The scribes who assembled the Book of Zechariah reiterate that the prophet Zechariah received a word from YHWH (1:1 and 1:7b), but the next series of oracles (1:7–6:15) portray Zechariah as an ecstatic prophet, who receives a series of visions and who is taken on a series of “spirit journeys.”1 This series of visions elevates the status of the prophet but not because of the ecstatic experience itself. Rather, the prophet’s ecstatic experiences imply that YHWH granted the prophet access to the divine court, not only to see its goings on, but also to serve as the divine messenger to the people. Just as entering the king’s presence in Persia was restricted, likewise the access to the divine court was not granted to just anyone. The scribes of the Book of Zechariah seek to assure the audience that Zechariah’s words are the words of a divine courtier, an authorized messenger who brings YHWH’s word.2

What Zechariah 9:1–11:3 only briefly remarks upon – the failure of the governors of Yehud that, for the disciples of Zechariah, would prove to postpone the glorious promises of Zechariah into the ill-defined future – comes to massive scale in 11:4–17. As becomes apparent in the narrative of Zech 11:4–17, the governors of Yehud too readily share characteristics of the governors of their Levantine neighbors, including the concern to increase their wealth with its concomitant lack of concern for suffering people.

As the narrative in Zech 11:4–17 ends, YHWH hands the people and land over to a worthless shepherd, and the book turns toward the future. The phrase “in that day” (bayyôm hahûʾ) occurs only five times in Zechariah 1–11 but seventeen times in Zechariah 12–14. In the overall argument of the book, the promises and visions of 1:1–11:3 seemed always just on the horizon, if only the people would return to YHWH. But the governors, elites, and the peoples consistently refused to obey the prophet’s call across generations. So the final oracles look toward “that day,” in the future, when YHWH will act decisively to finally renew Yehud and Jerusalem as YHWH intended all along.

Tucked in at the very end of the prophetic books, at the very end of the Christian Old Testament, the Books of Haggai and Zechariah are two of the more neglected texts of the Old Testament. The relative obscurity of their message to most readers of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) parallels the relative obscurity of the original audience of these two books to their Persian overlords, the people residing in the small district of Yehud, a small portion of the previously larger state of Judah, at the southernmost reach of the empire. Yet, these two books are at great pains to convince their audiences that these people, their capital city Jerusalem, their Temple, and their god, YHWH, have a significance on the world stage all out of proportion to their role within the empire.1

The Book of Haggai unfolds across four narrative episodes (1:1–1:15a; 1:15b–2:9; 2:10–19; 2:20–23), marked in the text by the date when the prophet Haggai came forward to make each of the four proclamations during the reign of Darius I (1:1; 1:15b; 2:10; 2:20). While this series of narratives tell of Haggai’s interaction with the remnant of Israel and their leaders, several key imperatives indicate the persuasive aim of the book: “Go up to the hills and bring down trees and build this house” (1:8) and “Be strong, Zerubbabel … be strong Joshua … be strong all people of the land … and act!” (2:4). Several more imperatives punctuate this collection of stories (1:5, 7; 2:15, 18), but these serve to exhort the audience to introspection as a means to motivate them to fulfill these two, primary imperatives. In which case we can fairly summarize the purpose of the Book of Haggai as to encourage the book’s audience to fulfill Haggai’s commands, to be strong and to finish the work of building the Temple to YHWH. The explicit theological claims and implicit theological assumptions of the book intend to motivate its original audience to achieve this aim, perhaps not too long after Haggai’s prophetic ministry.

We do not know much about the biography of Zechariah son of Berechiah, son of Iddo. The Book of Zechariah does not concern itself much with the person as with the fact that Zechariah is “the prophet” who, during the reign of Darius I of Persia, received words from YHWH. What we know then is that Zechariah was one of those figures recognizable in Yehud as a practitioner of a form of “intuitive divination” whose utterances were believed, at least by those who recorded them, to be inspired by YHWH, the God of Israel.1

A historical shift occurs at Zech 9:1. The earlier narrative material purportedly came from the days of Zechariah son of Iddo during the reign of Darius I, around 520–518 BCE. But the tensions with the neighboring cities on the coast of the Levant and to the north reflected in Zechariah 9:1–11:3 gesture at the struggles in the “middle territory” during the reign of Artaxerxes I, ca. 464–455 BCE. Persia to the north and east and Egypt to the south were engaged in conflict after Egypt rebelled against Artaxerxes following the assassination of Xerxes I. The scope of the conflict expanded as the Greeks from the West joined their naval forces in the battles along the coast.

No two prophets within the canon of the Old Testament are as closely linked as Haggai and Zechariah. Other prophetic books indicate that two prophets delivered their oracles during the reigns of the same kings (e.g., Isaiah and Micah or Jeremiah and Ezekiel). But only the Books of Haggai and Zechariah explicitly indicate that the messages of these two prophets overlapped at one point during the same year in the same location: the second year of the reign of Darius I in the city of Jerusalem. Moreover, only Haggai and Zechariah are named together in a third book purporting to tell the history of their time period, the Book of Ezra. And, of course, they appear next to each other in the Hebrew canon of Scripture, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but unlike Isaiah and Micah.

When Zechariah initially steps down out of heaven at the end of chapter 6, the audience of the book has no idea where he lands. What the narrative does say is that the prophet proceeded to the house of Josiah son of Zephaniah to perform the dramatic action of crowning Joshua the high priest. In the following chapter, the narrative seems to place Zechariah in the Temple, as part of the regular Temple personnel of priests and other prophets (7:3). Envoys from the otherwise unknown figures of Sharezer and Regem-melek arrive from Bethel with a question to lay before YHWH (v. 2). According to the narrative, YHWH chooses to give an answer through Zechariah (vv. 1, 4).1