Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/516



500 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH

tions of other prophetic announcements concerning that day ; as, for instance, " The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining" x or, in the words of Isaiah : " The moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and before His ancients gloriously " ; 2 and again : " The stars of heaven, and the constellations thereof, shall not give their light : the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine" 3

" But in those days after that tribulation the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall be falling from heaven^ and the powers that are in the heaven sliall be shaken" 4

And it shall be yom echad, " one day," we read in our prophecy " one " primarily in the sense of its being unique

which is described as " sailing resplendent" and it seems most probable that the plural yeqaroth is used here of "the resplendent heavenly bodies," i.e., the stars. The verb ttsfi, qapha (" thicken," " condense," " congeal ")is found in Ex. xv. 8, and describes the depths as becoming congealed, or consolidated, in the midst of the seas. But the difference of the gender in the combination of the feminine substantive yeqaroth with the masculine verb yeqipa ttn, the irregularity of con struction, and the rarity with which these words are met with in the Hebrew Bible, have occasioned many conjectural readings and explanations. The " keri" (marginal alternative reading in the Massoretic text) has JiN$p] n np;, yeqaroth rfqipa un the meaning of which is also not quite clear, but may be rendered "intense brightness, and waning." But it is pretty generally agreed by all scholars that the kethib (the Hebrew text) and not the keri, or margin, has the true reading. The "Jewish" explanation is embodied in Kimchi s comment, which is as follows : " In that day in which he says that this miracle shall occur, there shall also be this circumstance, that the light shall neither be yeqaroth ( " precious ") nor yeqipa un (" thickness "). The meaning is figurative, that the light of that day shall not be bright, which is the meaning of "precious lights," or "the moon walking in brightness" (Job xxxi. 26), nor light of thickness, i.e., dense and thick, which is like darkness. The sense is, the day shall not be entirely light nor entirely dark, i.e., it shall not pass entirely in tranquillity nor in affliction, for they two shall be in it ; and so he says afterwards, not day nor night. Jonathan has interpreted, "There shall be nothing that day but privation and coagulation."

The LXX reads KO.\ ^ux n * a Tayos, "and cold and frost."

The translation which I have given in the text seems to me the most satis factory.

1 Joel iii. 15. 3 Isa. xxiv. 23.

3 Isa. xiii. 10. 4 Mark xiii. 24, 25.