One thing is very remarkable. The two sources of revelation are the King and the Priest. The Prophet is not mentioned beside them. Nothing could prove more emphatically the sense in Israel that prophecy was exhausted.
The appointment of so responsible a position for Zerubbabel demanded for him a special promise of grace. And therefore, as Joshua had his promise in the Fourth Vision, we find Zerubbabel’s appended to the Fifth. It is one of the great sayings of the Old Testament: there is none more spiritual and more comforting. Zerubbabel shall complete the Temple, and those who scoffed at its small beginnings in the day of small things shall frankly rejoice when they see him set the top-stone by plummet in its place. As the moral obstacles to the future were removed in the Fourth Vision by the vindication of Joshua and by his cleansing, so the political obstacles, all the hindrances described by the Book of Ezra in the building of the Temple, shall disappear. _Before Zerubbabel the great mountain shall become a plain._ And this, because he shall not work by his own strength, but the Spirit of Jehovah of Hosts shall do everything. Again we find that absence of expectation in human means, and that full trust in God’s own direct action, which characterise all the prophesying of Zechariah.
_Then the angel who talked with me returned and roused me like a man roused out of his sleep. And he said to me, What seest thou? And I said, I see, and lo! a candlestick all of gold, and its bowl upon the top of it, and its seven lamps on it, and seven[848] pipes to the lamps which are upon it. And two olive-trees stood over against it, one on the right of the bowl,[849] and one on the left. And I began[850] and said to the angel who talked with me,[851] What be these, my lord? And the angel who talked with me answered and said, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord! And he answered and said to me,[852] These seven are the eyes of Jehovah, which sweep through the whole earth. And I asked and said to him, What are these two olive-trees on the right of the candlestick and on its left? And again I asked and said to him, What are the two olive-branches which are beside the two golden tubes that pour forth the oil[853] from them?[854] And he said to me, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord! And he said, These are the two sons of oil which stand before the Lord of all the earth._
_This is Jehovah’s Word to Zerubbabel, and it says:[855] Not by might, and not by force, but by My Spirit, saith Jehovah of Hosts. What art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel be thou level! And he[856] shall bring forth the top-stone with shoutings, Grace, grace to it![857] And the Word of Jehovah came to me, saying, The hands of Zerubbabel have founded this house, and his hands shall complete it, and thou shall know that Jehovah of Hosts hath sent me to you. For whoever hath despised the day of small things, they shall rejoice when they see the plummet[858] in the hand of Zerubbabel._
THE SIXTH VISION: THE WINGED VOLUME (Chap. v. 1-4).
The religious and political obstacles being now removed from the future of Israel, Zechariah in the next two Visions beholds the land purged of its crime and wickedness. These Visions are very simple, if somewhat after the ponderous fashion of Ezekiel.
The first of them is the Vision of the removal of the curse brought upon the land by its civic criminals, especially thieves and perjurers—the two forms which crime takes in a poor and rude community like the colony of the returned exiles. The prophet tells us he beheld a roll flying. He uses the ordinary Hebrew name for the rolls of skin or parchment upon which writing was set down. But the proportions of its colossal size—twenty cubits by ten—prove that it was not a cylindrical but an oblong shape which he saw. It consisted, therefore, of sheets laid on each other like our books, and as our word “volume,” which originally meant, like his own term, a roll, means now an oblong article, we may use this in our translation. The volume is the record of the crime of the land, and Zechariah sees it flying from the land. But it is also the curse upon this crime, and so again he beholds it entering every thief’s and perjurer’s house and destroying it. Smend gives a possible explanation of this: “It appears that in ancient times curses were written on pieces of paper and sent down the wind into the houses”[859] of those against whom they were directed. But the figure seems rather to be of birds of prey.