ZECHARIAH THE PROPHET
Zec 1:1-6, etc.; Ezr 5:1; Ezr 6:14
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." In his own book he is described as "the son of Berekh-Yah,
the son of Iddo," and in the Aramaic document of the Book of Ezra as
"the son of Iddo." 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; {Gen 24:47, cf. 1Ki 19:16, cf. 2Ki 9:14; 2Ki 9:20} 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 Yebherekh-Yahu, the contemporary of Isaiah. This is
precarious, while the other hypothesis is a very natural one.
Whichever be correct, the prophet Zechariah was a member of the
priestly family of Iddo, that came up to Jerusalem from Babylon
under Cyrus. {Neh 12:4} 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. If this be our prophet, then he was
probably a young man in 520, and had come up as a child in the
caravans from Babylon. The Aramaic document of the Book of Ezra {Ezr
5:1; Ezr 6:14} 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 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.
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, {Zec 2:13; Zec 4:9; Zec 6:15} 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 today
these are the qualities which characterize 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 raveled 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 labored 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,
saying: Jehovah was very wroth 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 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, 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 willfully 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 canonized 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. 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 fulfillment 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 today and now. "The
fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? 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," 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.
This 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 practice
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. 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 spring-times of peace; solid gain of
labor for every man, with no raiding neighbors 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
un-harassed labor 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 fullness of their years; the city’s streets shall be
rife with boys and girls at play."
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