Zechariah 9-14

Here is what Lawrence Boadt has to say about these chapters….

Second Zechariah in chapters 9-14 reveals an entirely different spirit. There are no visions, no concern for the temple, no further hopes for Zerubbabel, and no Davidic restoration dreams. It is poetry instead of prose, and stresses God as a divine warrior who will fight to deliver Jerusalem from the power of foreign nations. It especially develops several themes found in Ezekiel, especially those of God as the true shepherd of his people, and the coming day of the Lord.

Second Zechariah treats the theme of the shepherd in Zechariah 9:16-17, 11:1-17, and 13:7-9. In the final passage he proclaims that God will shepherd Israel….

Compare this with the great climax of Ezekiel’s oracle on God as the good shepherd… in Ezekiel 34:30-31.

He also intensifies the hopes of a great day of the Lord. God will not only restore Israel but transform the people and the land into a new paradise…. (Zec 14:6-7)

There is a sense of a delayed coming of God in this passage. The hope that God will transform the whole world represents a new state of thought that developed in the centuries after Haggai and Zechariah. In the development of Israelite thought, they fall somewhere between the sixth century and the time of the Book of Daniel in the second century B.C.

Second Zechariah also continues many of the themes found in the original Zechariah, including the coming of a new age, the cleansing of all impurities from the holy land, the outpouring of the Spirit of Yahweh, and the place of Jerusalem as the center of God’s restored land. (Reading the Old Testament, pp. 441-443)

As the first Christians read Second Zechariah, they saw prophecies that were fulfilled in Jesus. Zechariah 9:9 is often read on Palm Sunday and Zechariah 12:10 found its fulfillment when the first disciples of Jesus mourned his piercing and death upon the cross. See these places where Zechariah is quoted in the New Testament: Matthew 21:5; 26:15, 31; 27:9-10; Mark 14:27; John 12:15; 19:37; Jude 1:9; Revelation 1:7.

What has stood out most to you in your reading of Zechariah?

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