Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/284



268 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH

Chap. xiv. is, according to Ewald, a modification of the earlier " anticipations " of this prophet.

" This piece," he says, " cannot have been written till somewhat later, when facts made it more and more improb able that Jerusalem would not anyhow be conquered, and treated as a conquered city, by coarse foes. Yet then, too, this prophet could not part with the anticipations of older prophets, and those which he had himself at an earlier time expressed so boldly, amid the most visible danger, he holds firm to the old anticipation (in remembrance of) the great deliverance of Jerusalem in Sennacherib s time (Isa. xxxvii.), which appeared to justify the most fanatic hopes for the future (comp. Ps. lix.). And so now the prospect moulds itself to him thus, as if Jerusalem must indeed actually endure the horrors of the conquest, but that then, when the work of the conquerors was half-completed, the great deliver ance already suggested in that former piece would come, and so the sanctuary would notwithstanding be wonderfully preserved, the better Messianic time would notwithstanding still so come."

Principal George Adam Smith, to whose work, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, we shall have occasion to return presently, and who, like Canon Driver, follows those German critics who ascribe a post-exilic origin to these chapters, though denying Zechariah s authorship, after mentioning some grounds for a later date, says :

" But though many critics judged these grounds to be sufficient to prove the post-exilic origin of Zech. ix. xiv., they differed as to the author and exact date of these chapters. Conservatives, like Hengstenberg, Delitzsch, Keil, Kohler, and Pusey, used the evidence to prove the author ship of Zechariah himself after 516, and interpreted the references to the Greek period as pure prediction. . . . But on the same grounds Eichhorn saw in the chapters not a prediction, but a reflection, of the Greek period. He as signed chaps, ix. and x. to an author of the time of Alexander the Great ; xi.-xiii. 6 he placed a little later, and brought down xiii. 7-xiv. to the Maccabeean period."