Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/357



THE SHEPHERD-KING 341

O My people, and I will testify unto thee : O Israel, if thou in thee ; neither shalt thou worship any strange god. I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt : open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it" x
 * } wouldest hearken unto Me ; there shall no strange god be

It was Israel s divided heart, the turning away from the true and living God to follow after the vanities of the Gentiles, which was the cause of Israel s calamities and ruin in the past. This is what the prophet reminds them of in the 2nd verse : " For the idols ( teraphim ) have spoken vanity, and the diviners fiave seen a lie ; they have told false dreams (or, and dreams speak vanity ), they comfort in vain : therefore they went their way (or wandered ) like sheep, they are oppressed (or afflicted ), because there was no shepherd

It is the teraphim, or "speaking" oracles of the heathen, and their consulters, or diviners, that the prophet specially speaks of in this verse.

" Apart from our passage there are only seven other scriptures in the Hebrew Bible where the teraphim are introduced ; but these suffice to show that they were not only idols, the use of which is classed by God with witch craft, stubbornness, and iniquity, 2 but that they were a peculiar kind of idols, namely, those used for oracular responses. The first mention of the teraphim is in connec tion with Jacob s flight from Laban, in Gen. xxx. ; and in the light of the other passages there seems probability in the explanation of Aben Ezra that Rachel stole them in order that her father might not discover the direction of their flight by means of these oracles. 3

" The second place where we find them is in that strange narrative about the Ephraimite Micah, and the Danite expedition to Laish, in Judg. xvii. and xviii., where we get a sad and characteristic glimpse of the condition of some among the tribes in those days, when there was no

1 Ps. Ixxxi. 8-10. - i Sam. xv. 23.

3 See Aben Ezra in loc. Gesenius traces "teraphim" to the unused root " taraph," which in the Syriac has the significance, " to inquire."