Zechariah 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

In the fourth year of King Darius, men come to the temple to ask the priests and prophets whether they should keep mourning and fasting in the fifth month as they have for years. The LORD answers Zechariah with questions of his own: their fasting and their eating were done for themselves, not for him, and the earlier prophets had already said what mattered. That earlier message was to judge honestly, show mercy, and not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the foreigner, or the poor. Because their ancestors refused to listen, the LORD did not listen to them, and he scattered them among nations they did not know, leaving the land empty behind them.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • It was the fourth year of King Darius.
   • The word of the LORD came to Zechariah.
   • It came on the fourth day of the ninth month.
   • The ninth month is Chislev.
2. 7:2
   • Sharezer and Regem-melech and their men were sent, along with a reference to Bethel that is ambiguous: either the people of Bethel did the sending, or Bethel (the house of God) was the place they were sent to.
   • The purpose of sending them was to entreat the favor of the LORD.
3. 7:3
   • The men were sent to speak to the priests belonging to the house of the LORD of hosts.
   • The men were sent to speak also to the prophets.
   • The question asked was whether the speaker should weep in the fifth month.
   • The question asked was whether the speaker should abstain, as by fasting or consecrated separation.
   • The speaker said he had done this for many years.
4. 7:4
   • The word of the LORD of hosts came to Zechariah.
   • Zechariah speaks in the first person as the one who received it.
5. 7:5
   • The LORD told Zechariah to speak to all the people of the land.
   • The LORD told Zechariah to speak also to the priests.
   • The people had fasted in the fifth month.
   • The people had mourned in the fifth and seventh months.
   • This had gone on for seventy years.
   • The LORD asked whether they had in fact fasted for him at all.
6. 7:6
   • The people ate and drank.
   • The LORD asked whether they were not eating and drinking for themselves.
7. 7:7
   • The LORD asked whether they should not heed the words he proclaimed through the former prophets.
   • Those words were proclaimed when Jerusalem was inhabited and at ease.
   • The cities around Jerusalem were then inhabited as well.
   • The Negev, the dry south country, was then inhabited.
   • The Shephelah, the western lowland, was then inhabited.
8. 7:8
   • The word of the LORD came to Zechariah.
9. 7:9
   • The LORD of hosts said this.
   • He commanded them to render true judgment.
   • He commanded each man to show loyal kindness to his brother.
   • He commanded each man to show compassion to his brother.
10. 7:10
    • He commanded them not to oppress the widow.
    • He commanded them not to oppress the fatherless.
    • He commanded them not to oppress the resident foreigner.
    • He commanded them not to oppress the poor.
    • He commanded that none of them devise evil against his brother in his heart.
11. 7:11
    • They refused to pay attention.
    • They turned a stubborn shoulder away.
    • They made their ears heavy so as not to hear.
12. 7:12
    • They made their hearts as hard as the hardest stone.
    • They did this so as not to hear the law.
    • They did this so as not to hear the words the LORD of hosts sent by his Spirit.
    • Those words were sent through the former prophets.
    • Therefore great wrath came from the LORD of hosts.
13. 7:13
    • He called and they would not hear.
    • In the same way, they called and he would not hear.
    • The LORD of hosts said this.
14. 7:14
    • The LORD scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations.
    • They had not known those nations.
    • The land was left desolate behind them.
    • No one passed through the land or returned.
    • They turned the desirable land into a desolation.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

7:1

Darius is Darius I, king of the Persian Empire, which then ruled Judah; his fourth year was 518 BC. After the exile the Jews dated events by the reigning foreign king, since Judah no longer had kings of its own. Chislev was the ninth month of the Hebrew year, falling in our November–December.

7:2

The Hebrew of this verse is compressed and genuinely disputed. It can be read as "Bethel sent Sharezer", Bethel being a town about twelve miles north of Jerusalem, or as a single personal name, "Bethel-sharezer." Sharezer and Regem-melech are Babylonian-style names, the kind borne by families who had spent a generation in exile. "To ask the LORD for his favor" renders a Hebrew idiom whose literal sense is "to soften the face of the LORD," that is, to seek a favorable ruling. The "house of God" is the temple in Jerusalem, at this date still half-rebuilt.

7:3

The fast of the fifth month marked the burning of the temple and the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BC. It was not commanded in the law of Moses; it was a custom the exiles had taken up, and the question here is a practical one about whether it still applies now that the temple is going up again. The King James "separating myself" means abstaining from food. "LORD of Hosts" is a title meaning the LORD who commands the armies of heaven; "hosts" is an old English word for armed forces drawn up for battle. "The LORD of Hosts" is a title for God as commander of the armies of heaven.

7:4

The King James Bible says "the LORD of hosts." A host meant a great big army. So the name pictures God as a king with countless soldiers.

7:5

The seventh-month fast marked the murder of Gedaliah, the governor the Babylonians appointed over the survivors left in Judah after Jerusalem fell. His killing ended the last scrap of local self-rule and sent many of the remaining people fleeing to Egypt. The "seventy years" is the standard round figure for the length of the exile, counted either from the fall of Jerusalem or from the first deportation.

7:6

Fasting and feasting were the two halves of the religious calendar, so the question covers everything: not just the mourning days but the ordinary eating and the festival meals too.

7:7

"The south" is the Negev, the dry grazing country running south from Judah; "the plain" is the Shephelah, the belt of low hills between the central highlands and the coastal plain. Naming both is a way of saying the whole country, edge to edge, was settled and working. The "former prophets" are those who spoke before the exile (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and the rest) whose warnings had by Zechariah's day become old written words rather than living voices.

7:9

"Execute true judgment" is courtroom language: give honest verdicts, take no bribes, do not tilt a case toward the powerful party. Behind "mercy and compassions" stand two Hebrew words, one for the loyal kindness members of a community owe each other, the other for the gut-level pity a parent feels for a child.

7:10

The widow, the fatherless child, the foreigner and the poor are a standard set in Hebrew law: the four kinds of people with no male head of household or clan to press their case, and therefore the easiest in that society to cheat with no consequences. The "stranger" is not a passing traveler but a foreigner settled permanently among Israelites without land of his own.

7:11

"Pulled away the shoulder" is a farming image, an ox shrugging its neck sideways out from under the yoke instead of taking the harness.

7:12

"Adamant" in 1611 English meant the hardest stone known, the kind used for cutting and engraving; flint, emery and diamond were all called by the name. "The law" here is the Torah, the body of instruction given through Moses.

7:13

The sentence slides from talking about God in the third person, "as he cried", into God speaking as "I". That shift is normal in prophetic speech, where the prophet's voice and the quoted voice of God run together in one sentence.

7:14

"Pleasant land" was a stock phrase for the land of Israel, valued for its fertility. Being scattered among nations "they knew not" means deportation to places where they had no kin, no legal standing, and nobody under any obligation to take their side.