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According to Zechariah’s superscription, he was the “son of Berechiah, son of Iddo” (1:1). Both Ezra and Nehemiah refer to Zechariah only as the son of Iddo and omit the “son of Berechiah” (Ez. 5:1; Neh. 12:16). Commentators theorize that Berechiah, his father, must have died in exile, leaving Zechariah in the care of his grandfather Iddo. The name Zechariah was surely common, but it is highly unlikely that among the early waves of returnees there were two Zechariahs, sons of Iddo.
In Nehemiah’s genealogy, he listed Zechariah son of Iddo as the head of a priestly family (12:16). Assuming the Zechariah in Nehemiah’s genealogy is the same as the literary prophet, Zechariah served the community as both a priest and a prophet, in the same vein as Ezekiel and Jeremiah.
The doubting remnant
Like Haggai, Zechariah received his revelation during the second year of King Darius, in 520 BCE (1:1). Zechariah and Haggai were contemporaries, both ministering to the remnant who had returned from exile with lofty dreams of rebuilding their nation. Instead, Jerusalem remained in ruins, inflation was rampant, and the harvest was meager. We know the circumstances of Zechariah’s early audience because of the details in Haggai and Ezra. The people were questioning Yahweh’s commitment to the restoration promises.
When was his universal reign supposed to begin? When would Jerusalem become central to global order and peace? Haggai and Zechariah’s specific words of comfort make it obvious that the people were in a crisis of faith.
Haggai was likely an old man at the time of his prophetic ministry, which only lasted three months according to his place in history. Zechariah started prophesying after Haggai, after the people had already renewed their work on the temple. Though the prophetic careers of Haggai and Zechariah closely aligned, the two prophets had different emphases. Haggai urged the returnees to obey, and Zechariah encouraged them to repent.
Haggai was the prophet God sent to highlight the failures of the postexilic community. He informed them God was withholding his blessing because of their neglect of his former temple. Remember, after an enthusiastic laying of the temple foundations, they had stopped all work on the temple for the next 16 years, until Haggai’s pronouncements shook them. Zechariah did not even mention the temple in his first eight chapters, instead emphasizing repentance and a spiritual return to Yahweh. They had returned to the land physically but had not fully returned to the Lord spiritually.
Call to repentance
Zechariah’s prophetic book begins on a pessimistic note. He was reminding the people of the sins of their ancestors. Their rebellion had brought God’s wrath upon them, which culminated in their exile and the destruction of Jerusalem. Their lack of repentance had forced God’s punishing hand. Zechariah’s warning was straightforward: “Do not be like your ancestors,” who ignored the prophets and refused to turn from their evil deeds and evil ways (1:4). Do not repeat their mistakes.
Zechariah then reiterates the unifying theme of the prophets: “Return to me…and I will return to you” (1:3). This message was the constant refrain of the Major and Minor Prophets, beginning with the earliest recorded prophecies in Hosea and continuing into the period of the return.
Zechariah rhetorically asked, “Your ancestors, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever?” (1:5). He contrasted the mortality of their ancestors and prophets with Yahweh’s eternal words and statutes (1:6). Like Haggai, Zechariah’s message garnered a positive response from the people. They immediately repented. Zechariah is one of the rare prophets that includes the response of his audience. Every day that the returnees walked among Jerusalem’s ruins and lived under Persian subjugation, the words of the preexilic prophets rang in their ears. Still paying the cost of the sins of their fathers, they were keen to listen to their own messengers from the Lord.
Three months after Zechariah’s sermon on repentance, he experienced a series of eight visions. Zechariah uses a precise dating formula for his visions: “On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, the month of Shebat, in the second year of Darius” (1:7). Historians can pinpoint the Gregorian calendar date to February 15, 519 BCE. The text is ambiguous about whether the visions were dreams, only mentioning their occurrence at night. With no additional date reference, it seems all eight visions may have happened in one night.
First vision
In the first vision, Zechariah saw a man on a red horse “standing among the myrtle trees in the shadows, and behind him were red, sorrel, and white horses” (1:8). The vision narrows in on the man on the red horse, who is bathed in moonlight and secrecy. At first, it is unclear if there are riders on the other three horses, but the text eventually uses a plural pronoun, “then they spoke to the angel of the Lord,” revealing that all the horses had riders (1:11).
Bible enthusiasts consider the symbolism of the myrtle tree and the colors of the horses. Those excited by eschatological possibilities connect Zechariah’s multicolored horses with the four horsemen of Revelation that ride throughout the earth (Rev. 6:1-8). Certainly, I enjoy pontificating the meanings of all the details in the visions. However, I believe that if the myrtle tree and horse colors were deeply significant, beyond colorful narrative devices, the biblical author would have given us the meaning, and would not have kept it hidden. One possibility, as well, is that the dream spoke to the vulnerabilities of Zechariah’s audience. In 519 BCE, King Darius marched through Judah on a military mission to Egypt. Perhaps the vision of the horsemen connected to the fears of the people, knowing Darius had a military presence in their land. Portraying unseen angelic forces conducting reconnaissance on their behalf would have been reassuring.
In fact, the prophet did not even need to interpret the symbols of his vision because God divulged the meaning. Seeing the horsemen, Zechariah asked, “What are these, my Lord?” (1:9). A divine intercessor answered him. The Angel of the Lord served as mediator, relaying the word of Yahweh to the prophet throughout his vision sequence. The Angel of the Lord had appeared earlier in scripture, most often in Genesis and Exodus. For example, the Angel spoke with Hagar in the desert (Gen. 16), wrestled with Jacob at night (Gen. 32), and spoke to Moses from the burning bush (Ex. 3). Because sometimes the Angel spoke as God and other times for God, a whole theology has built up around the divine nature of the Angel of the Lord. In general, the angel appears to be separate in being from Yahweh.
The angel told the prophet that the horsemen were scouts commissioned by God “to patrol the earth” (1:10). According to the horsemen’s secret reconnaissance mission, “there is peace throughout the whole earth” (1:11). By the end of King Darius’s second year, the Persian empire was truly at peace. Conflict marred the first two years of his reign, as the empire transitioned from the dynastic family of Cyrus to that of Darius. Darius had stolen the throne by orchestrating an internal revolt. Coups inspired more coups. By 519 BCE, however, all was quiet in the empire. The horsemen, without naming King Darius, reported the empire’s contemporary reality.
Modern readers naturally assume that regional peace must be a positive development for the people of Judah. Despite Judah not being independent, Darius had allowed the rebuilding of the temple and free worship of Yahweh. However, the peaceful state of things was also discouraging to the Judeans. Centuries of prophecy fueled their imagination that peace in the new world order would come from Jerusalem, not from the Persian empire. The prophets had predicted a great shaking of the nations that would upend world order, giving Jerusalem, and therefore Yahweh, primacy of place. The prophets’ oracle did not include peace across the empire. It seemed to the returnees that God’s favor might be on Persia rather than on Judah.
The Angel of the Lord voiced the question on all the people’s mind: “O Lord of hosts, how long will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, with which you have been angry these 70 years?” (1:12). Seventy years reflected the prophecies of Jeremiah and Daniel, who had promised only a 70-year exile (Jer. 25:11-12; Dan. 9:2). The 70-year span fit the period from the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE to the completion of the temple rebuilding project around 516 BCE.
Yahweh answered the angel, and the angel told Zechariah, “Proclaim this message: Thus says the Lord of hosts: I am very zealous for Jerusalem and for Zion” (1:14). Yahweh was still protective of his people, even if his response seemed delayed. The direction to “proclaim” is a reminder that Zechariah was experiencing these visions in solitude, but God intended for them to be shared.
God added that he was angry with the “nations that are at ease” (1:15). The preexilic prophets clarified that Assyria and Babylon had been instruments of God’s anger, used to deliver his punishment on his disloyal people. However, Assyria and Babylon had taken it too far. God said, “while I was only a little angry, they made the disaster worse” (1:15). Most likely, the audience was eager to see Babylon devastated. The Jewish remnant longed for Yahweh’s vengeance.
God continued, “I have returned to Jerusalem with compassion; my house shall be built in it, says the Lord of hosts, and a measuring line shall be stretched out over Jerusalem” (1:16). The measuring line was a metaphor for Jerusalem’s reconstruction. The message of compassion delivered through the Angel of the Lord extended outward from Jerusalem (1:17). Full restoration applied to all of Judah’s threatened cities.
Second vision
Zechariah’s second vision, which was short and simple, was connected to the first vision. Zechariah looked up and saw four horns. There were unattached horns that stood alone with no animal bodies. When Zechariah asked the mediating angel for the meaning of the horns, the angel responded, “These are the horns that scattered Judah, Israel and Jerusalem” (1:18). They represented the strength of the imperial powers responsible for the scattering of Israel and Judah. In the ancient Near East, horns symbolized power, because it is the horns of an animal that help attack its prey. Daniel also had a vision of unattached horns, only one of the horns had eyes and a mouth (Dan. 7-8). The number four represented the totality of Israel’s oppression, coming from all four cardinal directions. Likewise, as in Daniel’s vision, the horns symbolized Judah’s historic enemies: Assyria, Babylon, the Medes, and the Persians.
Without introduction, Yahweh suddenly entered the scene and directly addressed the prophet, no longer using the angelic mediator. The Lord showed Zechariah four craftsmen, or blacksmiths, depending on the translation. Zechariah asked about the purpose of the blacksmiths. Yahweh answered, they are “to strike down the horns of the nations that lifted up their horns against the land of Judah to scatter its people” (1:20). Thus, the blacksmiths were to fight the horns on behalf of Judah. Yahweh did not explain the identity of the blacksmiths, but they likely represented the supernatural force of Yahweh’s judgment enacted on Judah’s oppressors. If we want to place this vision in a historical context, the blacksmiths could be Yahweh’s purposing of the Persian army under Darius to deliver the final blow on Babylon. It was around this time that Darius obliterated the continuous Babylonian threat. So again, the second vision’s meaning is a continuation of the first. The repetition of the number four tethers them together: four horsemen, four horns, and four blacksmiths.
Zechariah was speaking to a desperate people. He had the task of redefining Yahwism for a people stripped of their independence. The postexilic community expected a domino effect of blessing after their miraculous return from exile. They had anticipated that they would rebuild the temple, that the Davidic dynasty would be restored, and all nations would recognize the superiority of Yahweh. So, why was God delaying?
Zechariah’s eight visions all point to the restoration of Judah. The prophet was trying to tamp down the people’s negative perspectives. If they repented and returned to God, they had permission to hope in their future. Yahweh had not abandoned them. Judgment was coming for the nations responsible for Judah’s downfall. Those nations seemed to be at peace, but that did not mean God was giving them a pass.