[874] Wellhausen, supplying ל before ארבע, renders _These go forth to the four winds of heaven after they have presented themselves_, etc.
[875] Heb. _behind them_.
[876] אמצים, the second epithet of the horses of the fourth chariot, ver. 3. See note there.
[877] Or _anger to bear_, Heb. _rest_.
[878] The collective name for the Jews in exile.
[879] LXX. παρὰ τῶν ἀρχόντων, מִחֹרִים; but since an accusative is wanted to express the articles taken, Hitzig proposes to read מַחֲמַדַּי, _My precious things_. The LXX. reads the other two names καὶ παρὰ τῶν χρησίμων αὐτῆς καὶ παρὰ τῶν ἐπεγνωκότων αὐτήν.
[880] The construction of ver. 10 is very clumsy; above it is rendered literally. Wellhausen proposes to delete _and do thou go ... to the house of_, and take Yosiyahu’s name as simply a fourth with the others, reading the last clause _who have come from Babylon_. This is to cut, not disentangle, the knot.
[881] The Hebrew text here has _Joshua son of Jehosadak, the high priest_, but there is good reason to suppose that the crown was meant for Zerubbabel, but that the name of Joshua was inserted instead in a later age, when the high priest was also the king—see below, note. For these reasons Ewald had previously supposed that the whole verse was genuine, but that there had fallen out of it the words _and on the head of Zerubbabel_. Ewald found a proof of this in the plural form עטרות, which he rendered _crowns_. (So also Wildeboer, _A. T._ _Litteratur_, p. 297.) But עטרות is to be rendered _crown_; see ver. 11, where it is followed by a singular verb. The plural form refers to the several circlets of which it was woven.
[882] Some critics omit the repetition.
[883] So Wellhausen proposes to insert. The name was at least understood in the original text.
[884] So LXX. Heb. _on his throne_.
[885] With this phrase, vouched for by both the Heb. and the Sept., the rest of the received text cannot be harmonised. There were two: one is the priest just mentioned who is to be at the right hand of the crowned. The received text makes this crowned one to be the high priest Joshua. But if there are two and the priest is only secondary, the crowned one must be Zerubbabel, whom Haggai has already designated as Messiah. Nor is it difficult to see why, in a later age, when the high priest was sovereign in Israel, Joshua’s name should have been inserted in place of Zerubbabel’s, and at the same time the phrase _priest at his right hand_, to which the LXX. testifies in harmony with _the two of them_, should have been altered to the reading of the received text, _priest upon his throne_. With the above agree Smend, _A. T. Rel. Gesch._, 343 n., and Nowack.
[886] Heb. חֵלֶם, Hēlem, but the reading Heldai, חלדי, is proved by the previous occurrence of the name and by the LXX. reading here, τοῖς ὑπομένουσιν, _i.e._ from root חלד, _to last_.
[887] חן, but Wellhausen and others take it as abbreviation or misreading for the name of Yosiyahu (see ver. 10).
[888] Here the verse and paragraph break suddenly off in the middle of a sentence. On the passage see Smend, 343 and 345.