[1276] XII. _Antt._ i.: cf. _Con. Apion._, I. 22.
[1277] See above, p. 442. Eusebius, _Chron. Arm._, II. 225, assigns it to 320.
[1278] Cheyne, _Introd. to Book of Isaiah_, p. 105.
_Lo, thy King cometh to thee, vindicated and victorious, meek and riding on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass._
_Up, Sword, against My Shepherd!... Smite the Shepherd, that the sheep may be scattered!_
_And I will pour upon the house of David and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplication, and they shall look to Him whom they have pierced; and they shall lament for Him, as with lamentation for an only son, and bitterly grieve for Him, as with grief for a first-born._
We saw that the first eight chapters of the Book of Zechariah were, with the exception of a few verses, from the prophet himself. No one has ever doubted this. No one could doubt it: they are obviously from the years of the building of the Temple, 520—516 B.C. They hang together with a consistency exhibited by few other groups of chapters in the Old Testament.
But when we pass into chap. ix. we find ourselves in circumstances and an atmosphere altogether different. Israel is upon a new situation of history, and the words addressed to her breathe another spirit. There is not the faintest allusion to the building of the Temple—the subject from which all the first eight chapters depend. There is not a single certain reflection of the Persian period, under the shadow of which the first eight chapters were all evidently written. We have names of heathen powers mentioned, which not only do not occur in the first eight chapters, but of which it is not possible to think that they had any interest whatever for Israel between 520 and 516: Damascus, Hadrach, Hamath, Assyria, Egypt and Greece. The peace, and the love of peace, in which Zechariah wrote, has disappeared.[1279] Nearly everything breathes of war actual or imminent. The heathen are spoken of with a ferocity which finds few parallels in the Old Testament. There is a revelling in their blood, of which the student of the authentic prophecies of Zechariah will at once perceive that gentle lover of peace could not have been capable. And one passage figures the imminence of a thorough judgment upon Jerusalem, very different from Zechariah’s outlook upon his people’s future from the eve of the completion of the Temple. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the earliest efforts of Old Testament criticism should have been to prove another author than Zechariah for chaps. ix.—xiv. of the book called by his name.
The very first attempt of this kind was made so far back as 1632 by the Cambridge theologian Joseph Mede,[1280] who was moved thereto by the desire to vindicate the correctness of St. Matthew’s ascription[1281] of “Zech.” xi. 13 to the prophet Jeremiah. Mede’s effort was developed by other English exegetes. Hammond assigned chaps. x.—xii., Bishop Kidder[1282] and William Whiston, the translator of Josephus, chaps. ix.—xiv., to Jeremiah. Archbishop Newcome[1283] divided them, and sought to prove that while chaps. ix.—xi. must have been written before 721, or a century earlier than Jeremiah, because of the heathen powers they name, and the divisions between Judah and Israel, chaps. xii.—xiv. reflect the imminence of the Fall of Jerusalem. In 1784 Flügge[1284] offered independent proof that chaps. ix.—xiv. were by Jeremiah; and in 1814 Bertholdt[1285] suggested that chaps. ix.—xi. might be by Zechariah the contemporary of Isaiah,[1286] and on that account attached to the prophecies of his younger namesake. These opinions gave the trend to the main volume of criticism, which, till fifteen years ago, deemed “Zech.” ix.—xiv. to be pre-exilic. So Hitzig, who at first took the whole to be from one hand, but afterwards placed xii.—xiv. by a different author under Manasseh. So Ewald, Bleek, Kuenen (at first), Samuel Davidson, Schrader, Duhm (in 1875), and more recently König and Orelli, who assign chaps. ix.—xi. to the reign of Ahaz, but xii.—xiv. to the eve of the Fall of Jerusalem, or even a little later.