Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/204

 (iv) Furthermore, there is evidence to show that the Rabbis, like the author of the first Gospel, confused or, disregarding chronology, identified the pre-exilic victim with Zechariah the prophet of the Restoration. The Targum on Lam. ii. 20 ("Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?") runs, "Is it also fit that they should slay a priest and prophet in the Temple of the Lord, as ye slew Zacharias the son of Iddo in the house of the Sanctuary, on the day of Expiation?" (Lightfoot l. c.). The Midrash (tr. Wünsche) interprets the same passage of Lam. of Zechariah son of Jehoiada.

(v) What is the intended series or line of which Zechariah is the last representative? Abel is naturally the first, but, chronologically, Z. ben Jehoiada was not the last prophet whose murder is recorded in the O.T.; Uriah (Jer. xxvi. 20 ff.) was later. The usual explanation that his murder stands last in the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible with Chronicles at the end is unsatisfactory; the books of the O.T. still circulated separately in the first century of our era. Moore's answer is "It is not because the death of Z. was the last crime of the kind in Jewish history that it is named in the Gospel, but because it was in popular legend the typical example of the sacrilegious murder of a righteous man, a prophet of God, and of the appalling expiation God exacted for it." But the identification of the victim with the prophet of the Restoration suggests another answer. Zechariah ben Berechiah did in fact stand chronologically at the end of the prophets; as Josephus writes (§ 63), the succession failed after Artaxerxes (i. e. Ahasuerus). The context in Matthew relates to the ancient prophets; the later generation that built the prophets' tombs is set over against that of the forefathers who murdered them. That the final instance of such murder should be drawn from