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 chapter 1 dates is recognized 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; in others we cannot be sure that we have it, and there are several glosses. 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 willful 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.

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, or nowhere else in it at all. 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.

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. 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; while some prefer the days of reaction under Jehoiakim, 608 ff., and assume that the phrase in the title, "in the days of Josiah," is a late and erroneous inference from Zep 1:4.

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 skeptical 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 skeptical 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; {Jeremiah 25} 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, {Jer 7:18} but during the latter years of Josiah it cannot possibly have been so public as Zephaniah describes (Zep 1:3). Other reasons which have been given for those years are inconclusive-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 Zep 1:12 -"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 Zep 1:8 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." 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, 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, and not yet reached by the drastic measures of 621; the temper of skepticism and hopelessness condemned by Zep 1:12 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, 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. 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 Zep 2:9. Stade makes all chapter 3 post-exilic, and suspects Zep 2:1-3; Zep 2:11. A very thorough examination of them has led Schwally to assign to exilic or post-exilic times the whole of the little sections comprising them, with the possible exceptions of Zep 3:1-7, which "may be" Zephaniah’s. His essay has been subjected to a searching and generally hostile criticism by a number of leading scholars; and he has admitted the inconclusiveness of some of his reasons.

Zep 2:1-4 is assigned by Schwally to a date later than Zephaniah s, principally because of the term meekness (Zep 2:3), which is a favorite one with post-exilic writers. He has been sufficiently answered; and the close connection of Zep 2:1-3 with chapter 1 has been clearly proved. Zep 2:4-15 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 (Zep 2:5-7), Moab and Ammon (Zep 2:8-10), Egypt (Zep 2:11) and Assyria (Zep 2:13-15). The passage has given rise to many doubts; everyone 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. The concluding oracle on Nineveh 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 Zep 2:7, "shall turn their captivity," is hot necessarily exilic. As Cornill, too, points out, the expression in Zep 2:13, "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 Zep 2:11 predicts the conversion of the nations, while Zep 2:12 makes them the prey of Jehovah’s sword, and in this Zep 2:12 follows on naturally to Zep 2:7. 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 Zep 2:4-15 was originally an authentic oracle of Zephaniah’s in the elegiac meter, uttered at the same date as Zephaniah 1-Zephaniah 2:3, the period of the Scythian invasion, though from a different standpoint; and that it has suffered considerable dilapidation (witness especially Zep 2:6 and Zep 2:14), and probably one great intrusion, Zep 2:8-10.

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. In the first place, it falls into two sections, Zep 3:1-13 and Zep 3:14-20. 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 Zephaniah 1-Zephaniah 2:3. 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. He holds Zep 3:6 to be out of place and puts it after Zep 3:8, and this may be. But as it stands it appeals to the impenitent Jews of Zep 3:5 with the picture of the judgment God has already completed upon the nations, and contrasts with Zep 3:7, in which God says that He trusts Israel will repent. Zep 3:9 and Zep 3:10 are, we shall see, obviously an intrusion, as Budde maintains and Davidson admits to be possible.

We reach more certainty when we come to the second section of the chapter, Zep 3:14-20. Since Kuenen it has been recognized 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 somber outlook of Zephaniah 1-Zephaniah 2:3 and Zep 3:1-13, 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 Gentiros, Zep 3:14-20 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. 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.