Mining the Minors: Zechariah (12)

A couple of my Christian friends gave up certain food groups for Lent this year, provoking the occasional thought about the purpose of biblical fasting, though not necessarily inspiring me to join them. I’m on an eighteen-hour-a-day intermittent fasting program already, which is more than enough for me. Adding forty days of any kind of deprivation to that? Don’t think so.

Fasting has a long history as a perceived act of religious devotion, including among practitioners of Judaism, for whom the Law of Moses actually commanded it. Christians have no specific apostolic instructions to observe it, but some have always done so, citing the words of the Lord Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount concerning fasting, despite the fact that his own disciples did not make a habit of it.

Of course, the Lord’s instructions about fasting were directed to Jews, but that often goes unremarked.

The Question Behind the Question

Zechariah did not initiate the discussion of fasting. God sent him instructions and correction in response to a question raised by returned exiles visiting Jerusalem from Bethel. Like all Jews and Israelites in those days, in common with people from many other nations, these men of Bethel lived in a province of the Persian Empire rather than an independent nation under God. Many things in Judea were not as they should be. There was no king on the throne of Judah, no wall built around Jerusalem, no autonomy for the Jews and many of their brothers still voluntarily dispersed throughout the Empire. Still, some good things seemed to be happening. The building of the new temple was in progress, the Persian kings treated them favorably, and regular corporate worship had returned to Israel.

For years, the habit among the Jews in exile had been to grieve and mourn at certain times of the year because of the seventy years of punishment God had inflicted on them for their national rebellion. Probably there were Jews who wondered “When are these seventy years going to be up?” No matter when you marked their beginning, it seemed like the termination point of their judgment must be getting close.

So then, the people of Bethel sent emissaries to the religious leadership in Jerusalem to ask questions about their annual public displays of national repentance. “Should we continue or should we not?” The underlying concern was probably “Is our time of judgment ever going to be over?”

II. Four Messages (continued)

2/ Worship in Truth

Zechariah 7:1-7 – Self or God?

“In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, which is Chislev. Now the people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-melech and their men to entreat the favor of the Lord, saying to the priests of the house of the Lord of hosts and the prophets, ‘Should I weep and abstain in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?’

Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me: ‘Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted? And when you eat and when you drink, do you not eat for yourselves and drink for yourselves? Were not these the words that the Lord proclaimed by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous, with her cities around her, and the South and the lowland were inhabited?’ ”

Dates, Months and Names

It’s possible the day, month and year of Zechariah’s second message has some greater significance to Jews than to Christians, as the dates do in Haggai, but if so, few commentators have much to say about it. If anything, we may note that the fourth year of King Darius marks roughly the halfway point in the building of the new temple, which began construction in his second year and was completed in his sixth.

Likewise, Sharezer and Regem-melech appear to have been unremarkable individuals. The consonant combination in Sharezer’s name suggests an Assyrian background, but there is no way to be certain about that, even if, living in the former territory of the northern kingdom, being the product of racial intermarriage was not uncommon. Nevertheless, these two men brought their question to the leadership on behalf of their fellow citizens in Bethel. Of these, Zechariah was an acknowledged prophet, and it was to Zechariah that God gave his response.

The People of Bethel

The question of where they fit in was unusually relevant to the people living in Bethel. Bethel was not in Judea proper. It was technically a city of Samaria, sitting right on the border between the ancient tribal allotments of Benjamin (in Judah) and Ephraim (in the former northern kingdom). Bethel was a city with a checkered but notable religious history. It was the place where Jacob saw his vision of a ladder up to heaven, a place where both Abraham and Jacob built altars, and one of the early stopping places of the Ark of the Covenant when the tabernacle was brought into Canaan. It later became home to the southernmost of Jeroboam’s golden calves, the seat of northern idolatry. Even after the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians, Bethel remained a religious center. Some priests returned to Bethel to teach its new occupants to fear the Lord, though their worship was intermingled with paganism. Because of its proximity to Judah, there is some thought that Benjamite Judeans may have begun to occupy the city in the years following the Assyrian exile of the Ephraimites. Old Testament writers mention Bethel more often than any Israelite city except Jerusalem.

Though many of the people of Samaria had gone into Assyrian exile more than 100 years prior to Judah’s Babylonian exile, a grand total of 223 from the Bethel area returned with the former Judean exiles to the land they had possessed for generations. This amounts to less than one-half of one percent of the returnees. With all that tribal and religious baggage, it’s no surprise the question about fasting and mourning came from Bethel.

The Question

“Should I weep and abstain in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?” This was the question, and its self-congratulatory tone almost seems to require the rebuke it received. “Look at how long we’ve been faithful!” And yet the text plainly says these men had come from Bethel to entreat the favor of the Lord, and we should not be inclined to second-guess their motives or their seriousness in seeking an answer. Sometimes this happens to Christians too: we deceive ourselves about the reasons we perform religious duties and think we are in a better place spiritually than we actually are.

There’s also a bit of funny business about the timing. These men arrived in the ninth month with a question about things to do in the fifth and seventh months of the year. In other words, their need for an answer was not imminent. The question was an abstract, theological inquiry rather than a pressing need-to-know.

On one level this might be a good thing. It’s always better to seek the mind of God about any important question in a disinterested way. That is to say, if you seek the mind of God about the appropriateness of aborting a child when you have just conceived one you don’t want and can’t support, you are likelier than not to come up with the wrong answer. You are predisposed to answer your own inquiry in the way that makes your life easiest. On another level, we must be careful about looking for the Lord’s will as a matter of intellectual curiosity rather than personal commitment. We must be prepared to put into practice whatever we may find out about the Lord’s mind on any matter, regardless of the anticipated cost.

Months and Meanings

The significance of the fifth month as a time of mourning for Judah may not be obvious, but it marked the month in which Nebuchadnezzar finally breached the walls of Jerusalem and Judah’s last king prior to Messiah went into exile. The fifth month was the month in which the temple and city burned and in which the Chaldeans began carrying off the survivors of the siege of Jerusalem into captivity. Jeremiah also remarks that the fifth month was the beginning of the captivity of Jerusalem. That happened, to the best of our knowledge, in 586 BC. This inquiry from Bethel was made in 518 BC, give or take. So for anybody counting to seventy, as Jeremiah’s prophecy required, the numbers were getting close, and the people of God were starting to wonder what they ought to expect, and if there was anything they ought to do differently than they had been.

The seventh month is usually associated with the annual Day of Atonement for the nation, during which the Law of Moses commanded a national fast. Three of the seven feasts of YHWH fell in the seventh month, but the Day of Atonement is the only one associated with self-deprivation. However, this cannot be what the Lord has in mind when he mentions the seventh month through Zechariah, since it should be obvious nobody would ever need to inquire whether the Day of Atonement ought to continue to be observed. It was enshrined in Israel’s law, and nobody would have thought to ask the question. Accordingly, several commentators associate the seventh month with the murder of Gedaliah, the appointed governor of Judea, by a member of the royal family only two months after the deportations of the fifth month. It is assumed the Jews also commemorated this national disgrace with fasting and mourning over the sixty-eight years that had since transpired, since it resulted in the eventual loss of most of the Jews initially remaining in Judea after the captivity, when they rebelled and fled to Egypt to avoid Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath. No evidence from scripture can be offered for this assumption, but it seems a likely conclusion.

So then, the thought is that the Jews in Judea were marking their worst national disgraces with days of mourning, in addition to the annual feasts of YHWH required by law. The question was whether these days of self-flagellation ought to continue. Perhaps the Jews in Bethel had begun to wonder if they served any purpose.

For Whom Do You Fast, Eat and Drink

Religious observances may be either pleasurable or painful, but both feasting and fasting may be performed without any conscious desire to please God or awareness of his presence. They may be performed out of duty, habit, peer pressure, guilt, the desire to feel good about ourselves or for any number of other self-serving reasons. The Pharisees of the first century fasted to parade their spiritual superiority before the masses, which is about as self-defeating a religious exercise as can be imagined.

In the case of my friends (who are not even Catholic), Lent became a convenient occasion in which to eat a little healthier. That’s a useful activity, but nobody would claim it’s intrinsically spiritual. The giveaway is that we all knew they were fasting (and got double desserts out of the deal), which is your first clue the motive for self-deprivation is not primarily Godward, but something more practical, like demonstrating a little self-discipline or losing a few pounds. As the Lord Jesus taught, when you fast properly, nobody knows you are doing it. It’s something done in secret in order that the Father who sees in secret will secretly reward you.

This was the first response Zechariah was given, not just for the messengers from Bethel, but for “all the people of the land and the priests”, who evidently needed to hear it. If you’re going to seek the favor of God, you don’t expect to receive it by diligently performing self-appointed oblations, even if you do it for seventy straight years. In that case, all you are really doing is serving yourself, hoping for a handout for being a good boy. The Jews had made up the dates of their own fasts in memory of their own misery. God had not appointed these fasts to them. (Remember, the nations of the day also sacrificed to their gods, and their sacrifices involved acts of asceticism and even self-deprivation and mutilation orders of magnitude more extreme than any allowed in Israel.)

In order to please God, something more than mourning, fasting and outward religious service is needful, and we will get into that next week.