Zechariah

The first half of the book is a single night's sequence of eight visions, and its most consequential feature is not any of the images but the figure standing beside the prophet. An angel accompanies him, he asks what the things mean, and the angel answers. Earlier prophets receive a word; here a prophet receives a picture and needs an interpreter. That device becomes standard in the apocalyptic literature that follows, and Zechariah is where it enters.

The visions themselves are compact and strange. Horsemen returned from patrolling the earth report that all the world sits still. Four horns are broken by four smiths. A young man setting out to measure Jerusalem is told to stop, because the city will be too large for walls. The high priest Joshua stands in filthy garments while an accuser stands at his right hand to oppose him, and is reclothed. A lampstand of seven lights is flanked by two olive trees, identified as the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth. A scroll flies over the land. A woman named Wickedness is pressed into a measuring basket, sealed with a lead weight and carried off to Shinar by two women with wings like a stork.

The political point is direct. Judah was a province, not a kingdom, and the book places two figures at the head of the restored community, the governor Zerubbabel of David's line and the high priest Joshua, and speaks of a counsel of peace between them both. Later editing of the crowning passage in chapter six has left visible seams, which readers have taken as evidence that the arrangement did not survive.

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.