Zechariah the Prophet

Scripture: Zechariah 1–14; Ezra 5:1; 6:14; Matthew 21:4–5; 26:31; 27:3–10; John 12:14–15; 19:37; Revelation 1:7

Zechariah son of Berechiah son of Iddo (זְכַרְיָה, "YHWH remembers") began prophesying in October–November 520 BC, the same year as Haggai (Zechariah 1:1), in the early years of Darius I. He is identified in Ezra 5:1 and 6:14 as a Levite, grandson of the priest Iddo who returned from Babylon with Zerubbabel and Jeshua (Nehemiah 12:4, 16). His book divides into two major sections: chapters 1–8, which contain precisely dated oracles and the eight night visions clustered around the rebuilding of the Temple; and chapters 9–14, undated apocalyptic oracles of a markedly different register, often called Deutero-Zechariah, from which the NT passion narratives draw with remarkable concentration. Zechariah is the most extensively cited Old Testament book in those narratives after Psalms and Isaiah.

In a single night Zechariah saw eight visions (1:7–6:15). Vision 1: a man riding among the myrtle trees in the hollow, accompanied by colored horses, the patrol-riders of YHWH report the earth at rest, and the interpreting angel intercedes: "How long, O YHWH of hosts, will you have no mercy on Jerusalem?" (1:12). The divine answer: jealousy for Jerusalem, anger at the nations that furthered calamity. Vision 2: four horns that scattered Judah and four craftsmen who come to terrify them (1:18–21). Vision 3: a man with a measuring line going to measure Jerusalem, the divine word: "Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls because of the multitude of people and livestock in it. For I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares YHWH, and I will be the glory in her midst" (2:4–5). Vision 4: Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of YHWH in filthy garments, with the Accuser standing at his right hand to accuse him, YHWH rebukes the Accuser; clean garments replace the filthy ones; a stone with seven eyes is set before Joshua; and the word comes: "Behold, I will bring my servant the Branch" (3:8). Vision 5: the golden lampstand with seven lamps and two olive trees, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says YHWH of hosts" (4:6). Vision 6: the flying scroll, six meters by three meters, bearing the curse over the whole land (5:1–4). Vision 7: a woman sitting in a basket, representing wickedness, carried by two women with stork wings to the land of Shinar, Babylon receives the idol it made of itself (5:5–11). Vision 8: four chariots with colored horses going out from between two bronze mountains, the one with black horses goes to the north country and sets YHWH's Spirit at rest in the land of Babylon (6:1–8).

The culminating act of the entire vision sequence is the symbolic crowning (6:9–15). Zechariah is commanded to take silver and gold and make crowns and set them on the head of Joshua the high priest, a priest receiving a crown, and to declare: "Behold, the man whose name is the Branch: for he shall branch out from his place, and he shall build the temple of YHWH. It is he who shall build the temple of YHWH and shall bear royal honor, and shall sit and rule on his throne. And there shall be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace shall be between them both" (6:12–13). The Branch unites two offices, the royal and the priestly, that Israel's constitution had kept separate. That union is the burden of the final vision's word.

Zechariah 9–14 is the quarry from which the passion narratives are hewn. Zechariah 9:9, "Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey", is explicitly cited in Matthew 21:4–5 and John 12:14–15 at the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. Zechariah 11:12–13, thirty pieces of silver thrown to the potter at the house of YHWH, is cited in Matthew 26:15 and 27:3–10, attributed there to "Jeremiah," a text-critical puzzle (the passage is in Zechariah; proposed solutions include a unified scroll attribution, a scribal error, or a conflated citation). Zechariah 13:7, "Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered", is cited by Jesus in Gethsemane in Matthew 26:31 and Mark 14:27 as a direct prediction of the disciples' impending flight. Zechariah 12:10 is cited twice in the NT at the moment of the crucifixion itself.

Zechariah 12:10 carries one of the most grammatically arresting clauses in the OT. YHWH speaks in the first person: "And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child." The clause "they will look on me, on him whom they have pierced" shifts, within a single grammatical unit, from the first-person divine speaker ("me") to a third-person human referent ("him"). The Masoretic text permits the reading "they will look on me whom they have pierced", YHWH himself as the pierced one. Some Targum traditions separate the two referents into the deity and a human mediator. John 19:37 quotes the verse at the moment of the soldier's lance thrust into Jesus without resolving the internal grammar, the identification is made by the narrative placement, not by exegetical commentary. Revelation 1:7 applies it to the return of the Son of Man: "every eye will see him, even those who pierced him." The text resists a single clean solution; what it does not resist is the NT writers' confident identification of Jesus as the figure who fulfills it. The man whose name is YHWH-Remembers wrote the book that the NT reads as YHWH's own memory of what was coming.

The eight night visions are built into the world of the Sanctum as structural reference points, the Branch-Priest who unites the royal and priestly offices is the theological center of what the Spiritborn are fighting toward. Zechariah's "wall of fire all around" (2:5) and the lampstand of unquenchable oil (4:6) are direct visual and theological sources for the world's architecture.