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Zechariah 11 is arguably the most enigmatic and gloomy section of the entire book. The chapter’s prelude is a dark poem portraying personified trees wailing over their own destruction (11:1-3). Shepherds and lions are joining in with the trees’ lament, mourning their own loss of pasture and thicket. Lebanon’s cedars and cypress are burned, while Bashan’s oaks tumble in a cascade of destruction.
Chapter divisions and interpretations
The poem declares, “the glorious trees are ruined!” regarding the fall of the most prized trees in the ancient Near East—Lebanon’s cedars (11:2). David had purchased cedar logs from Lebanon to build his palace (2 Sam. 5:11). Cedar paneling from Lebanon also adorned Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6:6). Even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the mythic king had risked his life to go to Lebanon’s cedar forest and bring back the precious wood to his kingdom.
To Zechariah’s listening audience, the destruction of the cedar trees, forever associated with strength and glory, demonstrated Yahweh’s superiority. Yahweh was greater than all things, even the stately cedar tree. When the psalmist was praising God’s strength, he compared his voice to the cedar: “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon” (Ps. 29:5).
It is difficult to interpret the meaning of the charred forest. Did the wailing trees represent God’s judgment on the nations? If so, Lebanon, Bashan, and Jordan seem to be an odd group. They were not major players in the people’s history. Maybe the trees portrayed the coming collapse of Judah? Perhaps they were symbolic of an enemy army descending from the north, starting with a slash-and-burn campaign through the forests and pastures on her northern border and moving toward Jerusalem.
The answer is unknown because the chapter division’s possible misplacement may influence the interpretation. The tree lament fits better at the end of Zechariah 10 than as the prelude to Zechariah 11. At the end of Chapter 10, Assyria is “laid low” and Egypt’s scepter has departed (10:11), so the tree lament may center around the dismantled pride of Lebanon and Jordan. If so, the poem is a prophecy against the nations. If the poem is launching Chapter 11, it serves as a warning for the people of Judah who are under harsh judgment.
Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton first introduced chapter divisions in the twelfth century as a helpful way to locate scriptures. God did not divinely inspire chapter divisions; they are merely practical. It is not inappropriate to challenge their arbitrariness occasionally for the sake of interpretation.
No matter the interpretation or the symbolism, the foreboding poem establishes a change in tone from future-focused restoration promises to present-focused messages of calamity. The rest of the passage lacks the hope and peace of previous oracles. Destruction seems as inevitable as the falling trees.
Good shepherd
The sheep and shepherd motif are amplified in Zechariah 11. God commissions Zechariah to play the role of good shepherd to the people: “Thus says the Lord my God: Be a shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter” (11:4). The negligent shepherds had no pity on their flock, so they labeled the sheep for immediate slaughter and destined them for the market (11:5).
Interpreters often identify the buyers with foreign kings who were oppressing the people of Judah, but the failure of leadership was multi-layered. The leaders of Judah did nothing to protect the flock from foreign buyers. Jewish elites, possibly collaborating with foreign entities, were the sellers who further oppressed the laypeople of Judah. By praising Yahweh sarcastically and saying, “Blessed be Yahweh, for I have become rich” (11:4), they were revealing their identity.
Which historical figures in postexilic Judah should be associated with the buyers and sellers depends on the orientation of Zechariah’s prophecy. Was he looking to the past, present, or future? Were the predictions for the near, distant, or in the eschatological age? If Zechariah was speaking to the affairs of his own audience, then we may look to the book of Nehemiah, which describes a historical event corresponding with Zechariah’s symbolism (Neh. 5). Nehemiah was condemning the practice of Judah’s elite who were charging returnees heavy interest on loans. In the postexilic community, there were poor people trying to eke out a living as they rebuilt their homes and cultivated their lands. Some who had already achieved economic security were trying to grow richer by exploiting the poor.
Nehemiah reminded the community of the deep-rooted bonds of their kinship and the immorality of oppressing their compatriots. In Nehemiah’s case, the elite repented and changed course. It is difficult to identify the exact historical events that Zechariah was describing, especially since his references are couched in metaphor. However, the abusive interest program conducted in Nehemiah’s day may have begun decades earlier, during Zechariah’s prophetic ministry.
Alternatively, some bible scholars argue that Zechariah was not performing a prophetic sign-act but experiencing another vision. The prophet shared divine revelations in both forms. However, the passage follows the same formula of other sign-acts in the Bible. In prophetic sign-acts, Yahweh gave the directives for the role play in narrative form: “Thus says the Lord, do such-and-such.” Three times in this passage, Yahweh gave Zechariah a command following this style. In prophetic sign-acts, the prophets often narrated how they were obeying Yahweh’s order. Zechariah, following the formula, switched to first person after relating the sign-act instructions from God’s perspective, and then the prophet described how he had carried them out: “I became a shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter” and “I took two staffs” (11:7).
There were props in Zechariah’s role play. First, Zechariah named the two staffs Favor and Unity (11:7). Within a month of his role as a good shepherd, the prophet purged three community leaders, an act entirely too realistic to be merely part of a vision (11:8). He had lost patience with them, and they apparently despised him, as well. Despite the futility of his task, to save a flock marked for slaughter Zechariah intended to make corrections in the community.
Historians have combed through Jerusalem’s history looking for the three leaders who were eliminated in one month. The conjecture ranges from kings in Judah’s preexilic past to a series of Roman leaders. One theory is that the three rulers represent the three main positions of Judean leadership: prophet, priest, and king.
The whole community had rebelled against Zechariah’s leadership, and the prophet had lost his patience. He angrily denounced them, “What is to die, let it die; what is to be destroyed, let it be destroyed; and let those that are left devour the flesh of one another!” (11:9). If the returnees ignored God’s message, he would abandon them to the natural consequences of their chosen path.
Favor and Unity
To further dramatize the termination of the covenant, Zechariah broke his two staffs, Favor and Unity. He was theatrically decommissioning the tools of his vocation. It is likely that Zechariah performed his role play near the temple to maximize his audience. In the breaking of Favor, God announced he was “annulling the covenant that I had made with all the peoples” (11:10). Most commentators view the covenant “with all peoples” as a limit God placed on the nations when interacting with Judah. During the Persian period, God kept the nations at bay and the region at peace so the returnees could work on the temple and the exiles would feel safe to return. Breaking the staff named Favor symbolized Yahweh’s retraction of his covenant obligation to guard and protect his people from their neighbors.
Zechariah also broke the staff named Unity which annulled the hope of reunification between Judah and Israel (11:14). The bond of kinship severed all those centuries ago with the breakup of the Northern and Southern Kingdom would stay broken. With Zechariah’s breaking of the Unity staff, he mimicked an earlier, more hopeful sign-act performed by his predecessor Ezekiel. In Ezekiel, the prophet had joined two sticks together as a symbol of the future reunification of Judah and Israel as a unified covenant people (Ezek. 37:15-23). Zechariah intentionally showed the cancelation of Ezekiel’s hope, the prophetic ideal of the reunification of the tribes.
The passage’s language is harsh, and difficult to square with the promises of hope and the messianic expectations in the rest of Zechariah. Zechariah threatened a full-scale stop on all the prophetic promises. Yet, one of the most important prophetic moments referring to the New Testament occurs in this same dark passage.
When Zechariah resigned from his post prematurely, he asked the “sheep merchants” to compensate him for his service as leader. He said, “If it seems right to you, give me my wages, but if not, keep them” (11:12). He was testing them, allowing them to determine the worth of having God’s voice and instruction in the community through his mediation. Because Zechariah was a stand-in for Yahweh as good shepherd, the people’s evaluation of Zechariah’s worth was equivalent to the worth they placed on God’s covenant. If they had said that Zechariah’s role was of infinite value, that would have been the correct answer. Instead, they insulted Zechariah paying him 30 shekels of silver (11:12). Thirty pieces of silver was the known price for a slave in the Bible (Ex. 21:32). His response dripped with derision about the “lordly price at which I was valued by them” (11:13).
Thirty pieces of silver
To display his repulsion by the people’s ingratitude, Yahweh instructed Zechariah to fling the silver at the potter. Likely, the event took place near the temple where an artisan potter was employed. Potters’ workshops were often near refuse heaps, as a practical means for disposing of their scraps. Perhaps Zechariah’s act of throwing the money at the potter was a way of saying he was throwing it away entirely. It is difficult to understand the significance of the potter in the action, except as it relates to a significant event in the New Testament.
The gospel of Matthew interpreted this section of Zechariah as a foreshadowing of an event in the life of Jesus (Matt. 27:3-10). On the night before Jesus’s crucifixion, Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. When Judas spotted Jesus the next morning, bound and led off to trial in front of Pilate, he regretted his actions. He confessed to the priests that he had betrayed innocent blood. He tried to give the money back to the priests, but they refused to put it in the temple treasury since it was “blood money.” Judas flung the money at them, and he hanged himself. They used the silver to buy a potter’s field, where they could bury non-Jews. Oddly, Matthew credited Jeremiah for the prophecy rather than Zechariah:
Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, ‘And they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me’ (Matt. 27:9).
Why did Matthew attribute the Zechariah passage to Jeremiah? First, ancient writers did not follow our modern standards for quotations and citations. We cannot put the expectations of the Chicago Manual of Style on them. We know from Dead Sea Scrolls, such as the Temple Scroll, that it was a permissible practice in the first century CE for scribes to make scrolls that blended assorted passages of scripture. Perhaps there was a topical scroll that blended Jeremiah’s potter metaphors with Zechariah’s reference to a potter. It is possible that Matthew generically referenced the topical scroll by merely naming its most prominent literary prophet.
Another interesting note is that a few details in Matthew’s account differ from Zechariah’s narrative. In Matthew, the priest bought a potter’s field with the silver. In Zechariah, the prophet flung the silver at the potter. Still, the thirty pieces of silver and the action of flinging it at a potter or buying a potter’s field is similar enough to consider it a messianic typology that was fulfilled through Jesus.
For Christians, the Hebrew scriptures offer many typologies for Jesus. Typology is a type of symbolism in the Bible that points to Christ. Christians can easily allegorize any part of Hebrew scripture as a symbol of Jesus’s coming. And certainly, there are big themes about God’s redemptive, saving works, from Genesis to Revelation, as he extends his covenant love and grace to all who believe. However, to take every detail in the Hebrew scripture and try to pin it on Jesus often makes us miss the point of the Hebrew passage on its own merit.
As a practice, the best way to identify a passage in the Old Testament as a typology for Jesus is if the New Testament itself makes the claim. The New Testament is our cheat sheet, so to speak. If it records that Jesus fulfilled a passage from the Old Testament, then the interpretation is dependable. Matthew’s use of this passage in Zechariah is a perfect example. His point is that just as they rejected Zechariah as the good shepherd, they also rejected Jesus as the good shepherd (John 10:11), and just as God implicated the entire community in the devaluing of Zechariah’s role, he also implicated the first-century community in failing to see the purpose of Jesus’s saving mission.
In the last act of this prophetic play, Yahweh commanded Zechariah to “take once more the implements of a worthless shepherd” (11:15). With two staffs broken, the prophet needed new shepherding equipment. Because the people were being foolish, he wanted them to experience the rule of a foolish leader. His poor leadership would portend the destruction of the community. The corrupt shepherd hardly even concerned himself with the people. He did “not care for the perishing, or seek the wandering, or heal the maimed, or nourish the healthy” (11:16). The worthless shepherd ignored all the duties of his role.
Thankfully, Zechariah 11 ends with God punishing the worthless shepherd according to his crimes: “Let his arm be completely withered, his right eye utterly blinded!” (11:17). Because a blind or maimed shepherd is useless, God mercifully intervened on the community’s behalf. God standing in as shepherd provided a much-needed word of comfort to an otherwise woeful narrative. Thankfully, Zechariah 11 was not the prophet’s last word. The fog of doom lifts for the rest of the book.