Zechariah: The King on a Donkey

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Chapters 1 to 8 are the visions of Zechariah son of Berechiah, a prophet in Jerusalem at the same time as Haggai. Chapters 9 to 14 are in a different style, with no dates, and most scholars think they come from one or more later prophets.

When: Chapters 1 to 8, 520 to 518 BC. Chapters 9 to 14, probably later, perhaps the 400s or 300s BC.

Where it fits: After the exile. Zechariah spoke in Jerusalem alongside Haggai while the Temple was rebuilt, the years told in Ezra 5 and 6, which name them both. The Temple was finished in 515 BC.

Where I quote it: “Strike the shepherd” (Mark 14:27; Zechariah 13:7). The gospels tell my entry into Jerusalem with its king on a donkey (Matthew 21:5; John 12:15; Zechariah 9:9). Matthew uses its thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 27:9–10; Zechariah 11:12–13), and John its line They will look on him whom they pierced (John 19:37; Zechariah 12:10).

If you only read three chapters: Zechariah 4, Zechariah 7 and Zechariah 9.

Words to Know

The Branch — a name for a coming ruler from David’s line, a new shoot from an old stump.

The satan — in this book, as in Job, the accuser in God’s court.

Joshua the high priest — the chief priest in Zechariah’s day. His name is the same as mine.

Mount of Olives — the hill east of Jerusalem, across the Kidron Valley.

The Book in Brief

Zechariah is a book of prophecy in two very different halves. The prophet speaks to the people who have come back from Babylon and are rebuilding the Temple, and to their leaders, Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest. The book gives his family and the dates of his messages, and little else about his life.

Chapter 1 opens with a call to return to God, as the people’s ancestors refused to do. Then come eight visions in the night, each explained by an angel. Horsemen report that the whole earth is at rest. Four horns, the powers that scattered Judah, are thrown down. A man sets out to measure Jerusalem and is told it will spread beyond any walls. Joshua the high priest is accused by the satan and given clean clothes. A golden lampstand stands between two olive trees. A huge scroll flies over the land, bringing a curse on thieves. A woman in a basket, called Wickedness, is carried off to Babylon. Four chariots go out to the four winds. Then Zechariah is told to make crowns and set them on Joshua’s head.

In chapters 7 and 8, people ask whether they should keep fasting for the fallen Temple. The answer recalls what the earlier prophets demanded, justice and mercy, and promises a city at peace, full of old people and children, where foreigners come to seek God.

Chapters 9 to 14 have no dates and no visions. They announce judgment on Judah’s neighbors and a humble king riding a donkey. The prophet plays a shepherd who is paid thirty pieces of silver and breaks his two staffs. The people mourn for one they pierced, a spring opens to wash away sin, and the shepherd is struck and the sheep scattered. The book ends with the nations attacking Jerusalem, God standing on the Mount of Olives, living water flowing from the city, and the nations coming every year to worship.

I rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. I said, on the way to the garden, that the shepherd would be struck and the sheep scattered. I was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver. My side was pierced. And I sat on the Mount of Olives and spoke of the end.

Each of those is in the gospels with Zechariah behind it.

Not by might

The first half of the book is a series of night visions, given to Zechariah while the Temple was being rebuilt.

He sees horsemen patrolling the earth. He sees a golden lampstand between two olive trees. He sees a flying scroll, thirty feet long, carrying a curse on thieves and on those who swear falsely (Zechariah 5:1–4). He sees a woman called Wickedness stuffed into a basket and flown off to Babylon (Zechariah 5:5–11).

And to the governor, Zerubbabel, who has to finish the Temple with very little, God says: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of Armies (Zechariah 4:6).

A man named Joshua

In Zechariah 3, the high priest Joshua stands before the angel of the LORD in filthy clothes, and the satan, the accuser, stands at his right hand to accuse him. God says, The LORD rebuke you, Satan! Joshua’s filthy clothes are taken off, and he is dressed in clean robes (Zechariah 3:1–5).

In chapter 6, Zechariah is told to make a crown and set it on Joshua’s head, and to say: Behold, the man whose name is the Branch (Zechariah 6:11–12).

A man named Yeshua, accused, cleaned and crowned. You can see why my followers read this book closely.

What the fasting was for

In Zechariah 7, people come to ask whether they should keep fasting to mourn the Temple’s destruction, as they had for seventy years.

God answers with a question. When you fasted and mourned … did you at all fast to me, really to me? Then God tells them what he wanted all along:

Execute true judgment, and show kindness and compassion every man to his brother. Don’t oppress the widow, nor the fatherless, the foreigner, nor the poor; and let none of you devise evil against his brother in your heart (Zechariah 7:9–10).

The prophets keep giving the same answer to every question about religion.

Old people and children in the streets

Zechariah 8 has the loveliest picture of a healed city in the scriptures: Old men and old women will again dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, every man with his staff in his hand for very age. The streets of the city will be full of boys and girls playing in its streets (Zechariah 8:4–5).

No armies. No gold. Old people sitting in the sun and children playing safely. That is what peace looks like.

The chapter ends with foreigners coming: In those days, ten men will take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, they will take hold of the skirt of him who is a Jew, saying, “We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (Zechariah 8:23).

Go deeperHow small Jerusalem was

Zechariah’s picture of a crowded, happy city was a picture of the future. The city he lived in was tiny.

In one of his night visions, a young man goes out with a measuring line to mark out Jerusalem, and an angel stops him. The city will spread past any walls, because of the multitude of men and livestock in it (Zechariah 2:4). That was a bold thing to say. Archaeologists who have dug in Jerusalem find very little from the Persian period. The town seems to have been confined to the narrow ridge south of the Temple, the oldest part of the city, a small fraction of the city the Babylonians had destroyed.¹

Estimates of how many people lived there vary. The Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein puts it at 400 to 500 people. Oded Lipschits, another Israeli archaeologist, argues for about 1,000 to 1,250. Others have suggested up to 1,500. Even the highest of the recent estimates is a large village.¹

The Bible says the same. About seventy-five years after Zechariah, Nehemiah found that the city was wide and large; but the people were few therein (Nehemiah 7:4), and the people had to cast lots to make one in ten of them move into Jerusalem (Nehemiah 11:1).

So when Zechariah promised old men and women sitting in the streets, and children playing, he was speaking to people who could count their neighbors. He was not describing what they had. He was telling them what the city was for.

The king on a donkey

Then comes the second half of the book, and the verse every Christian knows on Palm Sunday:

Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King comes to you! He is righteous, and having salvation; lowly, and riding on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9).

Now read the next verse, because it tells you what kind of king this is: I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow will be cut off; and he will speak peace to the nations (Zechariah 9:10).

Conquerors rode war horses. This king rides a donkey. The chariot and the horse are cut off, and he speaks peace.

I sent two of my friends to fetch a colt, and I rode it into Jerusalem, and the crowds spread their cloaks on the road (Mark 11:1–10). Everyone who knew Zechariah knew what I was saying.

Matthew quotes the verse, and in his telling my friends bring two animals, a donkey and a colt, and I sit on them (Matthew 21:2–7). Hebrew poetry says things twice in different words: on a donkey, even on a colt. It is one animal. Matthew seems to have read it as two.²

Thirty pieces of silver

In Zechariah 11, the prophet acts out a parable as a shepherd hired to tend a flock doomed to slaughter. When he asks for his wages, they weigh out thirty pieces of silver. God tells him, sarcastically, to throw the handsome price that I was valued at by them to the potter in the house of the LORD (Zechariah 11:12–13). The Hebrew says potter; some translations, following an old Syriac translation, have treasury.

Matthew tells how Judas was paid thirty pieces of silver, threw the money into the Temple, and how the priests used it to buy a potter’s field. He says it fulfilled what Jeremiah said (Matthew 27:3–10). Most of the words are Zechariah’s, but the field comes from Jeremiah.³

Go deeperWho wrote the second half of Zechariah

Matthew’s mention of Jeremiah started one of the oldest arguments in the study of the Bible. In the 1600s an English scholar named Joseph Mede noticed that Matthew credits the thirty pieces of silver to Jeremiah. He suggested that the later chapters of Zechariah came from an earlier prophet, perhaps Jeremiah himself, and had been copied onto the end of Zechariah’s scroll.⁴

Few scholars today think Jeremiah wrote them. But most agree with Mede on one thing: chapters 9 to 14 are not by the man who wrote chapters 1 to 8. The first half has dates, visions, an angel who explains them, and named people, Zerubbabel and Joshua. The second half has none of these. It speaks of wars with the nations and of worthless shepherds, and one verse names Greece (Zechariah 9:13).

When was it written? Mede and others thought it was older than the exile, because it mentions Assyria, Egypt and Ephraim, the old northern kingdom. Most scholars now think it is later than chapters 1 to 8, from the 400s BC or after. Some point to the mention of Greece and date parts of it after Alexander the Great passed through in 332 BC. Many think it holds the words of more than one prophet.⁵

There is one more clue. Chapters 9 and 12 each open with the same unusual heading, A revelation, the LORD’s word, and it is found in only one other place in the scriptures: the first words of Malachi (Zechariah 9:1; 12:1; Malachi 1:1). Some scholars think these were once three unnamed collections at the end of the scroll of the Twelve. Two were attached to Zechariah, and the third became a book of its own, so that the scroll held twelve prophets. Nobody can prove it.⁶

Strike the shepherd

Zechariah 13:7: Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.

On the way to the Mount of Olives after supper, I told my friends, All of you will be made to stumble because of me tonight, for it is written, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered” (Mark 14:27).

Peter said he never would. That night, they all ran.

The one they pierced

God says, they will look to me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for his only son (Zechariah 12:10).

John tells how a soldier pierced my side with a spear after I died, and quotes this verse (John 19:34, 37).

Go deeperWho was pierced?

Zechariah 12:10 is one of the hardest verses in the prophets, and readers have argued over it for more than two thousand years.

In the Hebrew, God is speaking, and then the words shift: they will look to me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him (Zechariah 12:10). Is God the one who was pierced, or someone else? The next verse compares the mourning to a great mourning in the valley of Megiddo (Zechariah 12:11). Many readers have thought of King Josiah, who was fatally wounded in battle there and mourned by all Judah and Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 35:22–25).

The Greek translation that my followers usually read made the verse easier, and different. It says that they will look to God because they danced in triumph. The translators seem to have read the Hebrew word for pierced as a similar word meaning danced.⁷ John does not follow it. His They will look on him whom they pierced (John 19:37) is closer to the Hebrew, and so is a line in Revelation: every eye will see him, including those who pierced him (Revelation 1:7).

My own people read the verse in their own ways. In the Talmud, two teachers disagree over who is being mourned. One says it is a messiah from the tribe of Joseph, who will be killed. The other says it is the evil inclination, the urge in every person to do wrong, which God will slay at the end. Then, the Talmud says, the righteous will weep to see how great a thing they had overcome.⁸

So the verse has been read as being about a king, about God, about a dying messiah, about the death of evil itself, and, by my followers, about me.

On the Mount of Olives

The book ends with a great battle for Jerusalem, and God standing on the Mount of Olives, which splits in two (Zechariah 14:4). Living waters flow out from Jerusalem, east and west (Zechariah 14:8).

I sat on the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple, when my friends asked me about the end (Mark 13:3).

No more traders

Then the last verse of the book. On that day, even the cooking pots in Jerusalem will be as holy as the Temple’s vessels. In that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD of Armies (Zechariah 14:21).

The Hebrew word can mean Canaanite or trader.⁹

When I drove out the people selling animals in the Temple courts, John remembers me saying, Don’t make my Father’s house a marketplace! (John 2:16).

Check It Yourself

Look up: Zechariah 9:9–10, then Mark 11:1–10.

You will find: a lowly king on a donkey who speaks peace, with the chariot and the horse cut off, and how I entered Jerusalem.

Then read Zechariah 7:8–10. It is the prophets’ answer to a question about fasting.

The Short Version

• Zechariah’s visions encouraged the rebuilding of the Temple: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.”
• A high priest named Joshua, my name, is accused by the satan, cleaned and crowned.
• When asked about fasting, God answers: don’t oppress the widow, nor the fatherless, the foreigner, nor the poor.
• Its lowly king on a donkey, who speaks peace to the nations, is the picture I acted out entering Jerusalem.
• Strike the shepherd, thirty pieces of silver and the one they pierced all run through my last week.