_ZECHARIAH THE PROPHET_
ZECHARIAH i. 1-6, etc.; EZRA v. 1, vi. 14
Zechariah is one of the prophets whose personality as distinguished
from their message exerts some degree of fascination on the student.
This is not due, however, as in the case of Hosea or Jeremiah, to
the facts of his life, for of these we know extremely little; but to
certain conflicting symptoms of character which appear through his
prophecies.
His name was a very common one in Israel, Zekher-Yah, _Jehovah
remembers_.[757] In his own book he is described as _the son of
Berekh-Yah, the son of Iddo_,[758] and in the Aramaic document of the
Book of Ezra as _the son of Iddo_.[759] Some have explained this
difference by supposing that Berekhyah was the actual father of the
prophet, but that either he died early, leaving Zechariah to the care
of the grandfather, or else that he was a man of no note, and Iddo was
more naturally mentioned as the head of the family. There are several
instances in the Old Testament of men being called the sons of their
grandfathers:[760] as in these cases the grandfather was the reputed
founder of the house, so in that of Zechariah Iddo was the head of his
family when it came out of Babylon and was anew planted in Jerusalem.
Others, however, have contested the genuineness of the words _son of
Berekh-Yah_, and have traced their insertion to a confusion of the
prophet with Zechariah son of Yĕbherekh-Yahu, the contemporary of
Isaiah.[761] This is precarious, while the other hypothesis is a very
natural one.[762] Whichever be correct, the prophet Zechariah was a
member of the priestly family of Iddo, that came up to Jerusalem from
Babylon under Cyrus.[763] The Book of Nehemiah adds that in the
high-priesthood of Yoyakim, the son of Joshua, the head of the house of
Iddo was a Zechariah.[764] If this be our prophet, then he was probably
a young man in 520,[765] and had come up as a child in the caravans
from Babylon. The Aramaic document of the Book of Ezra[766] assigns to
Zechariah a share with Haggai in the work of instigating Zerubbabel and
Jeshua to begin the Temple. None of his oracles is dated previous to
the beginning of the work in August 520, but we have seen[767] that
among those undated there are one or two which by referring to the
building of the Temple as still future may contain some relics of that
first stage of his ministry. From November 520 we have the first of his
dated oracles; his Visions followed in January 519, and his last
recorded prophesying in December 518.[768]
These are all the certain events of Zechariah’s history. But in the
well-attested prophecies he has left we discover, besides some obvious
traits of character, certain problems of style and expression which
suggest a personality of more than usual interest. Loyalty to the great
voices of old, the temper which appeals to the experience, rather than
to the dogmas, of the past, the gift of plain speech to his own times,
a wistful anxiety about his reception as a prophet[769] combined with
the absence of all ambition to be original or anything but the clear
voice of the lessons of the past and of the conscience of to-day—these
are the qualities which characterise Zechariah’s orations to the
people. But how to reconcile them with the strained art and obscure
truths of the Visions—it is this which invests with interest the study
of his personality. We have proved that the obscurity and redundancy of
the Visions cannot all have been due to himself. Later hands have
exaggerated the repetitions and ravelled the processes of the original.
But these gradual blemishes have not grown from nothing: the original
style must have been sufficiently involved to provoke the
interpolations of the scribes, and it certainly contained all the weird
and shifting apparitions which we find so hard to make clear to
ourselves. The problem, therefore, remains—how one who had gift of
speech, so straight and clear, came to torture and tangle his style;
how one who presented with all plainness the main issues of his
people’s history found it laid upon him to invent, for the further
expression of these, symbols so laboured and intricate.
We begin with the oracle, which opens his book and illustrates those
simple characteristics of the man that contrast so sharply with the
temper of his Visions.
_In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of Jehovah
came to the prophet Zechariah, son of Berekhyah, son of Iddo,[770]
saying: Jehovah was very wroth[771] with your fathers. And thou shalt
say unto them: Thus saith Jehovah of Hosts: Turn ye to Me—oracle of
Jehovah of Hosts—that I may turn to you, saith Jehovah of Hosts! Be not
like your fathers, to whom the former prophets preached, saying: “Thus
saith Jehovah of Hosts, Turn now from your evil ways and from[772] your
evil deeds,” but they hearkened not, and paid no attention to Me—oracle
of Jehovah. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they
live for ever? But[773] My words and My statutes, with which I charged
My servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? till
these turned and said, As Jehovah of Hosts did purpose to do unto us,
according to our deeds and according to our ways, so hath He dealt with
us._
It is a sign of the new age which we have reached, that its prophet
should appeal to the older prophets with as much solemnity as they
did to Moses himself. The history which led to the Exile has become
to Israel as classic and sacred as her great days of deliverance from
Egypt and of conquest in Canaan. But still more significant is what
Zechariah seeks from that past; this we must carefully discover, if we
would appreciate with exactness his rank as a prophet.
The development of religion may be said to consist of a struggle
between two tempers, both of which indeed appeal to the past, but from
very opposite motives. The one proves its devotion to the older
prophets by adopting the exact formulas of their doctrine, counts these
sacred to the letter, and would enforce them in detail upon the minds
and circumstances of the new generation. It conceives that truth has
been promulgated once for all in forms as enduring as the principles
they contain. It fences ancient rites, cherishes old customs and
institutions, and when these are questioned it becomes alarmed and even
savage. The other temper is no whit behind this one in its devotion to
the past, but it seeks the ancient prophets not so much for what they
have said as for what they have been, not for what they enforced but
for what they encountered, suffered and confessed. It asks not for
dogmas but for experience and testimony. He who can thus read the past
and interpret it to his own day—he is the prophet. In his reading he
finds nothing so clear, nothing so tragic, nothing so convincing as the
working of the Word of God. He beholds how this came to men, haunted
them and was entreated by them. He sees that it was their great
opportunity, which being rejected became their judgment. He finds
abused justice vindicated, proud wrong punished, and all God’s
neglected commonplaces achieving in time their triumph. He reads how
men came to see this, and to confess their guilt. He is haunted by the
remorse of generations who know how they might have obeyed the Divine
call, but wilfully did not. And though they have perished, and the
prophets have died and their formulas are no more applicable, the
victorious Word itself still lives and cries to men with the terrible
emphasis of their fathers’ experience. All this is the vision of the
true prophet, and it was the vision of Zechariah.
His generation was one whose chief temptation was to adopt towards
the past the other attitude we have described. In their feebleness
what could the poor remnant of Israel do but cling servilely to the
former greatness? The vindication of the Exile had stamped the Divine
authority of the earlier prophets. The habits, which the life in
Babylon had perfected, of arranging and codifying the literature of
the past, and of employing it, in place of altar and ritual, in the
stated service of God, had canonised Scripture and provoked men to
the worship of its very letter. Had the real prophet not again been
raised, these habits might have too early produced the belief that the
Word of God was exhausted, and must have fastened upon the feeble life
of Israel that mass of stiff and stark dogmas, the literal application
of which Christ afterwards found crushing the liberty and the force of
religion. Zechariah prevented this—for a time. He himself was mighty
in the Scriptures of the past: no man in Israel makes larger use of
them. But he employs them as witnesses, not as dogmas; he finds in them
not authority, but experience.[774] He reads their testimony to the
ever-living presence of God’s Word with men. And seeing that, though
the old forms and figures have perished with the hearts which shaped
them, the Word itself in its bare truth has vindicated its life by
fulfilment in history, he knows that it lives still, and hurls it upon
his people, not in the forms published by this or that prophet of long
ago, but in its essence and direct from God Himself, as His Word for
to-day and now. _The fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they
live for ever? But My words and My statutes, with which I charged My
servants the prophets, have they not overtaken your fathers? Thus saith
Jehovah of Hosts, Be ye not like your fathers, but turn ye to Me that I
may turn to you._
The argument of this oracle might very naturally have been narrowed
into a credential for the prophet himself as sent from God. About his
reception as Jehovah’s messenger Zechariah shows a repeated anxiety.
Four times he concludes a prediction with the words, _And ye shall know
that Jehovah hath sent me_,[775] as if after his first utterances he
had encountered that suspicion and unbelief which a prophet never
failed to suffer from his contemporaries. But in this oracle there is
no trace of such personal anxiety. The oracle is pervaded only with the
desire to prove the ancient Word of God as still alive, and to drive it
home in its own sheer force. Like the greatest of his order, Zechariah
appears with the call to repent: _Turn ye to Me—oracle of Jehovah of
Hosts—that I may turn to you_. This is the pivot on which history has
turned, the one condition on which God has been able to help men.
Wherever it is read as the conclusion of all the past, wherever it is
proclaimed as the conscience of the present, there the true prophet is
found and the Word of God has been spoken.
The same possession by the ethical spirit reappears, as we shall see,
in Zechariah’s orations to the people after the anxieties of building
are over and the completion of the Temple is in sight. In these he
affirms again that the whole essence of God’s Word by the older
prophets has been moral—to judge true judgment, to practise mercy, to
defend the widow and orphan, the stranger and poor, and to think no
evil of one another. For the sad fasts of the Exile Zechariah enjoins
gladness, with the duty of truth and the hope of peace. Again and again
he enforces sincerity and the love without dissimulation. His ideals
for Jerusalem are very high, including the conversion of the nations to
her God. But warlike ambitions have vanished from them, and
his pictures of her future condition are homely and practical.
Jerusalem shall be no more a fortress, but spread village-wise without
walls.[776] Full families, unlike the present colony with its few
children and its men worn out in middle life by harassing warfare with
enemies and a sullen nature; streets rife with children playing and
old folk sitting in the sun; the return of the exiles; happy harvests
and springtimes of peace; solid gain of labour for every man, with no
raiding neighbours to harass, nor the mutual envies of peasants in
their selfish struggle with famine.
It is a simple, hearty, practical man whom such prophesying reveals,
the spirit of him bent on justice and love, and yearning for the
unharassed labour of the field and for happy homes. No prophet has more
beautiful sympathies, a more direct word of righteousness, or a braver
heart. _Fast not, but love truth and peace. Truth and wholesome justice
set ye up in your gates. Be not afraid; strengthen your hands! Old men
and women shall yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in
hand for the fulness of their years; the city’s streets shall be rife
with boys and girls at play._
FOOTNOTES:
[757] זֶכֶרְיָה; LXX. Ζαχαρίας.
[758] i. 1: בֶּן־בֶרֶכְיָה בֶּן־עִדּוֹ. In i. 7: בֶּרֶכְיָהוּ
בֶּן־עִדּוֹא.
[759] Ezra v. 1, vi. 14: בַּר־עִדּוֹא.
[760] Gen. xxiv. 47, cf. xxix. 5; 1 Kings xix. 16, cf. 2 Kings ix. 14,
20.
[761] Isa. viii. 2: בֶּן־יְבֶרֶכְיָהוּ. This confusion, which existed
in early Jewish and Christian times, Knobel, Von Ortenberg, Bleek,
Wellhausen and others take to be due to the effort to find a second
Zechariah for the authorship of chaps. ix. ff.
[762] So Vatke, König and many others. Marti prefers it (_Der Prophet
Sacharja_, p. 58). See also Ryle on Ezra v. 1.
[763] Neh. xii. 4.
[764] _Ib._ 16.
[765] This is not proved, as Pusey, König (_Einl._, p. 364) and others
think, by נַעַר, or young man, of the Third Vision (ii. 8 Heb., ii. 4
LXX. and Eng.). Cf. Wright, _Zechariah and his Prophecies_, p. xvi.
[766] v. 1, vi. 14.
[767] Above, p. 260.
[768] More than this we do not know of Zechariah. The Jewish and
Christian traditions of him are as unfounded as those of other
prophets. According to the Jews he was, of course, a member of the
mythical Great Synagogue. See above on Haggai, pp. 232 f. As in the
case of the prophets we have already treated, the Christian traditions
of Zechariah are found in (Pseud-)Epiphanius, _De Vitis Prophetarum_,
Dorotheus, and Hesychius, as quoted above, p. 80. They amount to this,
that Zechariah, after predicting in Babylon the birth of Zerubbabel,
and to Cyrus his victory over Crœsus and his treatment of the Jews,
came in his old age to Jerusalem, prophesied, died and was buried near
Beit-Jibrin—another instance of the curious relegation by Christian
tradition of the birth and burial places of so many of the prophets to
that neighbourhood. Compare Beit-Zakharya, 12 miles from Beit-Jibrin.
Hesychius says he was born in Gilead. Dorotheus confuses him, as the
Jews did, with Zechariah of Isa. viii. 1. See above, p. 265, n. 1.
Zechariah was certainly not the Zechariah whom our Lord describes as
slain between the Temple and the Altar (Matt. xxiii. 35; Luke xi.
51). In the former passage alone is this Zechariah called the son of
Barachiah. In the _Evang. Nazar._ Jerome read _the son of Yehoyada_.
Both readings may be insertions. According to 2 Chron. xxiv. 21, in the
reign of Joash, Zechariah, the son of Yehoyada the priest, was stoned
in the court of the Temple, and according to Josephus (IV. _Wars_, v.
4), in the year 68 A.D. Zechariah son of Baruch was assassinated in the
Temple by two zealots. The latter murder may, as Marti remarks (pp. 58
f.), have led to the insertion of Barachiah into Matt. xxiii. 35.
[769] ii. 13, 15; iv. 9; vi. 15.
[770] LXX. Ἀδδω. See above, p. 264.
[771] Heb. _angered with anger_; Gr. _with great anger_.
[772] As in LXX.
[773] LXX. has misunderstood and expanded this verse.
[774] It is to be noticed that Zechariah appeals to the Torah of the
prophets, and does not mention any Torah of the priests. Cf. Smend, _A.
T. Rel. Gesch._, pp. 176 f.
[775] Page 267, n. 769.
[776] This picture is given in one of the Visions: the Third.