Zechariah

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Zechariah is the prophet named in the biblical Book of Zechariah, a figure of the early Persian period whose oracles open onto some of the strangest visionary material in the Hebrew Bible. The book identifies him as the son of Berechiah, grandson of Iddo, and dates his first words to the second year of Darius — 520 BCE — which sets him beside Haggai in the same small, struggling community of returned exiles, prodding them to rebuild the Temple the Babylonians had razed. He is not to be confused with the priest Zechariah of Luke’s gospel, the father of John the Baptist, a separate and much later figure who shares only the name.

The book divides sharply in two, and the prophet’s profile changes across the seam. Chapters one through eight are built around eight night visions, reported in the first person: a man among myrtle trees, four horns and four smiths, flying scrolls and lampstands, a woman sealed inside a basket and carried off to Babylon, a high priest re-clothed before an accusing figure. Each vision is relayed to Zechariah by an interpreting angel who tells him what he is seeing — a device that would become standard in later apocalyptic writing. These chapters keep the rebuilding in view: they name Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest, and they fold the Temple’s restoration into a wider promise that God is returning to Jerusalem.

Chapters nine through fourteen are different in kind, and historical scholarship has long held them to be later work gathered under the same name — sometimes called Second Zechariah. The oracles here drop the dated visions for sweeping, often violent pictures of the end: a humble king entering on a donkey, a pierced figure mourned by the city, nations massed against Jerusalem, a final day on which living waters flow out and “the Lord will be king over all the earth.” Where the visions begin and the editors take over is contested, and the unity of the book remains an open question.

The traditions that received it read across the seam as prophecy. Jewish interpreters preserved Zechariah among the twelve Minor Prophets and drew on its imagery of restoration. Christian readers mined the later chapters intensively: the entry on the donkey, the thirty pieces of silver, the pierced one, and the struck shepherd were all taken up by the gospel writers and read as foretelling the passion, so that few prophetic books are quoted more often in the New Testament. Among apocalyptic and esoteric currents the visions held their force as a cipher — angel-interpreted images, sealed meanings, a measured end — and they feed the same stream that runs through Daniel and into the Book of Revelation. The book itself keeps insisting that what is shown must be explained, and that the explaining is given, not seized.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) · Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

→ Related: Book Of Haggai · Daniel · Ezra · Apocalypse · Divination