[97] Schwally (234) thinks that the epithet צדיק (ver. 5) was first applied to Jehovah by the Second Isaiah (xlv. 21, lxiv. 2, xlii. 21), and became frequent from his time on. In disproof Budde (3398) quotes Exod. ix. 27, Jer. xii. 1, Lam. i. 18. Schwally also points to נצדו as borrowed from Aramaic.
[98] Budde, p. 395; Davidson, 103. Schwally (230 ff.) seeks to prove the unity of 9 and 10 with the context, but he has apparently mistaken the meaning of ver. 8 (231). That surely does not mean that the nations are gathered in order to punish the godlessness of the Jews, but that they may themselves be punished.
[99] See Davidson, 103.
ZEPHANIAH i.—ii. 3
Towards the year 625, when King Josiah had passed out of his minority,[100] and was making his first efforts at religious reform, prophecy, long slumbering, awoke again in Israel.
Like the king himself, its first heralds were men in their early youth. In 627 Jeremiah calls himself but a boy, and Zephaniah can hardly have been out of his teens.[101] For the sudden outbreak of these young lives there must have been a large reservoir of patience and hope gathered in the generation behind them. So Scripture itself testifies. To Jeremiah it was said: _Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I consecrated thee._[102] In an age when names were bestowed only because of their significance,[103] both prophets bore that of Jehovah in their own. So did Jeremiah’s father, who was of the priests of Anathoth. Zephaniah’s “forbears” are given for four generations, and with one exception they also are called after Jehovah: _The Word of Jehovah which came to Ṣephanyah, son of Kushi, son of Gedhalyah, son of Amaryah, son of Hizḳiyah, in the days of Joshiyahu,[104] Amon’s son, king of Judah._ Zephaniah’s great-great-grandfather Hezekiah was in all probability the king.[105] His father’s name Kushi, or _Ethiop_, is curious. If we are right, that Zephaniah was a young man towards 625, then Kushi must have been born towards 663, about the time of the conflicts between Assyria and Egypt, and it is possible that, as Manasseh and the predominant party in Judah so closely hung upon and imitated Assyria, the adherents of Jehovah put their hope in Egypt, whereof, it may be, this name Kushi is a token.[106] The name Zephaniah itself, meaning _Jehovah hath hidden_, suggests the prophet’s birth in the “killing-time” of Manasseh. There was at least one other contemporary of the same name—a priest executed by Nebuchadrezzar.[107]
Of the adherents of Jehovah, then, and probably of royal descent, Zephaniah lived in Jerusalem. We descry him against her, almost as clearly as we descry Isaiah. In the glare and smoke of the conflagration which his vision sweeps across the world, only her features stand out definite and particular: the flat roofs with men and women bowing in the twilight to the host of heaven, the crowds of priests, the nobles and their foreign fashions; the _Fishgate_, the New or _Second_ Town, where the rich lived, the _Heights_ to which building had at last spread, and between them the hollow _Mortar_, with its markets, Phœnician merchants and money-dealers. In the first few verses of Zephaniah we see almost as much of Jerusalem as in the whole book either of Isaiah or Jeremiah.
For so young a man the vision of Zephaniah may seem strangely dark and final. Yet not otherwise was Isaiah’s inaugural vision, and as a rule it is the young and not the old whose indignation is ardent and unsparing. Zephaniah carries this temper to the extreme. There is no great hope in his book, hardly any tenderness and never a glimpse of beauty. A townsman, Zephaniah has no eye for nature; not only is no fair prospect described by him, he has not even a single metaphor drawn from nature’s loveliness or peace. He is pitilessly true to his great keynotes: _I will sweep, sweep from the face of the ground; He will burn_, burn up everything. No hotter book lies in all the Old Testament. Neither dew nor grass nor tree nor any blossom lives in it, but it is everywhere fire, smoke and darkness, drifting chaff, ruins, nettles, saltpits, and owls and ravens looking from the windows of desolate palaces. Nor does Zephaniah foretell the restoration of nature in the end of the days. There is no prospect of a redeemed and fruitful land, but only of a group of battered and hardly saved characters: a few meek and righteous are hidden from the fire and creep forth when it is over. Israel is left _a poor and humble folk_. No prophet is more true to the doctrine of the remnant, or more resolutely refuses to modify it. Perhaps he died young.