovah which came to Zechariah in the
eighth month of the second year of Darius, that is in November 520
B.C., or between the second and the third oracles of Haggai.[720] In
this the prophet’s place is affirmed in the succession of the prophets
of Israel. The ancient prophets are gone, but their predictions have
been fulfilled in the calamities of the Exile, and God’s Word abides
for ever.
II. Chap. i. 7—vi. 9.—A Word of Jehovah which came to Zechariah on the
twenty-fourth of the eleventh month of the same year, that is January
or February 519, and which he reproduces in the form of eight Visions
by night. (1) The Vision of the Four Horsemen: God’s new mercies to
Jerusalem (chap. i. 7-17). (2) The Vision of the Four Horns, or Powers
of the World, and the Four Smiths, who smite them down (ii. 1-4 Heb.,
but in the Septuagint and in the English Version i. 18-21). (3) The
Vision of the Man with the Measuring Rope: Jerusalem shall be rebuilt,
no longer as a narrow fortress, but spread abroad for the multitude of
her population (chap. ii. 5-9 Heb., ii. 1-5 LXX. and Eng.). To this
Vision is appended a lyric piece of probably older date calling upon
the Jews in Babylon to return, and celebrating the joining of many
peoples to Jehovah, now that He takes up again His habitation in
Jerusalem (chap. ii. 10-17 Heb., ii. 6-13 LXX. and Eng.). (4) The
Vision of Joshua, the High Priest, and the Satan or Accuser: the Satan
is rebuked, and Joshua is cleansed from his foul garments and clothed
with a new turban and festal apparel; the land is purged and secure
(chap. iii.). (5) The Vision of the Seven-Branched Lamp and the Two
Olive-Trees (chap. iv. 1-6_a_, 10_b_-14): into the centre of this has
been inserted a Word of Jehovah to Zerubbabel (vv. 6_b_-10_a_), which
interrupts the Vision and ought probably to come at the close of it.
(6) The Vision of the Flying Book: it is the curse of the land, which
is being removed, but after destroying the houses of the wicked (chap.
v. 1-4). (7) The Vision of the Bushel and the Woman: that is the guilt
of the land and its wickedness; they are carried off and planted in
the land of Shin‘ar (v. 5-11). (8) The Vision of the Four Chariots:
they go forth from the Lord of all the earth, to traverse the earth
and bring His Spirit, or anger, to bear on the North country (chap.
vi. 1-8).
III. Chap. vi. 9-15.—A Word of Jehovah, undated (unless it is to be
taken as of the same date as the Visions to which it is attached),
giving directions as to the gifts sent to the community at Jerusalem
from the Babylonian Jews. A crown is to be made from the silver and
gold, and, according to the text, placed upon the head of Joshua. But,
as we shall see,[721] the text gives evident signs of having been
altered in the interest of the High Priest; and probably the crown
was meant for Zerubbabel, at whose right hand the priest is to stand,
and there shall be a counsel of peace between the two of them. The
far-away shall come and assist at the building of the Temple. This
section breaks off in the middle of a sentence.
IV. Chap. vii.—The Word of Jehovah which came to Zechariah on the
fourth of the ninth month of the fourth year of Darius, that is nearly
two years after the date of the Visions. The Temple was approaching
completion; and an inquiry was addressed to the priests who were in it
and to the prophets concerning the Fasts, which had been maintained
during the Exile, while the Temple lay desolate (chap. vii. 1-3). This
inquiry drew from Zechariah a historical explanation of how the Fasts
arose (chap. vii. 4-14).
V. Chap. viii.—Ten short undated oracles, each introduced by the same
formula, _Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts_, and summarising all
Zechariah’s teaching since before the Temple began up to the question
of the cessation of the Fasts upon its completion—with promises for
the future. (1) A Word affirming Jehovah’s new zeal for Jerusalem and
His Return to her (vv. 1, 2). (2) Another of the same (ver. 3). (3) A
Word promising fulness of old folk and children in her streets (vv. 4,
5). (4) A Word affirming that nothing is too wonderful for Jehovah
(ver. 6). (5) A Word promising the return of the people from east and
west (vv. 7, 8). (6 and 7) Two Words contrasting, in terms similar to
Haggai i., the poverty of the people before the foundation of the
Temple with their new prosperity: from a curse Israel shall become a
blessing. This is due to God’s anger having changed into a purpose of
grace to Jerusalem. But the people themselves must do truth and
justice, ceasing from perjury and thoughts of evil against each other
(vv. 9-17). (8) A Word which recurs to the question of Fasting, and
commands that the four great Fasts, instituted to commemorate the
siege and overthrow of Jerusalem, and the murder of Gedaliah, be
changed to joy and gladness (vv. 18, 19). (9) A Word predicting the
coming of the Gentiles to the worship of Jehovah at Jerusalem (vv.
20-22). (10) Another of the same (ver. 23).
There can be little doubt that, apart from the few interpolations
noted, these eight chapters are genuine prophecies of Zechariah, who is
mentioned in the Book of Ezra as the colleague of Haggai, and
contemporary of Zerubbabel and Joshua at the time of the rebuilding of
the Temple.[722] Like the oracles of Haggai, these prophecies are dated
according to the years of Darius the king, from his second year to his
fourth. Although they may contain some of the exhortations to build the
Temple, which the Book of Ezra informs us that Zechariah made along
with Haggai, the most of them presuppose progress in the work, and seek
to assist it by historical retrospect and by glowing hopes of the
Messianic effects of its completion. Their allusions suit exactly the
years to which they are assigned. Darius is king. The Exile has lasted
about seventy years.[723] Numbers of Jews remain in Babylon,[724] and
are scattered over the rest of the world.[725] The community at
Jerusalem is small and weak: it is the mere colony of young men and men
in middle life who came to it from Babylon; there are few children and
old folk.[726] Joshua and Zerubbabel are the heads of the community,
and the pledges for its future.[727] The exact conditions are recalled
as recent which Haggai spoke of a few years before.[728] Moreover,
there is a steady and orderly progress throughout the prophecies, in
harmony with the successive dates at which they were delivered. In
November 520 they begin with a cry to repentance and lessons drawn from
the past of prophecy.[729] In January 519 Temple and City are still to
be built.[730] Zerubbabel has laid the foundation; the completion is
yet future.[731] The prophet’s duty is to quiet the people’s
apprehensions about the state of the world,[732] to provoke their
zeal,[733] give them confidence in their great men,[734] and, above
all, assure them that God is returned to them[735] and their sin
pardoned.[736] But in December 518 the Temple is so far built that the
priests are said to belong to it;[737] there is no occasion for
continuing the fasts of the Exile,[738] the future has opened and the
horizon is bright with the Messianic hopes.[739] Most of all, it is
felt that the hard struggle with the forces of nature is over, and the
people are exhorted to the virtues of the civic life.[740] They have
time to lift their eyes from their work and see the nations coming from
afar to Jerusalem.[741]
These features leave no room for doubt that the great bulk of the first
eight chapters of the Book of Zechariah are by the prophet himself, and
from the years to which he assigns them, November 520 to December 518.
The point requires no argument.
There are, however, three passages which provoke further
examination—two of them because of the signs they bear of an earlier
date, and one because of the alteration it has suffered in the
interests of a later day in Israel’s history.
The lyric passage which is appended to the Second Vision (chap. ii
10-17 Heb., 6-13 LXX. and Eng.) suggests questions by its singularity:
there is no other such among the Visions. But in addition to this it
speaks not only of the Return from Babylon as still future[742]—this
might still be said after the First Return of the exiles in
536[743]—but it differs from the language of all the Visions proper in
describing the return of Jehovah Himself to Zion as still future. The
whole, too, has the ring of the great odes in Isaiah xl.—lv., and seems
to reflect the same situation, upon the eve of Cyrus’ conquest of
Babylon. There can be little doubt that we have here inserted in
Zechariah’s Visions a song of twenty years earlier, but we must confess
inability to decide whether it was adopted by Zechariah himself or
added by a later hand.[744]
Again, there are the two passages called the Word of Jehovah to
Zerubbabel, chap. iv. 6_b_-10_a_; and the Word of Jehovah concerning
the gifts which came to Jerusalem from the Jews in Babylon, chap. vi.
9-15. The first, as Wellhausen has shown,[745] is clearly out of place;
it disturbs the narrative of the Vision, and is to be put at the end
of the latter. The second is undated, and separate from the Visions.
The second plainly affirms that the building of the Temple is still
future. The man whose name is Branch or Shoot is designated: _and he
shall build the Temple of Jehovah_. The first is in the same temper
as the first two oracles of Haggai. It is possible then that these
two passages are not, like the Visions with which they are taken, to
be dated from 519, but represent that still earlier prophesying of
Zechariah with which we are told he assisted Haggai in instigating the
people to begin to build the Temple.
* * * * *
The style of the prophet Zechariah betrays special features almost only
in the narrative of the Visions. Outside these his language is simple,
direct and pure, as it could not but be, considering how much of it is
drawn from, or modelled upon, the older prophets,[746] and chiefly
Hosea and Jeremiah. Only one or two lapses into a careless and
degenerate dialect show us how the prophet might have written, had he
not been sustained by the music of the classical periods of the
language.[747]
This directness and pith is not shared by the language in which the
Visions are narrated.[748] Here the style is involved and redundant.
The syntax is loose; there is a frequent omission of the copula, and of
other means by which, in better Hebrew, connection and conciseness are
sustained. The formulas, _thus saith_ and _saying_, are repeated to
weariness. At the same time it is fair to ask, how much of this
redundancy was due to Zechariah himself? Take the Septuagint version.
The Hebrew text, which it followed, not only included a number of
repetitions of the formulas, and of the designations of the personages
introduced into the Visions, which do not occur in the Massoretic
text,[749] but omitted some which are found in the Massoretic
text.[750] These two sets of phenomena prove that from an early date
the copiers of the original text of Zechariah must have been busy in
increasing its redundancies. Further, there are still earlier
intrusions and expansions, for these are shared by both the Hebrew and
the Greek texts: some of them very natural efforts to clear up the
personages and conversations recorded in the dreams,[751] some of them
stupid mistakes in understanding the drift of the argument.[752] There
must of course have been a certain amount of redundancy in the original
to provoke such aggravations of it, and of obscurity or tortuousness of
style to cause them to be deemed necessary. But it would be very unjust
to charge all the faults of our present text to Zechariah himself,
especially when we find such force and simplicity in the passages
outside the Visions. Of course the involved and misty subjects of the
latter naturally forced upon the description of them a laboriousness of
art, to which there was no provocation in directly exhorting the people
to a pure life, or in straightforward predictions of the Messianic era.
Beyond the corruptions due to these causes, the text of Zechariah
i.—viii. has not suffered more than that of our other prophets. There
are one or two clerical errors;[753] an occasional preposition or
person of a verb needs to be amended. Here and there the text has been
disarranged;[754] and as already noticed, there has been one serious
alteration of the original.[755]
From the foregoing paragraphs it must be apparent what help and
hindrance in the reconstruction of the text is furnished by the
Septuagint. A list of its variant readings and of its mistranslations
is appended.[756]
FOOTNOTES:
[720] See above, pp. 225 ff.
[721] Below, p. 308.
[722] Ezra v. 1, vi. 14.
[723] i. 12, vii. 5: reckoning in round numbers from 590, midway
between the two Exiles of 597 and 586, that brings us to about 520, the
second year of Darius.
[724] ii. 6 (Eng., Heb. 10). On the question whether the Book of
Zechariah gives no evidence of a previous Return from Babylon see
above, pp. 208 ff.
[725] viii. 7, etc.
[726] viii. 4, 5.
[727] iii. 1-10, iv. 6-10, vi. 11 ff.
[728] viii. 9, 10.
[729] i. 1-6.
[730] i. 7-17.
[731] iv. 6-10.
[732] i. 7-21 (Eng., Heb. i. 7—ii. 4).
[733] iv. 6 ff.
[734] iii., iv.
[735] i. 16.
[736] v.
[737] vii. 3.
[738] vii. 1-7, viii. 18, 19.
[739] viii. 20-23.
[740] viii. 16, 17.
[741] viii. 20-23.
[742] ii. 10 f. Heb., 6 f. LXX. and Eng.
[743] Though the expression _I have scattered you to the four winds of
heaven_ seems to imply the Exile before any return.
[744] For the bearing of this on Kosters’ theory of the Return see pp.
211 f.
[745] See below, p. 300.
[746] Outside the Visions the prophecies contain these echoes or
repetitions of earlier writers: chap. i. 1-6 quotes the constant
refrain of prophetic preaching before the Exile, and in chap. vii. 7-14
(ver. 8 must be deleted) is given a summary of that preaching; in chap.
viii. ver. 3 echoes Isa. i. 21, 26, _city of troth_, and Jer. xxxi. 23,
_mountain of holiness_ (there is really no connection, as Kuenen holds,
between ver. 4 and Isa. lxv. 20; it would create more interesting
questions as to the date of the latter if there were); ver. 8 is based
on Hosea ii. 15 Heb., 19 Eng., and Jer. xxxi. 33; ver. 12 is based on
Hosea ii. 21 f. (Heb. 23 f.); with ver. 13 compare Jer. xlii. 18, _a
curse_; vv. 21 ff. with Isa. ii. 3 and Micah iv. 2.
[747] _E.g._ vii. 5, צַמְתֻּנִי אָנִי for צַמְתֶּם לִי: cf. Ewald,
_Syntax_, § 315_b_. The curious use of the acc. in the following verse
is perhaps only apparent; part of the text may have fallen out.
[748] Though there are not wanting, of course, echoes here as in the
other prophecies of older writings, _e.g._ i. 12, 17.
[749] לאמר, _saying_, ii. 8 (Gr. ii. 4); iv. 5, _And the angel who
spoke with me said_; i. 17, cf. vi. 5. _All_ is inserted in i. 11, iii.
9; _lord_ in ii. 2; _of hosts_ (after _Jehovah_) viii. 17; and there
are other instances of palpable expansion, _e.g._ i. 6, 8, ii. 4 bis,
6, viii. 19.
[750] _E.g._ ii. 2, iv. 2, 13, v. 9, vi. 12 bis, vii. 8: cf. also vi.
13.
[751] i. 8 ff., iii. 4 ff.: cf. also vi. 3 with vv. 6 f.
[752] _E.g._ (but this is outside the Visions) the very flagrant
misunderstanding to which the insertion of vii. 8 is due.
[753] v. 6, עינם for עונם as in LXX., and the last words of v. 11;
perhaps vi. 10; and almost certainly vii. 2_a_.
[754] Chap. iv. On 6_a_, 10_b_-14 should immediately follow, and
6_b_-10_a_ come after 14.
[755] vi. 11 ff. See below, pp. 308 f.
[756] Chief variants: i. 8, 10; ii. 15; iii. 4; iv. 7, 12; v. 1, 3, 4,
9; vi. 10, 13; vii. 3; viii. 8, 9, 12, 20. Obvious mistranslations or
misreadings: ii. 9, 10, 15, 17; iii. 4; iv. 7, 10; v. 1, 4, 9; vi. 10,
cf. 14; vii. 3.