An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 185: Some really crazy visions, and the Day of Small Things (Zechariah 1-5)

Zechariah 1-5
Some really crazy visions, and the Day of Small Things.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Zechariah 1

“I saw by night, and behold a man riding upon a red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom; and behind him were there red horses, speckled, and white.”

Zechariah is the grandson of a prophet called Iddo, and this chapter takes place in the second year of the reign of Darius, roughly contemporary with Haggai. In it, Zechariah receives a couple of visions from God. In the first, God tells the Israelites that if they turn back to Him, He will turn back to them. God points out that prophets come and go, but the commandments of God are eternal.

The second vision is more visual (well duh!), but the precise meaning of the details is unclear. There is a rider on a red horse amidst myrtle trees, with other horses, red, speckled and white, behind him. Somewhere in this there is an angel as well that translates between God and Zechariah – possibly this is the rider on the red horse, it isn’t clear.

The (horses?) are “they whom the LORD hath sent to walk to and fro through the earth”. The message is that God will return to Jerusalem. There are also four horns and four carpenters which somehow represent the Gentiles that have oppressed Jerusalem. I don’t know. Maybe something to do with cardinal directions, maybe there have been four Assyrian rulers in the past seventy years of the exile. Why carpenters is not clear, and the whole “horn” thing still remains a mystery to me, even though it’s been used as a metaphor many times, particularly with prophets. Musical horns? Animal horns? The altar of the temple has four “horns” which I took to mean a prong-like but on each corner. There’s obviously some meaning that the reader is expected to understand, but has been lost over time and crossing cultures. (Edited in later: As discovered earlier, “horns” also appears to refer to rays of light).

Zechariah 2

“Ho, ho, come forth, and flee from the land of the north, saith the LORD: for I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heaven, saith the LORD.”

Zechariah has a vision of a man with a measuring line, who is measuring the walls of Jerusalem. I’m sure someone’s had this vision before. Perhaps it was David or Solomon back when the temple was being built. Anyway, the rest of this chapter is a promise from God that the nations that have oppressed the Israelites will be struck down (lest we forget, they apparently did so because God wanted to use them to punish the Israelites), and the Israelites will be able to return to a renewed and re-invigorated Jerusalem, surrounded by a “wall of flame”.

Zechariah 3

“And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.”

Joshua the high priest got a mention in Haggai, so he’s evidently a very important contemporary figure. Strange to see a mention of Satan here – a figure that’s had very little use in the OT apart from in Job. Here, Satan has very little to do either. He gets rebuked by God, and that’s all he does in this short chapter. Joshua the high priest is clothed in “fine raiment” as opposed to his old rags, and promised good things if he keeps the covenant of God. There’s some mysterious imagery towards the end. God promises that “behold, I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH”, and I wonder why the word branch has been capitalised by the translators in the same way the LORD is always written. I can only assume that it is considered a reference to Jesus. There’s also a stone with seven eyes, that ... removes iniquity, or something....

Zechariah 4

“Then the angel that talked with me answered and said unto me, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord.”

Zechariah has another vision, of a seven-branched candlestick flanked by two olive trees. Over the course of the chapter the meaning of this is explained to him by an angel, after some rather pointless back and forth for each question, typified by the quoted verse above. “What does this mean?” asks Zechariah. “Don’t you know?” replies the angel. “No,” says Zechariah. Finally the angel explains. We could probably have lived without that formula.

Anyway, the candlestick represents Zerubbabel rebuilding the temple, with the seven branches having something to do with the seven eyes from last chapter, that “run to and fro through the whole earth” (like Satan in the Book of Job). The olive trees represent the two “anointed ones” that stand beside God. Two Messiahs?

Oh, and finally, “who hath despised the day of small things?” I have nothing to say about this bit of verse, apart from I like the idea of the Day of Small Things.

Zechariah 5

“Then I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a flying roll.”

Zechariah’s visions go really crazy now. He sees a flying roll (by which I assume he means a scroll, not a bread product), twenty by ten cubits. This represents a sort of spiritual wall which will cut off those who swear and those who steal (and somehow make the timbers of their houses go rotten). There’s a flying ephah, held aloft by two women with storks wings, and some lead, possibly a lead woman, representing wickedness, which is cast into the mouth of ... something. The ephah is borne to Shinar to build a house for “her”. I feel a bit lost here, I must admit.