Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/824

Rh 74 ZECHARIAH burning of the sanctuary of Jerusalem. 1 The difficult passage about the shepherds follows. The shepherds (rulers) of the nation make their flock an article of trade and treat the sheep as sheep for the shambles. Therefore the inhabited world shall fall a sacrifice to the tyranny of its kings, while Israel is delivered to a shepherd who feeds the sheep for those who make a trade of the flock (|N5?n yy.33, xi. 7, 11 = &quot; they that sell them,&quot; ver. 5) and enters on his office with two staves, &quot; Favour &quot; and &quot;Union.&quot; He destroys &quot;the three shepherds&quot; in one month, but is soon weary of his Hock and the flock of him. He breaks the staff &quot; Favour,&quot; i.e., the covenant of peace with the nations, and asks the traders for his hire. Receiving thirty pieces of silver, he casts it into the temple treasury and breaks the staff &quot;Union&quot; i.e., the brotherhood between Jiulah and Israel. He is succeeded by a foolish shepherd, who neglects his flock and lets it go to ruin. At length Jehovah intervenes ; the foolish shepherd falls by the sword ; two-thirds of the people perish with him in the Messianic crisis, but the remnant of one-third forms the seed of the new theocracy (xi. 4-17 taken with xiii. 7-9, according to the necessary transposition proposed by Ewald). All this must be an allegory of past events, the time present to the author and his hopes for the future beginning only at xi. 17, xiii. 7-9. The general situation is clear : foreign kings govern Israel through native princes. The details cannot be explained in the absence of information as to the date and historical course of the events described by_ the prophet in allegorical form. But those who seek to escape this difficulty, by supposing that the word of the prophet was unintelligible to his contemporaries, and gained a true meaning only in its New Testament fulfilment,* must forget that in Zech. xi. 9 the shepherd wearies of his office and abandons the flock, while in the New Testament the shepherd gives his life for the sheep, and that in Zech. xi. 12, 13 the price is paid to the shepherd, but in the New Testament to the traitor. Chap. xii. presents a third variation on the Messianic promise. All heathendom is gathered together against Jerusalem and perishes there. Jehovah first gives victory to the countryfolk of Judah and then they rescue the capital. After this triumph the noblest houses of Jerusalem hold, each by itself, a great lamentation over a martyr &quot; whom they have pierced&quot; (or &quot; whom men have pierced &quot;). In xii. 10 bx followed by vbj? cannot be right. If DX be deleted, L TT L we may read &quot;IEJ&amp;gt;X vX, but not &quot;It^tf 1vX, which is not Hebrew. Yet it is very doubtful if the deletion of DX is justifiable or suffi cient. It is taken for granted that the readers will know who the martyr is, and the exegesis of the church applies the passage to our Lord. Chap. xiii. 1-6 is a continuation of chap. xii. ; the dawn of the day of salvation is accompanied by a general purging away of idolatry and the enthusiasm of false prophets. Yet a fourth varia tion of the picture of the incoming of the Messianic deliverance is given in chap. xiv. The heathen gather against Jerusalem and take the city, but do 7iot utterly destroy the inhabitants. Then Jehovah, at a time known only to Himself, shall appear with all His saints on Mount Olivet and destroy the heathen in battle, while the men of Jerusalem take refuge in their terror in the great cleft that opens where Jehovah sets His foot. Now the new era begins, and even the heathen do homage to Jehovah by bringing due tribute to the annual feast of tabernacles. All in Jerusalem is holy down to the bells on the horses and the cooking-pots. There is a striking contrast between chaps, i.-viii. and chaps. ix.-xiv. The former prophecy is closely tied to the situation and wants of the community of Jerusalem in the second year of Darius I., and all that it aims at arises out of the necessities of the time, and is of a practical and possible kind the restoration of the temple and perhaps the elevation of Zerubbabel to the throne of David. The latter chapters, on the other hand, soar far above the field of reality ; the historical situation from which they start can hardly be recognized ; and the future hope has very little connexion with the present. The fundamental differ ence between the two parts of the book lies, not in the .subject but in the nature of the prophecy, in the first part realistic and almost prosaic, in the second vague and fantastic. There are corresponding differences in style and speech ; and it is particularly to be noted that, while the superscriptions in the first part name the author and give the date of each oracle with precision, those in the second part (ix. 1, xii. 1) are without name or date. That l)oth parts do not belong to the same author must be ad- 1 See Wagenseil, Sota, p. 927 ; Lightfoot, on Matt. xxvi. 3. - Matt, xxvii. 3-10 ; cp. Jahrbb. f. D. Theol., 1878, p. 471 sq. mitted. But most recent critics make the second part the older. Chaps, ix.-xi. are ascribed to a contemporary of Amos and Hosea, about the middle of the 8th century B.C., because Ephraim is mentioned as well as Judah, and Assyria along with Egypt (x. 10), while the neighbours of Israel appear in ix. 1 sq. in the same way as in Amos i.-ii. That chaps, xii. -xiv. are also pre-exilic is held to appear especially in the attack on idolatry and lying pro phecy (xiii. 1-6); but, as this prophecy speaks only of Judah and Jerusalem, it is dated after the fall of Samaria, and is assigned to the last days of the Judaean kingdom on the strength of xii. 11, where an allusion is seen to the mourn ing for King Josiah, slain in battle at Megiddo. Some suppose that the author of ix.-xi. is the Zechariah, son of Jeberechiah, of Isa. viii. 2, and Bunsen ascribes xii.-xiv. to the prophet Urijah, son of Shemaiah (Jer. xxvi. 20 sq.). It is more likely that chaps, ix.-xiv. go all together and are of much later date. These vague predictions have no real spiritual affinity either with the prophecy of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah, or with that of Jeremiah, where we always feel the solid ground of present reality under our feet. It was only after the exile that prophecy lost its close connexion with history and ceased to be built on present realities. The kind of eschatology which we find in Zech. ix.-xiv. was first introduced by Ezekiel, who in particular is the author of the conception that the time of deliverance is to be preceded by a joint attack of all nations on Jerusalem, in which they come to final overthrow (Ezek. xxxviii. sq. ; Isa. Ixvi. 18-24; Joel). The importance at tached to the temple service, even in Messianic times (Zech. xiv.), implies an author who lived in the ideas of the religious commonwealth of post-exile times. A future king is hoped for ; but in the present there is no Davidic king, only a Davidic family standing on the same level with other noble families in Jerusalem (xii. 7, 12). The &quot; bastard &quot; (mixed race) of Ashdod reminds us of Neh. xiii. 23 sqq. ; and the words of ix. 12 (&quot;to-day, also, do I declare that I will render double unto thee &quot;) have no sense unless they refer back to the deliverance from Babylonian exile. But the decisive argument is that in ix. 13 the sons of Javan, i.e., the Greeks, appear as the representatives of the heathen world-power. The prophecy, therefore, is later than Alexander; and indeed the hostility to the Jews implied in the passage just cited dates only from the time when Palestine passed from the hands of the Ptolemies to those of the Seleucids. Assyria and Egypt (x. 11) may well be the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms, which to gether made up for the Jews the empire of the sons of Javan. In ix. 1 sq. (imitated from Amos i.-ii.) Seleucid Syria is described as parcelled out into a number of small principalities, some of which were at the time nearly inde pendent. That the Jews had reason enough to hate their neighbours, even in later times, appears, e.g., in 1 Mac. v. ; compare especially ix. 6, 7 with 1 Mac. v. 68. The reference in ix. 8 would fit well with the Egyptian cam paigns of Antiochus IV. Epiphanes, when Jerusalem suf fered so much on the outward march and still more on the return of his troops. That the victory of Judah over the heathens is to precede the deliverance of Jerusalem (xii. 5 sqq.) is a remarkable feature, hardly to be explained except by the history of the Maccabee wars. The complaint about idolatry also fits this period ; and that a new kind of prophecy then came up, in an age where it no longer had a legitimate place, is far from unlikely. If this date is assumed for chaps, ix.-xiv., we must hold that, by the copious use of phrases from older prophets and other means, the author sought to give his oracles an archaic garb. That this is no unfair assumption appears especially in xiv. 5, in the reference to the earthquake in the days of Uzziah, which is natural only if the author addressed