Mining the Minors: Zechariah (8)

In interpreting Zechariah, a great deal depends on the systematic theology of the reader. When you start with an ironclad overview of the prophetic scriptures in mind, it’s next to impossible to interpret individual passages without inflicting your prejudices on them. I’ll try to keep that in mind as I go along.

The next two visions are considerably more difficult. They must be, as scholarly opinions about their meanings are all over the map. I’ll give a quick summary of the major viewpoints and then, in most cases, tell you where and why I disagree with them, and what I’d suggest as alternatives.

Five Positive, Three Negative

So far, Zechariah has received five positive visions, at least insofar as his people are concerned. The man on the red horse reminded Judah of the Lord’s zeal for Zion and anger at the nations. The four horns and four craftsmen assured them the bad guys would get their just desserts in due course. The man with the measuring line spoke of the glories of millennial Jerusalem and the presence of Messiah among his people. Joshua’s cleansing symbolized the purification and restoration of the priesthood, and the golden lampstand reminded Judah that the Spirit of God was with the Jews in the work of rebuilding the temple of the Lord.

Now the visions turn ugly. If we have read the history of this period, we know they had to eventually. I believe the most responsible way to interpret them is by keeping their historical context front and center.

I. Eight Visions and Explanations (continued)

6/ The Flying Scroll Curse

Zechariah 5:1-2 – The Vision

“Again I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, a flying scroll! And he said to me, ‘What do you see?’ I answered, ‘I see a flying scroll. Its length is twenty cubits, and its width ten cubits.’ ”

The scroll was flying and written on both sides, so it could be seen by all; unrolled, so the message was plain; and very large, so nobody in Judah could fail to read its characters. The measurements equate to 15 × 30 feet, the same as the dimensions of the porch of Solomon’s temple. Nobody really knows what to make of that, and I’m not sure there’s any great message to be dredged out of it. What we can say with confidence is that the Lord did not intend the contents of the scroll to be a secret.

If he did, he failed miserably. God doesn’t do that.

Zechariah 5:3-4 – The Explanation

“Then he said to me, ‘This is the curse that goes out over the face of the whole land. For everyone who steals shall be cleaned out according to what is on one side, and everyone who swears falsely shall be cleaned out according to what is on the other side. I will send it out, declares the Lord of hosts, and it shall enter the house of the thief, and the house of him who swears falsely by my name. And it shall remain in his house and consume it, both timber and stones.’ ”

Time and Place

The ESV has “whole land”, but a familiar interpretive difficulty raises its head here, namely that the words for “land” (meaning Judah) and “earth” are the same in Hebrew. Naturally, some commentators want to make this about the rest of the planet and refer it to Christ’s purging of evil at the end of the great tribulation period. Given that the first five visions have been directed at the returned exiles, the mission in which they were then engaged and the state of affairs in Judah around 520 BC, I just can’t see the logic of that. Even the hints concerning Messiah and the millennial glories of Israel existed primarily to encourage the workers in their labors at that time.

I think it’s far more likely this vision concerns Judah as well, rather than being a message about some remote judgment on the entire world. I believe it foretells a divine purge of the wicked among God’s people that took place during the next few decades after the vision.

The Content of the Message

Numerous commentators point out that the two sins identified in this purge (stealing and swearing) are forbidden, respectively, in the eighth and third of the Ten Commandments, though not all agree about how the curse on swearing should be understood. Some see it as a curse on profane people, others as a curse on oath breakers. I favor the latter, for reasons disclosed shortly.

The commentators bring the Commandments into it in order to suggest that these two identified sins really represent the entire law by synecdoche (meaning they effectively serve as an executive summary of the law in its entirety). They assume swearing is intended to represent the contents of Moses’ first stone tablet, and stealing the second.

Again, I respectfully disagree with their reasoning. For one, why choose the third and eighth commandments, rather than the first and sixth, which would surely have topped the two tablets? Secondly, why reverse the order of the tablets (stealing comes after swearing) if we are supposed to associate the sins with the entire Ten Commandments?

I don’t think the scroll and its curse have anything to do with the Commandments beyond the fact that both named sins were, coincidentally, violations of the big ten rather than one of the other 603 laws given to Moses. In fact, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah demonstrate the two sins specified by God are not merely representative sins intended to stand as a proxy for the entire law. Rather, the chosen violations of the law were the two most significant national sins peculiar to Jews of the post-exilic era. It was in these two areas — thievery and oath breaking — that Judah was most negligent before God. Not only that, the two areas are connected, and both are associated with curses.

Oaths, Curses and Thievery in Ezra and Nehemiah

If we stay glued to the historical accounts of this period, we cannot help but notice that both Ezra and Nehemiah are full of oath taking followed by oath breaking. “Oath” is exactly the same Hebrew word used in Zechariah, where it is translated “swears” or “swears falsely”, and both Ezra and Nehemiah use “covenant” as a synonym for it. Jewish marriage in those days was solemnized with, yes, an oath or covenant. That’s right, you’d swear, even back then. I don’t know if they said ’til death do you part, but they definitely made a solemn promise of fidelity.

In Ezra 10, Ezra makes the leading priests and Levites and all Israel take an oath to put away their foreign wives and children. Then in Nehemiah 5, a great outcry arises about thievery on a national scale. Rich Jews were stealing fields, vineyards, olive orchards and houses and exacting interest from their poor countrymen, to the point where they were taking their sons and daughters as slaves. What does Nehemiah do? He makes them take an oath to return the stolen property to their brothers, invoking a curse on those who do not.

In Nehemiah 13 (and this is definitely much later than the issue in Ezra 10), the governor catches even more Jews marrying foreign women. This time he is beside himself with anger, cursing and beating the culprits and pulling out their hair. What does he do? He makes them take an oath in the name of God not to do it anymore.

Each time they took an oath, the sinning people of Judah risked putting themselves under the curse of Zechariah when they failed to keep it.

Oaths, Curses and Thievery in Malachi

Finally, Malachi, who wrote some considerable time after Zechariah’s visions, specifically identifies the Jews who divorced their Jewish wives to marry foreign women as “covenant breakers” and condemns adulterers side-by-side with those who swear falsely [same word again] and those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless. These are the Jews to whom the Lord will “draw near for judgment”, and Malachi shows they were still at it, stealing and swearing, generations later.

The thievery, oaths and curses are all there side by side in the same historical passages from the period right after Zechariah saw his vision. I believe in Zechariah’s vision of the flying scroll curse, the Lord was confirming his own judgment on the evildoers in Judah who failed to keep their promises, and there were definitely no small number of these around. The angel promises Zechariah a curse will rest on the house of any individual who continues to violate, much like the curse once laid on the man who would dare to rebuild the city of Jericho.

History tells us how that played out. You don’t mess with a curse God has affirmed.

The Law and the Curse

In a way, it’s understandable how this happened. The people of Judah were largely ignorant of the Law of Moses. This had happened before at various times during Israel’s history, and ignorance of the Law was widespread again during the reigns of the final four kings of Judah and during the seventy years of judgment.

Nehemiah records that this changed under Ezra’s leadership. Like a scroll flying through the heavens with the commands of God writ large, Ezra had the Law of Moses read clearly to the people, and the Levites gave the intended sense so they could understand it. Ezra stood on a wooden platform made for the purpose as he did so. Nehemiah does not record the size of the platform, but if it turns out to have been twenty cubits by ten, I would not be all that surprised. Let’s just say that, like the contents of Zechariah’s scroll, nobody in Judah could miss the implicit threat to those who wished to continue in their sins. Men and women wept together as they realized their many violations and the curses pronounced on those who did these things. The people confessed their sins and made a covenant to obey the Law. From that point on, they made themselves personally accountable to God. Then, as we find out in Malachi, within a generation or so, large numbers of them went right back to the same sinful patterns of behavior.

Zechariah’s flying scroll was no harbinger of national judgment, but it promised the individual oath breakers and thieves that they would not get away with it. God himself would curse their houses. In good time, we can be sure he did just that.

For Death or Banishment

How did he do it? we might well ask. Ezra probably answers that too. He received the following instructions from King Artaxerxes of Persia several years after Zechariah’s vision: “Whoever will not obey the law of your God and the law of the king, let judgment be strictly executed on him, whether for death or for banishment or for confiscation of his goods or for imprisonment.”

That’s a pretty broad mandate, and it probably explains why the governor of Judah felt entirely comfortable personally assaulting Jews who were still violating the law. There is no way to do an end-around the commands of God while maintaining a reasonable expectation of prosperity.