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The second section of Zechariah opens with a precise date superscription: “in the fourth year of King Darius” (7:1). Apparently, the book picks up two years after the prophet experienced his vision sequence (1:1, 7). Around 518 BCE, the temple construction was proceeding quickly and was only two years from completion (Ezra 6:15). The people were feeling confident of Jerusalem’s reemergence and therefore were paying less attention to their spiritual condition.
Bethel delegation
Zechariah received a divine word of warning, prompted by a visiting delegation of leaders from Bethel (7:1). The townspeople of Bethel sent a delegation to Jerusalem to settle a dispute in their community about whether they should continue to observe certain fast days. The fast days had begun in exile to lament the destruction of Jerusalem (7:2-3). Now that they had returned to Judah and the temple was almost finished, perhaps there was no longer a point to fasts memorializing Jerusalem’s darkest days. Before analyzing Zechariah’s response, it is important to highlight some of the subtle details in the introductory verses.
Both Zechariah and Haggai expressed hopeful expectations that returnees would repopulate the surrounding cities of Jerusalem, and this seems to have happened, as evidenced by the delegation from a rural community outside of Jerusalem. In Zechariah’s first vision, the angelic messenger had asked Yahweh to extend his mercy to both Jerusalem and the “cities of Judah,” so that the cities would once again “overflow with prosperity” (1:12, 17). The existence of an organized community in Bethel was a significant sign! It showed that the exiles were returning to their ancestral homelands and felt secure enough to live outside of the walls of Jerusalem. Ezra also confirmed the resettlement trend and listed all the hometowns where the exiles had returned, including Bethel (2:28).
The second thing to note is that the Bethel delegation traveled the 12 miles to Jerusalem to inquire of the “priests of the house of the Lord of hosts and the prophets” (7:3). The author reveals something significant in this passage. Bethel’s inhabitants were yielding to Jerusalem’s spiritual supremacy.
Before the Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, Bethel had been a cultic religious center that opposed the leadership of Jerusalem. Bethel’s enmity with Jerusalem started during the reign of Jeroboam I, the first king of Israel after the division of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. To compete with the temple, Jeroboam I had placed a golden calf at a shrine in Bethel (1 Kings 12:28-32). The prophet Hosea accused Bethel of “great evil” and rightly predicted her ruin (Hosea 10:15). The prophet Amos also predicted Bethel’s fall (Amos 3:14). As a result, the priests at Bethel charged the prophet of conspiring against King Jeroboam (Amos 7:10-17). According to an apocryphal work, The Lives of the Prophets, a priest at Bethel murdered Amos.
With that dark history in mind, remarkably, Bethel—once home to a rival priestly caste—sent a delegation to Jerusalem to consult with the priests and prophets. Bethel’s recognition of Jerusalem as the religious and judicial center was a step in the right direction for the restored community.
However, other subtleties in the text point to an underlying challenge within the postexilic community. Sprinkled throughout the text are reminders of the Babylonian exile, indicators that the people had returned to the covenanted land, but they lacked independence. Sharezer, the leader of the Bethel delegation, had a Babylonian name. Even the prophet used the Babylonian name Chislev, not the Hebrew name, when identifying the month of his divine revelation, which was the ninth month. The influence of Babylonian culture persisted well after the exiles had returned. Rebuilding their own identity and station would be a process.
Fast days
Regarding the Bethel delegation’s inquiry, the question presented to Jerusalem’s leaders pertained to fast days. In exile, the diaspora initiated four fast days as a means of communal lament for their loss. The fast in the fourth month was to commemorate the loss of Jerusalem. They fasted in the fifth month to commemorate the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians (2 Kings 25:8). In the seventh month, they fasted to mourn the assassination of Gedaliah. When the Babylonians overtook Jerusalem, they appointed a Jewish leader named Gedaliah as governor over the remaining Jewish community. An anti-Babylonian Jewish patriot group assassinated Gedaliah (Jer. 41). His murder humiliated the exiles in Babylon, so they established a fast day in Gedaliah’s honor. In the tenth month, they fasted to commemorate the launch of Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem. Upholding the regular fasts throughout the time of exile was one way of keeping the community together and upholding their national memories.
Bethel’s conundrum, on its own, seems logical. Should the returnees continue to fast for the destroyed temple when the new one was almost finished? A similar question crops up in modern times around Passover. Should the Jews living in Israel say “next year in Jerusalem” at the end of the Seder liturgy when they are already living in a reestablished Israel?
When Sharezer asked if the returnees should continue the fast, he was ambiguous about the duration of the tradition, asking, “Should I mourn and practice abstinence in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?” (7:3). Zechariah saw prophetic importance in the number of years of exile. In his response, he specified the fast had occurred for “these 70 years” (7:5). He was keeping track of the number of years because the prophet Jeremiah had foretold a 70-year captivity (Jer. 29:11).
Sharezer was looking for a straightforward ruling. If it had been the priests or judges of Jerusalem who had answered him, they likely would have deliberated the legal and traditional aspects of the fast to determine a judgment. However, we are only made aware of Zechariah’s response. Prophets usually took an esoteric approach, answering questions with questions. Zechariah sermonized about the spiritual condition of “all the people of the land,” not just the Bethel delegation (7:5).
Zechariah had no problem with fasting as a practice. The Hebrew scriptures endorse fasting as a spiritual and confessional exercise to come humbly before the Lord. However, Zechariah was skeptical of the motivation behind the fast question. He sensed that the question reflected a misunderstanding of God’s priorities for his people.
Fasting motives
Zechariah’s response to the delegation was more of a rebuke than an answer. Speaking for Yahweh, the prophet asked, “Was it for me that you fasted?” (7:5). He challenged whether the fast served God or whether it was self-serving. Was the attitude behind the fast one of humble repentance or of self-pity? He probed further, “When you eat and when you drink, do you not eat and drink only for yourselves?” (7:6). If they were truly turning to God in all their thoughts, words, and deeds, the regular acts of eating and drinking also should have prompted gratitude and piety.
Zechariah was aware of the rich, prophetic traditions that preceded him, and he alluded to his prophetic predecessors frequently. In fact, all the postexilic prophets made frequent mention of the preexilic prophets. Before the exile, the prophets had accused the people of mechanizing the motions of religious ritual without turning their hearts toward God. Zechariah presented that same warning to the new community.
Zechariah referred to Jeremiah more than to any other preexilic prophet. Jeremiah had railed against the false sense of security that the people had derived from the temple. Zechariah sensed that the regional peace and the progressing temple construction gave the impression that Jerusalem was on the right path. As a result, the people were neglecting their inward spiritual lives. Without citing Jeremiah directly, Zechariah synthesized the preexilic prophet’s message with his own. Zechariah could not give them divine revelation to dictate their future until they first examined their past and present.
Bible commentaries point out the similarities between two specific messages in Jeremiah and Zechariah (Jer. 7:5-6; Zech. 7:9-10). Jeremiah had warned:
For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place (Jer. 7:5-7).
Zechariah gave a similar message to the Bethel delegation:
Thus says the Lord of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another (7:9-10).
In the sixth century BCE, before the exile, Jerusalem and her surrounding cities were “inhabited and in prosperity” (7:7). This was the high point for Jerusalem, but her punishment lurked around the corner because the people had ignored Yahweh’s appeal. To express the fullness of their rejection of covenant obligations, Zechariah used metaphorical kinetic language. In response to the former prophets, the previous generation “turned a stubborn shoulder and stopped their ears in order not to hear” (7:11). They also “made their hearts adamant” (7:12). These three rebellious body parts suggested that people were eager to abandon God with their whole bodies. Zechariah wanted his contemporaries to consider how they were responding to Yahweh’s message differently than their ancestors.
Zechariah repeatedly tried to motivate the people toward obedience, so the social injustices of their ancestors would not persist in the restored community. How a society cared for its most vulnerable members revealed its greater spiritual condition. Israel’s covenant laws, if followed, provided for the needy.
Zechariah was not overly concerned with the cancelation of the fast days, as the next chapter will elucidate. He was concerned about people resorting to preexilic Judah’s lazy faith standards. They no longer worshiped idols or established apostate sanctuaries, but they were once again focusing on the details of empty ritual, while missing the greater call for an ethical and just society. They were falsely pious. Fasting had no meaning or value if ethics were absent, faith was empty, and greed abounded.
The ultimate punishment for the wickedness of the preexilic community was that God had stopped listening. When the people of monarchic Judah had stopped listening to the prophets, Yahweh refused to hear their prayers (7:13). Just as God had warned from the beginning, their failure to uphold the covenant had led to their banishment from the land. God recalled, “I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations that they had not known” (7:14).
Zechariah’s message would have stung the ears of his audience. The postexilic generation was still reeling over the meaning of their exile. Why did it happen? Could it happen again? If the exile was the great, collective trauma of the people, the prophets were serving as divinely appointed counselors and life coaches. Zechariah, Haggai, and Ezra all gave the sense that the community was experiencing a crisis of hope. They had extremely low expectations for their future. Zechariah’s oracles restored their hope and encouraged them to trust that, even though their return from Babylon did not fulfill every prophecy, God was still working on their behalf.