A Call to Justice and Mercy

In the fourth year of Darius, a delegation from Bethel comes to seek the LORD and to ask whether the long-practiced fasting of the fifth month should continue. The divine answer begins by exposing the deeper issue: when the people fasted and mourned through the years of exile, or when they later ate and drank, they did so largely for themselves rather than for God. The LORD then points them back to the earlier prophetic words spoken when Jerusalem was still inhabited and prosperous. The paragraph shows that the real problem is not uncertainty about ritual timing but failure to engage the meaning of covenant devotion.

I¹n the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, the month of Chislev. ²Now the people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-melech, along with their men, to plead before the LORD ³by asking the priests of the house of the LORD of Hosts, as well as the prophets, “Should I weep and fast in the fifth month, as I have done these many years?” ⁴Then the word of the LORD of Hosts came to me, saying, ⁵“Ask all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for these seventy years, was it really for Me that you fasted? ⁶And when you were eating and drinking, were you not doing so simply for yourselves? ⁷Are these not the words that the LORD proclaimed through the earlier prophets, when Jerusalem and its surrounding towns were populous and prosperous, and the Negev and the foothills were inhabited?’”

The word of the LORD comes again with the substance of the older prophetic demand: administer true justice, show loving devotion and compassion, and do not oppress the widow, orphan, foreigner, or poor. Nor are they to devise evil against one another in their hearts. The paragraph makes clear that the covenant God had already told His people what He desired from them in concrete ethical terms.

⁸Then the word of the LORD came to Zechariah, saying, ⁹“This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘Administer true justice. Show loving devotion and compassion to one another. ¹⁰Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. And do not plot evil in your hearts against one another.’

The former generation responded to those commands with stubborn refusal: they turned a stubborn shoulder, stopped their ears, and made their hearts like flint so they would not hear the law or the Spirit-given words of the earlier prophets. Because they would not listen when God called, He did not listen when they later cried out. He scattered them among nations they did not know, and the pleasant land was left desolate. The paragraph interprets exile not as arbitrary disaster but as the direct result of hardened disobedience to God's ethical demands.

¹¹But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder; they stopped up their ears from hearing. ¹²They made their hearts like flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the LORD of Hosts had sent by His Spirit through the earlier prophets. Therefore great anger came from the LORD of Hosts. ¹³And just as I had called and they would not listen, so when they called I would not listen, says the LORD of Hosts. ¹⁴But I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations that they had not known, and the land was left desolate behind them so that no one could come or go. Thus they turned the pleasant land into a desolation.”