The Second Half, and the Passion Narratives

Chapters nine to fourteen are so unlike chapters one to eight that scholarship has treated them as a separate collection since the eighteenth century. The dated headings stop. The night visions stop. The interpreting angel disappears. Zerubbabel and Joshua are not mentioned. The style turns oracular and the subject turns to a future conflict of the nations.

That second half supplied the early Christian movement with an unusual proportion of its vocabulary for the death of Jesus. A king comes to Jerusalem lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey. A rejected shepherd is weighed out thirty pieces of silver, which he throws to the potter in the house of the Lord. They shall look on the one whom they have pierced and mourn. Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. On that day the Mount of Olives shall split in two from east to west.

Each of these is quoted or alluded to in the Gospels, and the entry into Jerusalem and the price of Judas are built directly on them. Matthew attributes the thirty pieces to Jeremiah rather than to Zechariah, a discrepancy noted in antiquity and never satisfactorily explained.

The result is a book of the twelve minor prophets whose second half is read far more often in Christian churches than in any other setting, and whose first half, the visions that give the prophet his historical position in the rebuilding of the temple around 520 BCE, is comparatively neglected.