Zechariah 7 Commentary

The book of Zechariah begins with a title verse providing information concerning the date, authorship, and source of the revelation. It states that the prophecy occurred in the eighth month of the second year of Darius (vs 1). The biblical material likely dates the prophetic message according to the regnal year of the Persian king because there was no king in Judah during that time. Judah had been conquered by Babylon, which in turn had been taken over by Persia (Daniel 5:30-31).

The term prophet [“nābî” in Hebrew] means “proclaimer” or “forth-teller.” It describes someone who received a call from God to be God’s spokesman. A prophet was God’s emissary. He had a particular calling to see or hear what God was saying, live it out in his life, and proclaim it to the people roundabout. That means the prophet could not speak from his authority and was not free to say what he pleased. Rather, he was to discern what God thought about a given situation, what His attitude was toward the people’s behavior in the past, what He required of them in the present, and how He would act in their favor in the future.

In Zechariah 7, the prophet receives a delegation of returning exiles from Bethel, who want to entreat the LORD to know whether they should continue to fast annually to commemorate and lament the temple’s devastation. Through a series of questions, the LORD answers the people, telling them their religious activities are meaningless because they are heartless.

Then, Zechariah gives them an example of what such disobedience looks like, and the attendant moral consequences. He sums up the moral standard by which the Judeans living prior to the Babylonian captivity were supposed to have lived. Unfortunately, they failed to meet the requirements, prompting God to discipline them through exile. The outline is as follows:

1. Zechariah receives a delegation of returning exiles from Bethel, inquiring whether they should continue to fast yearly to commemorate and lament the temple’s destruction. The LORD tells the prophet to inform them that their fasting and feasting did not please Him because they were heartless rituals (vv. 1–7).

2. Zechariah spells out four requirements that sum up the ethical teaching of the pre-exilic prophets. He reminds the post-exilic community of Judah that their forefathers’ rejection of that teaching was why God invoked the provisions of His covenant/treaty and punished them severely by scattering them abroad at the mercy of foreign nations (vv. 8–14).

The Bible Project - Zechariah Summary