Language Studies

Difficult Sayings

Which Zechariah?
Matthew 23:35, Luke 11:51

"Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar." (Matthew 23:34-35) the 5th letter and Z is the 7th not the last!

An apparent mistake was that Zechariah's father was not called Berechiah, as noted by Matthew but not Luke; he was in fact named Jehoiada. Furthermore, Zechariah was not chronologically the last slain. That honour falls to the prophet Urijah's murder (Jeremiah 26:20-23). Urijah had fled to Egypt and been brought back and then slain by the king's own hand, presumably in Jehoiakim's court.

Unless you disbelieve in a literal early history of the Bible there is little to doubt that Abel was indeed the first man slain in the world, though the scribes and Pharisees could hardly be held accountable for that. Nevertheless, it was a Jewish tradition that Abel's blood continued to cry out for righteous justice. Jewish theology holds in tension the belief in corporate guilt and that of exclusive rather than inherited individual accountability.

"The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself" (Ezekiel 18:20)

Yet, Jesus was apparently criticising the Pharisees as implicated in ancient murders and implying guilt and land defilement because of the shed innocent blood (cf. Numbers 35:33; Deuteronomy 21:8-9).

According to the New Testament (Hebrews 11:4, 1 John 3:12-13) Abel was regarded as "righteous" since God accepted his offering, yet he was slain and God himself said that Abel's blood cried out from the land (Genesis 4:10). Actually, the text has "bloods" - plural - which the rabbis noticed.^F1 Just as the Aramaic Jerusalem Targum paraphrases:

"the price of the bloods of "the multitude of the righteous", that shall spring from Abel thy brother."

Abel is often called "Abel the righteous" in Jewish writings^F2 and the "first" or "head of those killed"^F3 .

So we have no issues with Abel, but what of Zechariah, who or which one, was he?

Zechariah, son of Berechiah
Zechariah, son of Berechiah, was the subject of the prophetic book going by his name (Zecharaiah 1:1). Matthew, but not Luke, appears to give us this information, that Zechariah was the son of Berechiah. In Ezra 5:1; 6:14, however, he is called "the son of Iddo" presumably his grandfather. The first Temple had already been destroyed in Zechariah the Prophet's time. Assuming that the Matthean received text is correct then all reference to any other Zechariah is pointless. Gleason L Archer in the Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties sees this Zechariah as the true last martyr but he infers the manner of his death from the need to authenticate Matthew's ascription of paternity to Berechiah not Jehoiada. He says that as there are 27+ Zechariahs in the Old Testament it should not be "surprising if two of them happened to suffer a similar fate".^F4 But this is bad exegesis, starting with an assumption of Matthew's infallibility and then finding a solution to fit it. The whole synoptic problem for evangelicals, and I speak as one, is that there are apparent differences between the gospels, some of which are not yet resolved.

Zechariah, son of Jehoiada
Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, who died c.800 B.C., "stoned ... with stones in the court of the house of the LORD" (2 Chronicles 24:21), fits the location "between the temple and the altar" quite well. However, Matthew and Luke record Jesus as saying Zechariah, son of Berechiah, not Jehoida. Furthermore, Zechariah was not the last prophet slain in biblical history. However, he was the last martyr mentioned in the Jewish canon of Scripture if read from first book/scroll to last. For the Jewish order of the biblical books is different to the Christian ordering.

Zechariah, the son of Baruch
This Zechariah was slain according to the contemporary Jewish historian, Josephus^F5 , in the middle of the temple, just before the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 68-69. However, as Gill relates, "Zacharias was the son of Baruch, and not Barachias, which are two different names; he was killed in the middle of the temple, not between the temple and the altar"

Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist
This stems from a tradition related by some early church writers including Origen.^F6 They invent a spurious place in the temple specifically for virgins giving Mary a place there. The legend has the Jews complaining of a woman with child being there and Zacharias, a priest, defending her and being slain there. All this is fiction and we don't know of Zacharias' father being called Berechiah either.

Zechariah, the son of Jeberechiah
Mentioned in Isaiah 8:2 alongside Urijah the priest and read Berechiah by some traditions^F7, indeed the Targum on Isaiah inserts the assertion that this was the as yet unborn prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah. If this were the case it would make Urijah the contemporary prophet mentioned in Jeremiah (26:20) and not a priest.

The best fit circumstantially is Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, despite the problem with Matthew's ascribing alternative paternity to a Berechiah. It was not unusual for Jews to go by several names (e.g., Eliakim and Jehoiakim, 2 Chronicles 36:4) or variations but we have no evidence of that here. Jehoiada could be his grandfather and Berechiah his father, just as Zechariah the prophet is named son of both Iddo and Berechiah. We don't have any manuscripts pointing to a later scribal insertion

Late second century writers such as Irenaeus in Against Heresies 14:2 quoting Matthew 23:25 has "Zecharias the son of Barachias" as does Tatian's Diatessaron and the Greek manuscript p77. So, any error had to have crept in earlier than this. Curioiusly, Jerome seems to speak of the Hebrew Gospel of the Nazarenes as correctly referring to Jehoiada. Since Jehoiada was a priest the location of the martyrdom near the altar makes sense.

Luke (11:51) omits the name of the father of Zechariah indicating either a simple more original saying or the removal of Matthew's "son of Berechiah" to clean up the apparent mistake. Equally, an earlier version of Matthew may have had the purer Lukan form and later copyists and editors added the "son of..." mistake. But why add a mistake? Perhaps later copyists not realising the Jewish canonic order of books wrongly presumed the reference was to the chronologically later Zechariah and corrected an original Jehoida, but we have no evidence of this or of variant manuscripts, other than Jerome's hint above, only of Luke's omission.

The order of the Old Testament books is different in the original Hebrew Bible and our present order reflects the Greek Septuagint order with a greater emphasis on grouping according to literary content (historical, prophetical, poetical) or chronology, cf. Job (early) followed by Psalms (David) then Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Songs (Solomon, David's son), Kings and Chronicles one after the other and Lamentations (ascribed to Jeremiah) placed alongside Jeremiah.

In 43 ancient Christian lists of the Old Testament no two agree as to the order!^F8 Clearly the Christians felt free to play with the Jewish accepted order as outlined in the Talmud^F9 . Jesus probably endorses the Jewish order when he speaks of the blood shed from "Abel to Zechariah" (Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51) which only makes sense when we accept Abel as from Genesis 4 and Zechariah as the one in 2 Chronicles 24:20f., the last book of the Jewish canon.

The Hebrew Old Testament order of 24 books is:

Pentateuch	Early Prophets	Latter Prophets	Minor Prophets	Writings
Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy	Joshua Judges 1&2 Samuel 1&2 Kings	Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel	Hosea Joel Amos Obadiah Jonah Micah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah Haggai Zechariah Malachi	Psalms Proverbs Job Song of SongsF10 Ruth Lamentations Ecclesiastes Esther Daniel Ezra-Nehemiah 1&2 Chronicles

However, even the Hebrew order was liable to vary. Interestingly, in the Talmud order Isaiah drops to after Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and in German and French Jewish lists Isaiah slips between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The order of the Writings was more susceptible to variation. In general, Psalms always preceded Job, Chronicles could come first or last, and Ruth came first in the Talmud.

Jewish literary interest in the murder of Zechariah is very strong and Alfred Edersheim cites a semi-fanciful Jewish legend that Zechariah's blood "did not dry up those two centuries and a half, but still bubbled on the pavement, when Nebuzar-adan entered the Temple and at last avenged it."^F11

The sources for this are Talmudic and midrashic^F12 but appear to come from a strong and possibly early oral tradition:

"...when Nebuzaradan came up to destroy Jerusalem, the Holy One, blessed be He, hinted to that blood that it should seethe and bubble for two hundred and fifty-two years from the reign of Joash to that of Zedekiah. What did they do? They scraped quantities of dust to throw on it and made heaps and heaps over it, but it did not become still, and the blood kept seething and foaming. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to the blood: "The time has come for you to collect your debt." When Nebuzaradan came up and saw it, he asked, " What kind of blood is this which seethes in this manner?"" Midrash Rabbah on Ecclesiastes 3:16 (cf. midrashim on Ecclesiastes 10:4; 12:7)

The people eventually confess their historic murder of Zechariah at which point Nebuzaradan slays many but cannot stop the blood flow. Finally, he says:

"Zechariah, Zechariah. I have slain the best of them; do you want me to destroy them all? When he said this to him, it [the bubbling blood] stopped. Straightway Nebuzaradan felt remorse. He said to himself: If such is the penalty for slaying one soul, what will happen to me who have slain such multitudes? So he fled away, and sent a deed to his house disposing of his effects and became a convert." Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 57b, cf. Sanhedrin, 96b

According to the midrash on Lamentations 2:2:

"Eighty thousand priestly novitiates were slain on account of the blood of Zechariah. R. Judah asked R. Aha, Where did they slay Zechariah, in the Court of Israel or in the Court of the Women? He replied, In neither of these, but it was in the Court of the Priests. ... Seven transgressions were committed by Israel on that day: they killed a priest, a prophet, and a judge, they shed innocent blood, they profaned the Divine Name, they defiled the Temple Court, and it happened on the sabbath which was also the Day of Atonement."

And further, in the midrash on Lamentations 4:14, there is reference to the blind of Israel asking to be shown the place where Zechariah was slain. The actual passage in Lamentations gives a tenuous but slight verbal link back to Matthew 23:

"Because of the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests, Who shed in her midst The blood of the just. They wandered as blind men in the streets. They have defiled themselves with blood..." (Lamentations 4:13-14)

According to Gundry^F13 there is strong language assimilation in Matthew's Greek to the Septuagint text of Lamentations 4:13. Further, given Matthew's notorious - but quite Jewish - use of the Old Testament in allusions and combinations it would not be inconceivable that Matthew may have intended to combine the two Zechariahs. Compressing their two lives into one he is able to strengthen the reference in Matthew 27:3-10 to Zechariah's field of blood (Zechariah 11:12-13) and the concept of innocent blood.

The reference to "blind men" is also interesting given Jesus' reference to the Pharisees in the same chapter (Matthew 23:12) as "blind guides" in the context of swearing by the temple and the altar, the very place where Zechariah was slain.

Returning to our earlier reference to Ezekiel 18:20, concerning the non-accountability of a good son for his evil father's deeds, I think that we can see that Jesus' criticism is of the Pharisees' blind leading and preventing people from entering the kingdom. This, according to Ezekiel 33:8, is to be held accountable before God. Those called as watchmen who allow a wicked man to die in his sins rather than warn him shall have his blood required of them. Blind guides and mute watchmen are just as guilty as unrighteous kings slaying righteous prophets.

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FOOTNOTES:
F1: Bereshit Rabba, 22.20.1; Mishnah, Sanhedrin, 4. 5; Aboth R. Nathan, 31
F2: Tzeror Hammor, 8.2
F3: Juchasin, 5.2
F4: Gleason L Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, (USA: Zondervan, 1982), p.338
F5: Josephus, De Bello Jud. (Wars of the Jews), 4.5.4
F6: References cited by Gill: Origen. in Matth. T. 3. Homil. 26.44; Greg. Nyssen. in diem nat. Christ. Vol. 2. p.777; Basil. de human. gen. Christ; Theophylact. in loc.
F7: Babylonian Talmud, Maccot, 24.2
F8: R.D.Wilson, "The book of Daniel and the Canon", Princeton Theological Review, 13 (1915), pp.405 f.
F9: Babylonian Talmud, Baba Bathra, 14b, 15a
F10: The italicised 5 books are known as châmêsh meghillôwth, 'five scrolls' and are particularly associated with reading at the following Jewish festivals: Passover, Weeks, Tisha B'Av (mourning over both temple destructions), Tabernacles, Purim.
F11: Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1901), Vol. II, p.413-414, footnote and margin
F12: Cf. Blank, "The Death of Zechariah in Rabbinic Literature", Hebrew Union College Annual 12-13 (1937-38), pp.327-346
F13: Gundry, Matthew, (USA: Eerdmans, 1994), pp.470-471

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