SEP 25 1914 
 
 Epical %V^ 
 
 ,%v^ 
 
 BS 1665 .A3 1913 
 [Adams, John] of 
 
 Inverkeilor, Scotland. 
 ...The man among the myrtles 
 
THE SHORT COURSE SERIES 
 
 THE MAN AMONG THE MYRTLES 
 
GENERAL PREFACE 
 
 The title of the present series is a sufficient 
 indication of its purpose. Few preachers, 
 or congregations, will face the long courses 
 of expository lectures which characterised 
 the preaching of the past, but there is a 
 growing conviction on the part of some 
 that an occasional short course, of six or 
 eight connected studies on one definite 
 theme, is a necessity of their mental and 
 ministerial life. It is at this point the pro- 
 jected series would strike in. It would 
 suggest to those who are mapping out a 
 scheme of work for the future a variety of 
 subjects which might possibly be utilised in 
 this way. 
 
 The appeal, however, will not be restricted 
 to ministers or preachers. The various 
 volumes will meet the needs of laymen and 
 
 ii 
 
General Preface 
 
 Sabbath-school teachers who are interested 
 in a scholarly but also practical exposition 
 of Bible history and doctrine. In the hands 
 of office-bearers and mission-workers the 
 " Short Course Series " may easily become 
 one of the most convenient and valuable 
 of Bible helps. 
 
 It need scarcely be added that while an 
 effort has been made to secure, as far as 
 possible, a general uniformity in the scope 
 and character of the series, the final re- 
 sponsibility for the special interpretations 
 and opinions introduced into the separate 
 volumes, rests entirely with the individual 
 contributors. 
 
 A detailed list of the authors and their 
 subjects will be found at the close of each 
 Volume. 
 
 lU 
 
Volumes Already Published 
 
 A Cry for Justice: A Study in Amos. 
 
 By Prof. John E. McFadyen, D.D. 
 
 The Beatitudes. 
 
 Rev. Robert H. Fisher, D.D. 
 
 The Lenten Psahns. 
 By the Editor. 
 
 The Psalm of Psalms. 
 
 By Prof. James Stalker, D.D. 
 
 The Song and the Soil. 
 
 By Prof. W. G. Jordan, D.D. 
 
 The Higher Powers of the Soul. 
 
 By Rev. George M'Hardy, D.D. 
 
 Jehovah-Jesus. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, D.D. 
 
 The Sevenfold I Am, 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Marjoribanks, B.D. 
 
 The Man Among the Myrtles. 
 By the Editor. 
 
 Price 6o cents net per Volume 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
Ubc Sbort Course Series / ^^„ . 
 
 SEP '^o 1914 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D. 
 
 THE MAN AMONG 
 THE MYRTLES 
 
 A STUDY 
 IN ZECHARIAH'S VISIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 THE EDITOR 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1913 
 
TO 
 
 M. A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAue 
 
 I. The Prophet Zechariah . . . i 
 
 II. The Man among the Myrtles . • 15 
 
 III. The Dishorning of the Nations . 33 
 
 IV. The Man with the Measuring Line . 49 
 V. The Purification of the Church . 65 
 
 VI. The Upbuilding of the Community . 83 
 
 VII. The Cleansing of the Land . . 103 
 
 VIII. The Justification of Providence . 121 
 
 Appendix . . . . .137 
 
 Index . . . . . .141 
 
**The fault is ours, not theirs, if we wilfully misinterpret 
 the language of ancient prophets, if we persist in 
 understanding their words in their outward and material 
 aspect only, and forget that before language had 
 sanctioned a distinction between the concrete and the 
 abstract, between the purely spiritual as opposed to the 
 coarsely material, the intention of the speakers com- 
 prehended both the concrete and the abstract, both 
 the material and the spiritual, in a manner which has 
 become quite strange to us, though it lives on in the 
 language of every true poet." ^^^ MiJLLER. 
 
I 
 
 THE PROPHET ZECHARIAH 
 
 Chapter I. i-6 
 
THE PROPHET ZECHARIAH 
 
 In ver. i Zechariah is described as the 
 grandson of " Iddo the prophet." Does 
 this mean that Iddo belonged to the same 
 prophetical order as his illustrious de- 
 scendant Zechariah ? The Masoretes were 
 of opinion that it did. They adopted the 
 view that when a prophet is defined by the 
 addition of his father's or grandfather's 
 name, the ancestor so named was also a seer 
 or prophet. Consequently they have joined 
 together the two Hebrew words by an 
 ordinary connective accent. In this case, 
 however, they have helped to confuse the 
 grandfather of Zechariah with Iddo the 
 seer who prophesied concerning Jeroboam, 
 the son of Nebat, in 2 Chron. ix. 29 ; but 
 as there is nothing in the order of the 
 Hebrew words to necessitate this identifica- 
 tion the Revised Version prefers to insert a 
 
 3 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 comma after Iddo — " Iddo, the prophet " 
 — and thus limit the designation " prophet " 
 to the son of Berechiah himself. The 
 insertion of the comma is not so trivial as 
 it seems. It helps to set in a clearer light 
 the personality of the prophet. 
 
 I. His Comparative Youth. 
 
 As the son of Berechiah, Zechariah must 
 have been comparatively young when he 
 began to prophesy in B.C. 520. He is not 
 to be identified with the "young man" 
 referred to in chap. ii. 4 ; but if his grand- 
 father Iddo was one of the priests who 
 went up from Babylon with Zerubbabel 
 and Joshua in 537 (Neh. xii. 4), Zechariah 
 himself could not have been of any great 
 age when he began to prophesy in the 
 second year of Darius Hystaspis. His 
 first recorded prophecy overlaps the work 
 of Haggai, being dated one month earlier 
 than Haggai's concluding message (Zech. 
 i. I ; Hag. ii. 20) ; but as the latter was 
 one of the old men who had seen the 
 house of God in its former glory, Zechariah 
 
 4 
 
The Prophet Zechariah 
 
 can only be described as his younger and 
 more ideal colleague. It may even be 
 suggested that this is the explanation of 
 the seemingly inaccurate expression " unto 
 them " in ver. 3. Grammatically it can 
 only refer to its antecedent " fathers " in 
 ver. 2 ; but as the prophet was sent, not 
 to the fathers, but to the elders of his own 
 generation, it is conceivable that Zechariah, 
 because of his youth, allowed his thought to 
 include both classes in one — the older men 
 who were the leaders of the returned exiles 
 and the former generation of Israel whose 
 children and representatives they were. 
 Instinctively, therefore, had he framed an 
 expression that was equally applicable to 
 both. He placed the old men, ancient and 
 modern, in one and the same class. 
 
 Still, this is not to be understood as im- 
 plying that he the exponent of a new era 
 had nothing but cynicism towards the ideals 
 of his predecessors. The merest suspicion 
 that he was prepared to stand aloof from, 
 or to hurl the cynic's ban at, Israel's past, 
 would have disqualified him forthwith as 
 
 5 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 a divinely-appointed organ of revelation. 
 A true prophet must not only address him- 
 self to the needs of his ov^n age ; he must be 
 one w^ith it in its aspirations and problems, 
 and seek to elevate it to a higher spiritual 
 level by the very depth of his kinship. 
 Hence, instead of the accepted reading 
 " your fathers " in ver. 2, Codex A^ would 
 introduce the first personal pronoun, saying, 
 " The Lord hath been sore displeased with 
 our fathers." There was no conscious in- 
 tention on Zechariah's part to separate 
 himself from the elders of the people. 
 Standing on the accepted basis of Israel's 
 past, he was only seeking to take the exiles 
 back to the glory of forgotten ideals. He 
 was a reformer, not an innovator in the faith 
 and customs of their fathers. And in this 
 respect he was a teacher for all time. It 
 is no mark of greatness in any age when 
 reverence for the past is conspicuous by 
 its absence. The first test of a growing 
 and vigorous national life is gratitude for 
 those who have gone before. 
 1 The Septuagint, 
 
 6 
 
The Prophet Zechariah 
 
 2. The Severity of the Fathers' Fate. 
 
 " The Lord hath been sore displeased 
 with our fathers " — lit., hath been angry 
 with anger — a Hebraic expression, consist- 
 ing of the finite verb with its cognate 
 accusative, and designed to bring out the 
 intensity of the verbal action or the awe- 
 inspiring energy of the divine wrath. So 
 intensely did the Septuagint translators 
 feel this that they introduced the adjective 
 "great" from chap. vii. 12, and read, 
 " The Lord hath been incensed against our 
 fathers with a great indignation.'^^ 
 
 The explanation of this wrath is to be 
 sought in the peculiar heinousness of the 
 sin. Their fathers had been guilty, not 
 only of walking in evil ways, or practising 
 evil doings, but also of continued impeni- 
 tence and disobedience after they had been 
 summoned to submission. It was refusal 
 to hear, or apostasy. Disobedience, in its 
 strict sense, may simply mean a failure to 
 hear, or hearing amiss, but the notion of 
 active disobedience, which so easily follows 
 
 7 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 this inattentive or careless hearing, is readily 
 superinduced on the original signification. 
 Remissness on the part of Israel when 
 Jehovah is the speaker is really rebellion or 
 apostasy in essence. These two stages in the 
 development of moral evil are quite dis- 
 tinctly marked by the two Hebrew synonyms 
 employed by Zechariah. Not only did the 
 fathers fail to hear, when the former 
 prophets remonstrated with them, but they 
 refused to incline their ears, or give atten- 
 tion, when Jehovah, the God of Israel, 
 drew near to confirm or vindicate His 
 word. " They did not heaty nor hearken 
 unto Me, saith the Lord." 
 
 In consequence that former generation 
 had been compelled to bear the severity 
 of divine chastisement. As a nation they 
 had succumbed and disappeared amid the 
 dark storm-clouds of the exile. " Out of 
 the north " had come that dreaded scourge 
 depicted by Jeremiah. The contents of the 
 seething cauldron had been poured over 
 the land, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem 
 learned, when too late, that the Parable of 
 
 8 
 
The Prophet Zechariah 
 
 the Almond Branch, no less than of the 
 seething cauldron, had been tragically fulfilled 
 — " I am watching over My word to perform 
 it " (Jer. i. 12, 14). Is this not the meaning 
 of the emphatic Paseq in Zech. i. 6 ? It is 
 placed after the adversative " but " to 
 bring out the striking contrast between 
 transitory human life and the enduring 
 and unfailing potency of the divine word. 
 " Your fathers, where are thev ? and the 
 prophets, do they live for ever ? But My 
 words and My statutes . . . did they not 
 overtake your fathers ? " (R.V.) " Rarely 
 has punishment, though lame, failed to 
 overtake the criminal fleeing before her ? " ^ 
 So it fared with Israel. She turned a deaf 
 ear to Jehovah's word, but it dogged her 
 footsteps like a divine goel^ and overtook 
 her at the last. 
 
 3. The Call to Repentance. 
 
 " Return unto Me . . . and I will return 
 unto you, saith the Lord of Hosts " (ver. 3). 
 Does this mean that the returning grace of 
 
 ^ Horace, Carm, in. 2, 31. 
 
 9 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 Jehovah was dependent on the heartfelt 
 penitence of the people ? No, the preacher, 
 in reading this great text, may well follow 
 the hints supplied by the Hebrew tenses, and 
 prepare himself for one of the profoundest 
 lessons of Old Testament theology. In 
 Sermons in Syntax^ the suggestion has 
 been hazarded that while the idiom here 
 employed undoubtedly expresses design or 
 purpose in a sufficient number of instances, 
 there are not lacking others where the 
 element of sequence is allowed to recede 
 into the background, and the clauses con- 
 nected by " and " are conceived simply as 
 co-ordinate. Cf. Gen. xvii. 1-2, " Walk 
 before Me, and be thou perfect. And I 
 will make My covenant between Me and 
 thee." The " and " here is not consecutive 
 in the sense that the framing of a covenant 
 is made dependent on the perfect allegiance 
 of the man. The spring of the divine 
 action is found in El Shaddai Himself, and 
 since both the allegiance and the covenant 
 are traced back, like 'parallel streams, to His 
 
 1 P. 220. 
 10 
 
The Prophet Zechariah 
 
 revealed will and character, the connection 
 between them is suitably represented by 
 the insertion of the simple copulative. 
 *'Walk before Me" is, therefore, a divine 
 injunction that looks in both directions — 
 back to the character of El Shaddai and 
 forward to the fulness of the covenant. 
 Nevertheless it is not the covenant that is 
 contingent on the obedience : it is the 
 obedience that is stimulated by the covenant. 
 " When it is said in Scripture, * Turn ye 
 unto Me and I will turn unto you,' we are 
 reminded of our freewill. When we reply, 
 * Turn us to Thee, O Lord, and we shall 
 be turned,' we confess that we are first 
 aided (prcevenirt) by the grace of God." ^ 
 
 This is the key to our present passage. 
 God has not waited for Israel's response. 
 The God of their fathers has taken the 
 initiative. The mere fact that Zechariah 
 has now appeared as an organ of revelation 
 is the one proof needed that Jehovah, the 
 God of Israel, has turned to them with the 
 wonders of His grace, and that they, on their 
 
 ^ Concil. Trident. y cited by Pusey. 
 II 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 part, should return to Him with open 
 hearts. For why thus dwell on the love of 
 God for Israel, if not to incite responsive 
 love in Israel — responsive love as the deepest 
 motive for Old Testament morality ? Legal 
 righteousness is not the burthen of the Old 
 Testament after all, and legal righteousness 
 is not, and cannot be, the burthen of any 
 New Testament creed. Righteousness, as 
 in the Pauline Epistles, is often a synonym 
 for grace. There was a Power, not them- 
 selves, making for mercy. 
 
 Therefore be ye not as your fathers, unto 
 whom the former prophets prophesied in 
 vain. But be ye as your fathers' God, the 
 framer and vindicator of the covenant. 
 For He has returned unto you in love, and 
 will return more and more, as you are 
 prepared by prayer and heartfelt contrition 
 for the fulness of the revelation. Say, then, 
 with Herrick in Noble Numbers : — 
 
 ** Sick is my heart ! O Saviour ! do Thou please 
 To make my bed soft in my sicknesses : 
 Lighten my candle, so that I beneath 
 Sleep not for ever in the vaults of death ; 
 
 12 
 
The Prophet Zechariah 
 
 Let me Thy voice betimes i' th* morning hear : 
 Call, and I'll come ; say Thou the when, and where. 
 Draw me but Jirstj and after Thee Fll run 
 And make no one stop till my race be done." 
 
 »3 
 
II 
 
 THE MAN AMONG THE MYRTLES 
 
 Chapter I. 7-17 
 
THE MAN AMONG THE MYRTLES 
 
 Three months have elapsed since the 
 prophet's first call to repentance, and in 
 the interval no response has been made 
 to the urgency of his appeal. Probably 
 the leaders of the people felt that as there 
 was no sign of the promised political up- 
 heaval (Hag. ii. 21-23) they had no en- 
 couragement to go on with the work, and 
 no pledge that the rebuilding of the walls 
 would be crowned with anything like 
 success. In these circumstances repent- 
 ance might be an indispensable require- 
 ment ; but in view of the fact that the 
 impoverishment of the exile was still lying 
 upon them, and that the Messianic crisis 
 was still an unrealised hope, what could 
 the community do but follow the safe 
 policy of waiting, or cry, like the man 
 among the myrtles, " O Lord of Hosts, 
 
 B 17 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 how long wilt Thou not have mercy on 
 Jerusalem . . . against which Thou hast 
 had indignation these threescore and ten 
 years ? " Zechariah himself was prepared 
 to re-echo that cry. He was a priest no 
 less than a prophet. He would identify 
 himself with the people in all their aspira- 
 tions and problems ; and, therefore, gather- 
 ing into his own bosom the perplexities 
 that weighed upon them, he resolved to 
 go in before Jehovah, and among the 
 myrtle-trees of a divine contemplation 
 think out the whole mysterious providence 
 for himself. 
 
 I. Zechariah among the Myrtle- 
 Trees. 
 
 Following the imagery of chap. vi. i, the 
 Septuagint reads " mountains " instead of 
 " myrtles " in ver. 8, though the two pas- 
 sages, in character and diction, are not by 
 any means identical. The term is, no 
 doubt, a late one, not being found earlier 
 than Deutero-Isaiah, but it is sufficiently 
 
 i8 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 attested by Isa. xli. 19, etc., and by the 
 Arabic word hadas, which is still found in 
 the modern dialect of Yemen. A similar 
 interest attaches to the term metsulah 
 (ver. 8), which may be rendered " a valley 
 bottom," or " a shady place," according 
 as it is derived from the root tsul or tsalal — 
 the Septuagint being in favour of the 
 latter rendering. 
 
 Somewhere in the vicinity of Jerusalem, 
 perhaps in the deep ravine of the Kedron, 
 the prophet found a grove of myrtle-trees 
 where he could retire for silent meditation 
 and prayer. And here, for three months, 
 sometimes by day and oft-times by night, 
 he had burdened himself with the people's 
 anxieties, and waited for a divine answer 
 to their cry. Like Jesus among the olive 
 trees of the same Kedron valley, Zechariah 
 wrestled and waited for the unveiling of 
 the divine purpose. And when it came, 
 draped in the alluring symbolism of the 
 night, it was simply the solicitude of his 
 waking hours that erected and peopled 
 the stage of his nocturnal vision. We are 
 
 19 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 reminded of Savonarola in his efforts to 
 arouse the magnates of Florence. He had 
 read and re-read the prophets of Israel in 
 preparation for his great sermons ; and, as 
 his biographer so justly remarks, it was 
 not surprising that in this state of mind he 
 should have beheld visions. The night 
 before his last Advent sermon he saw in the 
 middle of the sky a hand bearing a sword, 
 upon which these words were inscribed, 
 Gladius Domini super terram cito et velo- 
 citer. Suddenly the sword was turned 
 towards the earth ; the sky darkened ; 
 arrows and flames rained down ; terrible 
 thunderclaps were heard ; and all the 
 world was a prey to war, famine and pesti- 
 lence. The vision ended with a command 
 to Savonarola to make these things known 
 to his hearers, to inspire them with the 
 fear of God, and to beseech the Lord to 
 send good shepherds to His church, so that 
 the lost sheep might be saved.^ 
 
 The real point of interest is that in both 
 instances the vision came as the result of 
 
 1 Villari, p. 154. 
 20 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 long-continued freparation. It is of no 
 vital significance whether the message came 
 in the plastic form of a dream, and during 
 the hours of sleep (cf. Ps. cxxvii. 2, R.V. 
 margin) ; or in the more graphic delinea- 
 tion of a midnight vision beheld among 
 the myrtle-trees themselves ; or, what is 
 not at all unlikely, that it came in the 
 normal way of spiritual intuition, as the 
 revealing spirit suggested to the brooding 
 prophet the nature of the divine message, 
 and allowed him to convey it to the leaders 
 of the people in the metaphorical language 
 of the poets.^ In either case, the laws of 
 language, as of psychology, are fully recog- 
 nised in its depiction, and a period of pre- 
 paration is divinely crowned by a definite 
 communication of truth. Was it not so 
 even on the hill of transfiguration ? " As He 
 frayed^ the fashion of His countenance 
 was altered, and His raiment was white and 
 glistering." Ah, child of the Kingdom, 
 go and kneel beside thy Saviour ! Thou 
 art never so great nor so strong as when 
 1 Cf. the phrase " talked <with " or " in me,'* ver, 9. 
 
 21 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 thou kneelest beside Him. That is the 
 way to feed thy better nature and to feel 
 thy kinship with the skies. The blessed 
 light of transfiguration falls upon every 
 Zechariah who prays. 
 
 2. The Man among the Myrtles. 
 
 Wellhausen's remark that the original 
 text has been corrupted by a later writer, 
 " who confused the man among the myrtles, 
 i.e., Jehovah Himself, with the angel inter- 
 preter," is one that raises the whole question 
 as to the number of dramatis 'persona 
 introduced by Zechariah into his vision. 
 Probably, as a first step, it is enough to 
 postulate two personal factors — the divine 
 and the human. On the one side we have 
 the approach of a divine personality seeking 
 intercourse with the human ; and, on the 
 other, a spiritually prepared instrument, 
 responsive like an -^olian harp to the felt 
 breath of the Eternal. These two correlated 
 factors enter into personal communion, and 
 a divinely-inspired message is the result. In 
 
 22 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 the filling in of this outline, however, the 
 sacred artist has gone far beyond the re- 
 quirements of so simple a dualism. Alike 
 on its divine and human sides, he has elab- 
 orated his sketch into a finished canvas, 
 v^hich is not only indebted to the teaching 
 of the past, but is charged also with the 
 inspiring prospect of a coming Messianic 
 ideal. It is a marvellous creation this 
 theophany among the myrtle-trees ; and 
 it is not to be wondered at if the prophetic 
 limner, in filling in the details, has wavered 
 between the angel and the man. There 
 can be no doubt that the man among the 
 myrtles and the angel of the Lord (vers, ii, 
 12) are practically identical, and are well 
 fitted in their union to express Zechariah's 
 conception of the Divine. On its human 
 side, too, a similar elaboration of the 
 picture is not difficult to trace. The 
 waiting prophet is represented as assisted 
 and instructed by a heavenly exegete, who 
 is not unlike the interpreting angel of 
 Job xxxiii. 23. In this, again, we have a 
 distinct reminiscence of the past, but with 
 
 23 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 an equally profound anticipation of the 
 future. In the last resort, the heavenly 
 exegete points us forward to that great 
 instructor of the human conscience, the 
 divine spirit of revelation, who would ulti- 
 mately dwell in the human heart and guide 
 God's people into all the truth. In fine, 
 in the completed picture of what took place 
 in the grove of myrtles we have at once a 
 definite foreshadowing of the Incarnation 
 and a clear anticipation of Pentecost. 
 
 Not indeed that the prophet himself knew, 
 or could know, that this was the necessary 
 outcome of his symbolism ; but if Socrates 
 in the Symposium, or Phaedrus on the 
 banks of the Ilissus, could convey glimpses of 
 the future, which could hardly have been 
 understood at the time when they were 
 uttered,^ why might not the seer on the 
 banks of the Kedron receive and convey 
 glimpses of a coming Messianic ideal that 
 are no less suggestive in their imagery ? 
 Hebrew prophecy is not less than Grecian 
 philosophy ; and if Zechariah sought to 
 1 Jowett's translation, vol. ii. p. 3. 
 24 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 portray his communion with the Divine 
 in terms that are eloquent of the future, 
 we may interpret the entire vision in the 
 light of that fact, and paraphrase it as 
 follows : — 
 
 At the hour of night he beheld a man 
 (not a rider ^) standing among the myrtle- 
 trees that were in the valley bottom, and 
 behind him, on horses red, sorrel, and white, 
 a company of apocalyptical riders, who were 
 awaiting his commands. Greatly astonished 
 at the sight of these mounted scouts, the 
 prophet could only ejaculate, " What are 
 these, my lord ? " although, as he asked 
 the question, he was intuitively assured 
 (ver. 9^) that a divine answer would speedily 
 be forthcoming. Whereupon the man 
 among the myrtles answered and said, 
 " These are they whom the Lord hath sent 
 to walk to and fro through the earth ; and 
 even now they have arrived from their 
 commission to report what they have seen 
 and heard." And they, recognising the 
 signal to draw near, said to the man among 
 1 Cf. Kitters footnotes. 
 
 25 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 the myrtles, " We have walked to and fro 
 through the earth, and behold there is no 
 sign of any impending change — all the earth 
 sitteth still, and is at rest." This was 
 sad news ! for all these months the prophet 
 had been waiting for some sign of the 
 coming political ferment which was to be 
 the token of their promised Messianic de- 
 liverance. Yet even while he lingered, the 
 man among the myrtles lifted his eyes to 
 heaven, and said, " O Lord of Hosts, how 
 long wilt Thou not have mercy on Jeru- 
 salem . . . against which Thou hast had 
 indignation these threescore and ten years ? " 
 It was enough ! The Church of God had 
 at last found a champion. The cause of 
 Israel had been espoused by a divine 
 kinsman or goel, and even though he did 
 not stand with a drawn sword in his hand, 
 like the Captain of the Lord's host in Josh, 
 v. 14, he held and wielded a weapon diviner 
 far — what Bunyan would have called the 
 weapon of *' all prayer." He had gathered 
 into his bosom the perplexities that weighed 
 upon the nation, and among the myrtle- 
 
 26 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 trees of a divine agony and appeal had spread 
 out the whole mysterious providence before 
 Jehovah. And the answer given was de- 
 signed for the Church. 
 
 3. The Church among the Myrtles. 
 
 Like Savonarola at the close of his vision, 
 Zechariah is commissioned to make these 
 things known to the people, that they 
 might be inspired with the fear of God, 
 and dedicate themselves without reserve to 
 the working out of a divine purpose. Hence 
 in verses 13, 14 the answer comes, not so 
 much to the man among the myrtles, as to 
 Zechariah himself, who is enjoined by the 
 angel who talked with him to proclaim the 
 divine message to Israel. Let Israel come 
 and stand where he stood, in the same 
 grove of myrtles, and the great spiritual 
 lessons that had thrilled and comforted him 
 would also inspire and comfort her. 
 
 Let her learn first the truth suggested 
 by the mounted servants of Jehovah. 
 Human life is not so defenceless as many a 
 
 27 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 harassed soul believes. Divine agencies are 
 at work throughout the entire human 
 family, and not only in death, but chiefly 
 in life, the human spirit is attended by 
 those apocalyptical riders. It may be so in 
 death. 
 
 " Born *neath the curse of the comet, 
 
 Bred on the desert sand ; 
 I have roamed since my birth in the wastes of the earth, 
 
 And die in an alien land, 
 Where humming-birds flash in the sunlight. 
 
 And the dazzling orchids nod ; 
 And a Rider waits on a high, pale horse 
 
 To carry a soul to God. 
 
 The howl of the hungry jackal 
 
 Wails o'er the moonlit plain ; 
 And I hear the song and the rhythmic gong 
 
 Of an Indian marriage train. 
 Then the vision fades ; but the Rider waits 
 
 In the moonlight by my side, 
 And gladly I clutch at his outstretched hand 
 
 And mount for my long last ride." 
 
 It is a beautiful fancy ; but how much 
 deeper is the thought of Zechariah that 
 Israel, through all the vicissitudes of life, is 
 attended by those far-travelled horsemen. 
 The returned exiles were not to imagine 
 
 28 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 that Jehovah had left them to their own 
 resources, or that no one was so interested 
 in their national well-being as to espouse 
 or vindicate their cause. No one who had 
 caught a glimpse of the mounted servants 
 of Jehovah in the Kedron valley would ever 
 weaken or disquiet his spirit with the fear 
 that he had been left alone in the battle. 
 The human wrestler is not alone. He is 
 guarded by divine agents who are ever on the 
 alert. And no greater boon could be con- 
 ferred on any distressed soul than to have 
 its eyes opened, as the eyes of Elisha's 
 servant were opened, to behold the horses 
 and chariots of fire that were round about 
 Elisha (2 Kings vi. 17), Well may the 
 prayer of each Zechariah be : — " O Lord 
 of Hosts, illumine the eyes of Israel Thy 
 servant, that among the myrtle-trees of a 
 divine contemplation she may behold the 
 mounted scouts of the Lord." 
 
 On the other hand, there was the other 
 significant lesson of Jehovah's silence. His 
 mercy had been withdrawn from Jerusalem 
 these threescore and ten years. That 
 
 29 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 silence, however, was not to be interpreted 
 as apathy or impotence. There might be 
 no sign as yet of the coming political 
 upheaval, but the very security in which the 
 nations were resting was the calm of a 
 ripening judgment. Just as a clear heat 
 by day, or a cloud of dew by night, helps to 
 fill out and ripen the grain until the day of 
 ingathering has come, so Jehovah was 
 resting and brooding over the affairs of the 
 nations until the cup of their iniquity was 
 full (cf. Isa. xviii. 4). Hence the voice 
 said, " Cry, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts : 
 I am jealous for Jerusalem with a great 
 jealousy. And I am sore displeased with 
 the nations that are at ease ; for I was but 
 a little displeased, and they helped forward 
 the affliction." As in the time of Nahum, 
 the great world-powers had exceeded their 
 commission. They had carried the chastise- 
 ment of Israel far beyond the divine inten- 
 tion. In the ruthlessness of their conquest 
 they had violated every instinct of humanity, 
 and therefore the violence with which they 
 had subjugated the conquered states would 
 
 30 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 recoil on their own heads, and they would 
 perish in the flames of their own kindling. 
 
 For this reason, and as a concluding 
 lesson, let Israel forthwith begin the work 
 of restoration* Her warrant for so doing 
 was found in the intervention of her covenant 
 God. The verbal form " I am returned " 
 at the beginning of ver. i6 is not to be 
 regarded as a prophetic perfect, announcing 
 the certainty of a coming event, like the 
 future " T will return " of the Septuagint. 
 It is a simple present perfect, indicating 
 the reality of a past action, but one con- 
 tinued into the present — a past action 
 which was Israel's sufficient warrant for 
 addressing herself to the work. " Thus 
 saith the Lord : I am returned to Jerusalem 
 with mercies. My house shall be built in 
 it . . . (yea) My cities through prosperity 
 shall be spread abroad, and the Lord shall 
 yet have mercy upon (LXX) Zion, and 
 shall yet choose Jerusalem." In fact, He 
 who had chosen Israel at the first as His 
 Kingdom of priests. His Jeshurun, had again 
 returned to the object of His choice, and 
 
 31 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 comforted her with the fulness of His 
 love. No higher instruction could be given 
 and no worthier service could be engaged 
 in. Israel was invited to stand among the 
 myrtle-trees of a deep, spiritual communion, 
 that the election of love might be responded 
 to by the obedience of law. That is the 
 sum of the whole matter. Jehovah had 
 returned to Jerusalem with covenant love ; 
 therefore Israel must arise and build. 
 
 32 
 
Ill 
 
 THE DISHORNING OF THE NATIONS 
 
 Chapter II. 1-4 
 
 (In Hebrew) 
 
 33 
 
THE DISHORNING OF THE 
 NATIONS 
 
 The second vision follows in natural sequence 
 upon the first ; but this is no reason for 
 placing it in the same chapter, as the English 
 Bible has done, and ignoring the plain, 
 logical arrangement of the Hebrew Text. 
 The third vision, no less than the second, 
 is the natural expansion of the first ; and 
 if all the three scenes are not to be collected 
 in one, it is more appropriate to leave the 
 first vision in a chapter by itself, and arrange 
 the two supplementary pictures as the 
 Hebrew Bible has done. In the vision 
 among the myrtle-trees, the divine inter- 
 position was represented under a twofold 
 aspect. It contained at once a threat of 
 divine punishment against the nations, and 
 a promise of divine blessing upon the dis- 
 tressed people of Jehovah. And as these 
 
 35 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 two correlated aspects shape themselves 
 into independent visions, the dishorning 
 of the nations (ii. 1-4) and the surveying 
 and measuring of Jerusalem (ii. 5-17) is 
 the result. 
 
 The dishorning of the nations is rightly 
 taken first ; for, in the estimation of the 
 Jewish community, no blessing for Israel 
 could be expected until the promised 
 political upheaval was a fully realised fact. 
 Hence the seer on the banks of the Kedron 
 must again Hft up his eyes, to catch the 
 first glimpse of the coming Weltkrisis — 
 that dies irae which was to be the sign of 
 TsraeFs Messianic deliverance. And as he 
 gazed and waited for the divine unveiling, 
 the Kedron valley was again illumined 
 by the weird-like symbolism of the night. 
 
 I. The Four Horns. 
 
 " And I lifted up mine eyes, and saw, 
 and behold four horns. And I said unto 
 the angel that talked with me, What be 
 these ? And he answered me, These are 
 
 36 
 
The Dishorning of the Nations 
 
 the horns which have scattered Judah 
 and Israel " — omitting " Jerusalem " with 
 various MSS. of the Septuagint. 
 
 In these horns we have a graphic delinea- 
 tion of the nations' sin. As represented 
 in the first vision, the world-powers had 
 helped forward Israel's affliction by visit- 
 ing upon the subjugated states the barbari- 
 ties of ancient warfare. Well may Zechariah 
 use the intensive form of the verb, to 
 scatter ; for they had tossed and gored 
 the vanquished nation like so many infuri- 
 ated bulls. We sometimes speak of the 
 barbarities of modern warfare, and heaven 
 forbid that anyone should seek to minimise 
 its horrors. But modern warfare is kind- 
 ness itself when compared with the savage 
 cruelties of a Sennacherib or a Nebuchad- 
 nezzar. Imagine the fiendish device of 
 flaying men alive ! or the inhuman practice 
 of putting out a captive's eyes ! or dragging 
 away a batch of exiles with a hook in their 
 nose ! The Chaldean conqueror was not 
 content with deporting the very flower of 
 the nation, when Jerusalem fell in 586 B.C. 
 
 37 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 In pure savagery he slew the sons of Zede- 
 kiah before his eyes, put out the eyes of 
 Zedekiah himself, bound him in fetters and 
 carried him to Babylon (2 Kings xxv. 7). 
 And in the day when these Chaldean 
 strangers entered the city gates, and cast 
 lots upon Jerusalem, Edom was as one of 
 them. Instead of helping a brother in 
 distress, the wild Edomite chiefs rejoiced 
 over Israel's calamity, grasped at a share 
 in the spoil, and lay in wait to cut off the 
 fugitives (Obad. 11-14). This is the meaning 
 of the number four as applied to the horns. 
 The world-powers who had gored Israel 
 in their fury, were not one enemy here and 
 another there, but enemies who had arisen 
 in all directions, and rushed in like the four 
 winds to crush and trample her life-blood 
 in the dust. 
 
 As a picture of this ferocious might, the 
 symbolism of the horn leaves nothing to be 
 desired. Beginning in early Semitic ritual 
 as a relic or appendage of the altar — for 
 in the last resort the horns on the altar 
 point back to the actual heads of the 
 
 38 
 
The Dishorning of the Nations 
 
 victims* — it became, in the development 
 of society, a no less instructive symbol of 
 kingly power (Ps. cxxxii. 17) or military 
 strength, as when Zedekiah the son of 
 Chenaanah made him '' horns of iron," 
 and said, " With these shalt thou push the 
 Syrians until they be consumed " (i Kings 
 xxii. 1 1). Even Bacchus, when he descended 
 to the realm of the shades, in order to 
 bring back his mother Semele, had nothing 
 to fear from the triple-tongued rage of 
 Cerberus ; for he appeared before that 
 dreaded guardian of the infernal regions 
 adorned with a golden horn (Horace, Odes, 
 II. 19, 29). While, to complete the cycle, 
 the student will remember how the imagery 
 of the horn has expanded into the fabled 
 cornucopia of the classics, until, like the 
 horn of the goat which suckled Jupiter, it 
 has been placed among the stars as the 
 emblem of plenty. Sacrifice, strength, 
 and plenty ! Probably the lambs of the 
 flock, if not the children of a larger 
 growth, will be interested and instructed 
 
 ^ See the author's Mosaic Tabernacle^ p. 69. 
 
 39 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 by the development of this expressive 
 symbol. 
 
 In the present instance, the horn is the 
 emblem of a ruthless and all-conquering 
 might. It recalls the figure of '' the 
 notable horn " in the Book of Daniel. 
 Moved with choler against the tv^o-horned 
 ram of Media and Persia, the rough goat 
 ran upon him in the fury of his power, cast 
 him down to the ground, and trampled upon 
 him ; and there was none that could deliver 
 the ram out of his hand (viii. 7, 20). So it 
 fared with Israel in the day of her calamity. 
 The world-powers had smitten and torn 
 her, as the first King of Greece would yet 
 smite Persia. Like enraged animals they 
 had lifted up the horn against Judah and 
 Israel, and scattered the heritage of Jehovah 
 among the heathen. 
 
 Judah and Israel ! Does this mean that 
 the old discord between the two kingdoms 
 has at last been forgotten in the stress of a 
 common calamity ? Is this an indication 
 that men learn in suffering, or in battle, 
 the value of a mutual comradeship in the 
 
 40 
 
The Dishorning of the Nations 
 
 attainment of a common ideal ? If so, one 
 reason at least for the hard discipline of 
 the Exile is not hard to discover. Jehovah 
 had cast His sinful nation into the furnace 
 of affliction that the pure metal of God's 
 people might be separated from the dross. 
 He chastised in order to purify : he fought 
 that he might teach. The Babylonian 
 Exile v^as not a colossal blunder. The 
 unifying of their national ideal was well 
 worth the discipline involved. They 
 had come out of the furnace purified as 
 silver and temperd as steel. Jehovah had 
 made even the wrath of their enemies to 
 work out their national good. 
 
 2. The Four Smiths. 
 
 " And the Lord shewed me four smiths. 
 Then said I, What come these to do ? And 
 he spake, saying, These are the horns which 
 scattered Judah and have broken Israel 
 (LXX), so that no man did lift up his 
 head : but these are come to terrify them, 
 to cast down the horns of the nations, which 
 
 41 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 lifted up their horn against the land of 
 Jehovah (LXX) to scatter it." 
 
 The symbolism of the nations' sin is here 
 followed by the delineation of their punish- 
 ment. Their personality is not emphasised. 
 It is the character of their work, and not 
 the nature of their persons, that absorbs 
 the interest of the prophet. What come 
 these to do ? is the inquiry that springs to 
 his lips ; for, unlike the mounted scouts of 
 Jehovah who appealed to him as angelic 
 beings, the four smiths might be nothing 
 more than human instruments, inaugurating 
 and developing their plans along the line 
 of history. The question of their identity 
 is not pressed. We may think of them as 
 four world-powers, like Nebuchadnezzar, 
 who shattered the tyranny of Assyria, 
 Cyrus, who broke down the pride of Babylon, 
 Cambysis, who finally subdued the power 
 of Egypt, and Alexander the Great, who in 
 turn levelled the might of Media and Persia. 
 Or we may limit the figure to the leaders of 
 the people in Jerusalem — to Zerubbabel and 
 Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, who carried on 
 
 42 
 
The Dishorning of the Nations 
 
 the work of consolidation and restoration 
 in spite of the half-caste people of the land, 
 who by intrigue and open resistance sought 
 to hinder and interrupt the work. Or, in 
 view of the fact that the four horns were 
 referred, not to any special class of opponents, 
 but to all the enemies of Israel without 
 exception, the four smiths also may be 
 interpreted in the same general way. We 
 may think of them as the provision made 
 by Israel's God for bringing to nought the 
 world-wide oppression of His people, and for 
 cowing and casting down all the adversaries 
 and persecutors of His Church. In this 
 wider view of the prophet's imagery, the 
 identity of the agents may be allowed to 
 pass into the background, and the whole 
 attention of Zechariah and his hearers be 
 concentrated on the character of the work. 
 
 The work, as already indicated, was the 
 dishorning of the nations. This was Pressel's 
 idea, as cited by C. H. H. Wright. A farmer 
 suggested to him the true reason why 
 smiths were specially alluded to. "When 
 cattle," said the farmer, " are driven out to 
 
 43 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 pasture, tlie points of the oxen's horns are 
 often cut off, in order that they may be no 
 longer dangerous, and as one is obliged for 
 this purpose to use a particularly sharp 
 instrument, he has generally recourse to a 
 smith." In other language, the intention 
 of Jehovah was chastisement, not destruc- 
 tion. Even in the case of the great world- 
 powers, he would humble, not annihilate, 
 their pride. He would cast down the horn 
 of their resentment, or withdraw the fangs 
 of their envenomed opposition, that finding 
 their place as innocuous and serviceable 
 members of the community, they might 
 realise the greatness of their national ideals 
 in the common life of humanity. 
 
 Alas, that the wisdom and mercy of the 
 divine intention should have been so fre- 
 quently frustrated by human obduracy ! 
 Was it not so in the tragic fate of the 
 heathen nations ? Not only did they ex- 
 ceed their commission in the matter of 
 helping forward the affliction of Israel, but 
 even now, when they were to be included 
 in a course of divine discipline— a discipline 
 
 44 
 
The Dishorning of the Nations 
 
 which was designed to secure their highest 
 national welfare, they refused to yield 
 themselves to the hand of the divine Potter, 
 and instead of rising to their true destiny 
 in the approved comity of nations, they 
 went down to future generations as a heap 
 of shapeless mounds. And what of Israel ? 
 Did she bemoan the frustration of the 
 divine ideal ? Did she bewail the fact that 
 instead of dishorning, destruction was to be 
 the fate of the world-powers ? Alas, for 
 the answer ! Stung by the memory of her 
 age-long oppression, she was only too ready 
 to catch up the strains of her much-maligned 
 imprecatory paslms, and sing — 
 
 O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed : 
 
 Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee 
 
 As thou hast served us. 
 
 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy 
 
 little ones 
 Against the rock. — Ps. cxxxvii. 8-9. 
 
 On the other hand, this is not to be 
 regarded as the Judaism that hates humanity. 
 It is only the natural reaction from the 
 inhuman oppression to which they had 
 
 45 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 been too often subjected. We think of 
 that long tale of horror which the world- 
 conquerors had meted out to the vanished 
 nation, and we do not marvel if the tossed 
 and mangled community came to desire, 
 not the dishorning of the oppressors, but 
 the utter destruction of the bulls. 
 
 Still, the mere fact that the nations had 
 exceeded the divine intention in the chastise- 
 ment of Israel was no good reason why 
 Israel, in turn, should go beyond the same 
 divine plan in the subduing and humbling 
 of the nations. The infinite mercy of 
 Jehovah was sufficient for both. However 
 imperfectly they realised it, it was true 
 then, and it is true now, that 
 
 There's a wideness in God's mercy 
 Like the wideness of the sea ; 
 There's a kindness in His justice 
 Which is more than liberty. 
 
 But we make His love too narrow 
 By false limits of our own ; 
 And we magnify His strictness 
 With a zeal He will not own. 
 
 His design, both for Israel and the 
 
 46 
 
The Dishorning of the Nations 
 
 nations, was altogether different. He was 
 painting on the shifting screen of the 
 future a golden age when all the ends of 
 the earth would be one. He was working 
 for the time, when not only one ancient 
 discord would be left behind, but all dis- 
 cords ; when not only Judah and Israel 
 would dwell together in amity, but when, 
 in the glowing idealism of Isaiah, Israel 
 herself would be " a third with Egypt and 
 Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the 
 earth " (Isa. xix. 24). But how was this 
 ideal to be reached ? Only in one way — 
 not by destruction, but by dishorning ; not 
 by vindictive hate, but by reforming and 
 forgiving love. Israel and all the nations 
 must yield themselves as clay to the hand 
 of the Master Potter, that He might fashion, 
 beautify, and keep them, as vessels meet for 
 His use. 
 
 Sad result ! if through any intractability 
 in the clay, the vessel should be marred in 
 the Potter's hand. It was so by the rivers 
 of Babylon, and among the ruins of Jeru- 
 salem. Shall it be so with us ? 
 
 47 
 
IV 
 
 THE MAN WITH THE MEASURING LINE 
 
 Chapter II. 5-17 
 (In Hebrew) 
 
THE MAN WITH THE MEASURING 
 
 LINE 
 
 The dishorning of the nations is now 
 followed hy the surveying and measuring 
 of Jerusalem. For despite the ruined 
 condition of her walls she was still the 
 inheritance or portion of Jehovah in 
 the holy land. In the expressive language 
 of ver. 12 (Heb.) she was regarded as 
 " the apple of His eye." What is seen 
 in the eye of a man is not the image 
 of the man himself, but the habhah, the 
 tiny reflected image of the observer. And, 
 in like manner, what was seen in Israel 
 was not the nation as such, but the 
 people of Jehovah in its ideality, bearing 
 the image or far-off reflection of the 
 Divine ; and therefore worthy of being 
 restored, beautified, and kept as the apple, 
 the pupil, the little man (cf. Deut. xxxii. lo) 
 
 SI 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 of his eye.^ Obviously the humbling of the 
 great world-powers was not sufficient : there 
 must be the depiction of positive blessing 
 for the sorely-distressed people of Jehovah. 
 
 I. The Present Necessity. 
 
 To say, with Orelli, that " there is not 
 the slightest suggestion here of the re- 
 building of the still ruined walls " is, to 
 the present writer, in the highest degree 
 unwarrantable. Whatever may have been 
 the higher meanings suggested by the work 
 of restoration, it was simply indispensable 
 to the struggling Jewish community that 
 the rebuilding of the city-walls should be 
 faced forthwith. To be inhabited as villages 
 without walls (ver. 8) would be, for a city 
 like Jerusalem, not strength but weakness, 
 not a blessing but a peril ; for so long as 
 the Jewish capital remained unwalled, she 
 was in perpetual fear of molestation, and 
 openly exposed to the taunts and hostility 
 of her continually active foes. Hence when 
 Nehemiah finally completed the walls seventy- 
 
 ^ Cf. Sermons in Syntax, p. 70, 
 52 
 
The Man with Measuring Line 
 
 three years later, that redoubtable patriot, 
 instead of regarding the building of the walls 
 as outwith the scope of the divine intenion, 
 added, " all the heathen that were about 
 us feared, and were much cast down in their 
 own eyes ; for they perceived that this work 
 zoas wrought of our God " (Neh. vi. i6). 
 
 This, indeed, was Jerusalem's urgent 
 necessity, and all the time that Zechariah 
 was visiting the myrtle-grove he was fully 
 cognisant of the fact. True, the building 
 of the temple had to be undertaken first, 
 for they had returned to Jerusalem as 
 essentially a religious community : but 
 the work of restoration could not rest there ; 
 it must go on, as occasion offered, until the 
 whole city was fortified. And as the days 
 came and passed the prophet had the 
 satisfaction of seeing his earnest call to 
 repentance beginning to bear fruit. The 
 theodolite and chain were at last brought 
 out into the open ; and time and again, 
 as he went to the grove of myrtles, he 
 beheld the surveyors busily at work, taking 
 measurements for the laying out of the 
 
 S3 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 streets and walls and ascertaining what 
 could be made of the ruins. This supplied 
 him with the necessary imagery for his 
 third midnight vision. " I lifted up mine 
 eyes, and saw, and behold a man with a 
 measuring line in his hand. Then said I, 
 Whither goest thou ? And he said unto 
 me. To measure Jerusalem, to see what is 
 the breadth thereof and what is the length 
 thereof. And behold the interpreting angel 
 was standing hy (cf. LXX) — as if in doubt 
 regarding the significance of this action — 
 but another angel (the angel of the Lord) 
 went forth to meet him, and said, Run, 
 speak to this young man, who so well repre- 
 sents the efforts of the youthful community, 
 and tell him, not indeed to desist from his 
 undertaking, but to realise the higher mean- 
 ings suggested by the work of restoration." 
 
 Why commentators in general should 
 have concluded that the angel was sent to 
 prevent the young surveyor from carrying 
 out his intention, we cannot profess to 
 explain. There is nothing in the language 
 itself to favour this interpretation ; and in 
 
 54 
 
The Man with Measuring Line 
 
 view of Jerusalem's necessitous condition, 
 surrounded as she was by powerful and 
 unscrupulous foes, the idea, as thus ex- 
 pressed, is quite inadmissible. The angel 
 was sent forth, not to prevent the young 
 man from accomplishing his task, but to 
 remind him of the greatness of Israel's 
 spiritual ideal — not to tell him that his 
 present project was altogether futile, but 
 to show him that any reconstruction engaged 
 in at that time was only the divine fore- 
 shadowing of a far more glorious destiny. 
 The surveyor's task, indeed, could not 
 thus be set aside. It was the one pressing 
 necessity of the hour ; and no dreams of a 
 possible increase of population in the future 
 could justify them in neglecting it. Every 
 generation, it is true, has a clear duty towards 
 the future, even though, as some retort, 
 posterity has done nothing for us. Still, 
 the present duty must always have the prior 
 consideration ; and to suggest that because 
 of some problematic increase of population, 
 municipal corporations, in any age, should 
 provide not simply for the present necessity 
 
 55 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 but for future possibilities as well, is nothing 
 better than the proverbial half-truth which 
 is never independent of some necessary 
 qualification. Former generations might 
 have produced more ideal systems, and made 
 fuller provision for later developments, both 
 in sanitation, education and theology ; but 
 in so doing, what would have been left for 
 us to perfect, or to bring into closer adjust- 
 ment with modern requirements ? Would 
 not earlier idealism have necessarily implied 
 diminished opportunity in the present ? 
 It may be the duty of the State to-day, let 
 us say, to begin a scheme of afforestation for 
 the sake of posterity ; but that would not 
 mean the mapping out of the entire area 
 during the first year. If it be a national 
 concern at all, it must be approached in a 
 truly scientific spirit — not by mapping out 
 the entire area at the outset, but by doing 
 first things first, inserting the thin end of 
 the wedge in a limited and even local 
 experiment, and then allowing the project 
 to expand and ripen with the growing 
 demands and capabilities of the nation. 
 
 56 
 
The Man with Measuring Line 
 
 The situation at the founding of the second 
 temple was precisely similar. Israel could 
 well afford to peer into the future and think 
 on the greatness of her coming destiny ; but 
 the present duty of the returned exiles was 
 clear and urgent. It was not to arrest the 
 youthful surveyor in his efforts to map out 
 the city walls, but to begin at once the work 
 of restoration, that having secured a firm 
 footing in the land of their fathers, they 
 might be ready for all eventualities. 
 
 2. The Future Ideal. 
 
 Zechariah, like a wise teacher, was in- 
 tensely interested in the plans of the 
 builders ; but, at the same time, he tried 
 to fire their imagination by emphasising 
 the greatness of Israel's calling. As the 
 people of Jehovah, she was destined to 
 hand on to future ages, not a political 
 economy, but a religion. She was sum- 
 moned to hold aloft the torch of revelation, 
 and thus fulfil the part of a great missionary 
 people. Her ideal was not political, but re- 
 ligious. She was not an empire, but a Church. 
 
 57 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 This meant {a) that in this ideal city 
 there was no need of walls ; for, like every- 
 thing spiritual, it was destined to be world- 
 wide. It would overflow, not simply into 
 the adjoining villages and annex the 
 neighbouring towns, but sweep out in ever- 
 increasing circles into other lands, and 
 occupy and rule the entire heathen world. 
 Nevertheless in this connection also the 
 duty of Israel was to begin at the centre. 
 Israel herself must first be blessed, before 
 she could hope to become a blessing to all 
 the ends of the earth. The Jews at home 
 and their brethren in other countries must 
 flock to the standard of Jehovah on Mount 
 Zion, else never a heathen nation would 
 be won for His service or help to swell 
 the ranks of His loyal-hearted worshippers. 
 This is the meaning of verses lo-ii (Heb.) — 
 " Ho, Ho, flee from the land of the north 
 {i,e, Chaldea), saith the Lord : for I will 
 gather you (LXX) from the four winds of 
 heaven, saith the Lord. Ho ye, escape to 
 Zion (LXX), ye who dwell with the 
 daughter of Babylon." Let no one say 
 
 58 
 
The Man with Measuring Line 
 
 that those who were still in Babylon turned 
 a deaf ear to this appeal. When occasion 
 offered they willingly sacrificed themselves 
 for the prosperity and peace of Jerusalem. 
 Not only did they contribute largely of 
 their wealth when the first caravan set 
 out under Zerubbabel and Joshua ; but 
 afterwards they furnished both the men 
 and means for bringing the work in Jerusa- 
 lem to a successful completion. Many of 
 them were no more unmindful of the home 
 and faith of their fathers than those who 
 first crossed the desert in 537 e.g. 
 
 The urgency of the appeal, however, was 
 peculiarly opportune at this juncture. Alike 
 in the condition of unrest which prevailed 
 in Babylon, and in the greatness of their 
 own spiritual ideal, the Babylonian Jews 
 had ample reason for reconsidering their 
 position, and responding, before it was 
 too late, to the urgent call of the homeland. 
 In the opening years of Darius, for instance, 
 Babylon herself was in imminent danger. 
 Having made preparations for a lengthened 
 siege within the city walls, she had openly 
 
 59 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 defied the Persian King, and hoped to 
 wrest from his powerful grasp the coveted 
 prize of her independence. But what could 
 withstand the onset of the Persian troops ! 
 Speedily did Darius prove himself equal 
 to every emergency : and Babylon, which 
 had been very leniently dealt with at the 
 hands of Cyrus, was made to bite the dust 
 in the fury of his conquest. In the time 
 of Zechariah, the atmosphere was charged 
 with the electrical fluid of this coming 
 storm ; and therefore the summons ad- 
 dressed to the captive Jews that they 
 should return to their own land, was peculi- 
 arly appropriate in the circumstances — 
 " Ho, ye that dwell with the daughter of 
 Babylon, escape ye to Zion." 
 
 For (b) their true national ideal was 
 also sfirituaL If the critical unrest of the 
 times was one urgent reason why they 
 should return to their own land, surely 
 the higher claim of their moral and spiritual 
 faith was indisputably another. Not in 
 the land of the north, where they had 
 been crushed by the spoiler, but in the 
 
 60 
 
The Man with Measuring Line 
 
 land and sanctuary of their fathers' God, 
 would they find the opportunity and 
 necessary fulcrum for the attainment of 
 their world-wide ideal. To most of them, 
 indeed, the land of their captivity was also 
 the land of their nativity : but what was 
 life-long association and personal ease to 
 the unparalleled grandeur of their national 
 faith ? What was gain or social distinction 
 to the insistent call of their God-appointed 
 destiny ? This was the voice of the nation 
 as against the individual life. This was 
 the appeal of the centuries as against the 
 hours. Ho, ye inhabitants of the north, 
 haste ye to Zion ! Be an ensign, a lever, 
 a divine signet, in the holy land. 
 
 Besides, was not Jehovah Himself the 
 strongest pledge that their spiritual cause 
 would ultimately triumph .? Unlike the 
 walls of Babylon which succumbed before 
 Darius, or the walls of Jerusalem which 
 would yet be demolished before the im- 
 perious might of Rome, the ramparts of 
 the spiritual Zion could neither be scaled 
 nor stormed ; for Jehovah, the Lord of 
 
 6i 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 Hosts, was as a wall of fire round about 
 His people (cf. ver. 9). It is a most striking 
 figure. God will not only make a hedge 
 about them (Job i. 10), or walls and bul- 
 warks which may be battered down (Isa. 
 xxvi. i), or high mountains, which may 
 be got over (Ps. cxxv. 2) : he will be a wall 
 of fire around them, which can neither be 
 broken down nor undermined, but which 
 will repel and overwhelm the assailants. 
 Not more safe were the Bedouin shepherds 
 when encircled by a ring of fires to scare off 
 the beasts of prey by night, than were 
 the people of Jehovah safe, even in the 
 midst of their enemies, when surrounded 
 and safeguarded by the holy fire of His love. 
 Hence in ver. 14 they are called upon 
 to welcome His coming with a perfect jubilee 
 of praise — " Sing and rejoice, O daughter of 
 Zion ; for lo, I come, and I will dwell in the 
 midst of thee, saith the Lord." Cf. similar 
 invocations in Zeph. iii. 14-15, Isa. xii. 6 
 and liv. i. The source of joy is sufficiently 
 instructive : it is a fresh coming of Jehovah, 
 Israel's God. Just as the early Christians 
 
 62 
 
The Man with Measuring Line 
 
 were inspired to nobler service by the 
 promise of the Second Advent, so the Jews, 
 at the founding of the second temple, are 
 encouraged to rally round Zion by the 
 hope of a speedy advent of Jehovah. Nay, 
 the promised parousia was already begun. 
 Jehovah had even then set forth from His 
 heavenly abode (ver. 17), and a dreaded 
 manifestation in judgment was about to 
 break forth upon the world. 
 
 And what, under a concluding para- 
 graph, was the real significance of this 
 unveiling both for Israel and the nations .? 
 The answer is, that the Weltkrisis here 
 depicted was to be a union of judgment 
 and mercy. There was, at once, the might 
 that crushes and appals, and the mercy 
 that rescues and redeems. For when 
 Jehovah appears in judgment. He but 
 smites that He may save, and chastises that 
 He may teach. In fine, the day of the Lord 
 is to be a dishorning of the nations, not a 
 destruction : it is chastisement, the proof 
 of love. Consequently, while the angel 
 of the Lord exclaims in ver. 13, "Behold, 
 
 63 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 I will shake mine hand over them, and they 
 shall be a spoil to those that served them," 
 he immediately adds in ver. 15, " And 
 many nations shall join themselves to the 
 Lord in that day, and shall be his people 
 (LXX) . . . and thou shalt know that 
 the Lord of Hosts hath sent me." The 
 coming of the Lord, on the one side, and 
 the jubilation of God's people on the other, 
 are to have this as their inspiring result. 
 The dispersed of Israel among the nations, 
 and the converted nations themselves, 
 are to come up as one people to worship 
 the Lord in Zion ; and then the ideal of 
 Israel, the covenant people of Jehovah, 
 will be most gloriously realised. The Lord 
 Himself will inherit Judah as His portion 
 in the holy land (ver. 16), and Jerusalem 
 once more will be chosen and kept as the 
 apple of His eye. No more inspiring pros- 
 pect could fill the mind or fire the imagina- 
 tion of any people. The building of the 
 walls will at last have become an anachronism. 
 " Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord ; 
 for He is wakei up out of His holy hahitationy 
 
 64 
 
V 
 
 THE PURIFICATION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 Chapter III 
 
 B 
 
THE PURIFICATION OF THE 
 CHURCH 
 
 When the first caravan set out in 537 B.C. 
 the recognised leaders of the people were 
 Zerubbabel and Joshua (Hag. i. i). The 
 secular and ecclesiastical rulers are found 
 side by side ; and yet, as Ibn Ezra so aptly 
 observes, the prince is named before the 
 priest, the son of Shealtiel has a distinct 
 precedence over the son of Jehozadak. It 
 may have been the design of their age- 
 long discipline that they should return 
 to their own land as a religious community ; 
 but the figment of a political ideal was 
 not easily eradicated. It possessed so 
 powerful an attraction for the popular 
 imagination, that while the exiles came 
 back greatly reduced in numbers and 
 resources, they continued to cherish the 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 dream of a future restoration of the king- 
 dom, and rejoiced in the thought that a 
 scion of the house of David was still their 
 leader and champion. But what of the pro- 
 phet Zechariah ? Was he, too, swayed and 
 fascinated by this illusive will-o'-the-wisp ? 
 Wellhausen thinks that he was. " It is 
 probable," he conjectures, " that the 
 prophet designs to hint in a guarded way 
 that Zerubbabel, who in all other places 
 is mentioned along with Joshua, is on the 
 point of ascending the throne of his ancestor 
 David." ^ The answer to this is obvious. 
 We have the clear teaching of chap. ii. 
 If Zechariah taught them anything by 
 means of his third midnight vision, he 
 taught them the necessity of revising and 
 reversing the order of this commonly- 
 accepted estimate. Israel must learn to 
 read not " prince and priest," but " priest 
 and prince." For, as Wellhausen himself 
 has pointed out in his article " Pentateuch " 
 in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the high 
 priest in the second temple was not only 
 
 ^ Biblkaf col. 5392. 
 
 68 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 the head of the natural worship, he was 
 " the head of the entire national life." 
 And the spirituality of this ideal was not 
 to be imperilled by any unreasoned action 
 in the present. There was the risk of 
 possible complications with Persia, through 
 the unguarded expression of their national 
 hopes. There was also the danger of 
 depreciating and discrediting their spiritual 
 functions, because of undue prominence 
 given to the secular. And, finally, there 
 was the moral certainty of still further 
 estranging their fathers' God, and the 
 subsequent difHculty of appeasing or 
 placating His favour. Surely all this en- 
 forced the wisdom of learning to put first 
 things first, and of placing well in the fore- 
 ground, not their political, but their 
 religious ideal as the covenant people of 
 Jehovah. It is in this order, at least, 
 that the prophet proceeds now to deal with 
 their present spiritual perplexities. Before 
 he comes to Zerubbabel, and treats of 
 their feebleness as a community (chap, iv.), 
 he describes the condition of the priesthood 
 
 69 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 (chap, iii.), and their admitted sinfulness 
 as a Church. 
 
 I. Rescued as a Brand. 
 
 " And he shewed me Joshua the high 
 priest standing before the angel of the 
 Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand 
 to be his adversary. And the angel of the 
 Lord (so Kittel) said unto Satan, The 
 Lord rebuke thee, O Satan ; yea, the Lord, 
 that is choosing (participle) Jerusalem, rebuke 
 thee ; is not this a brand plucked out of 
 the fire ? " (verses 1-2). 
 
 In these verses we have the prophetic 
 delineation of the covenant people them- 
 selves. For in the words of Kliefoth (as 
 quoted by Keil), " the priesthood of Israel 
 was concentrated in the high priest just as 
 the character of Israel as the holy nation 
 was concentrated in the priesthood." It 
 is not Joshua, as such, who is impeached 
 before the divine tribunal, but Joshua as 
 the ecclesiastical representative of a sinful 
 and guilt-laden people. And the people 
 themselves felt this. In the last resort, the 
 
 70 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 charges brought by Satan against the sacer- 
 dotal ruler are but the pictorial repre- 
 sentation of Israel's own sense of sin. 
 And psychologically the rise of this moral 
 consciousness is not difficult to follow. It 
 began with the soul-subduing vision of 
 Israel's spiritual destiny. The very im- 
 pressiveness of the picture, sketched by 
 Zechariah in the previous chapter, has 
 filled them with the guilty fear of a possible 
 divine estrangement. The sense of demerit 
 is always proportionate to the consciousness 
 of blessing despised. And since they have 
 been led for a moment to behold the 
 heights to which they had been summoned 
 to rise, they have been led by the same 
 impulse to peer into the depths to which 
 they had allowed themselves to sink. Alas, 
 neither they nor their priests had been 
 worthy of the greatness of their ideal. 
 They had violated the law and profaned the 
 sanctuary of their God (cf. Ezek. xxii. 26) ; 
 and who could wonder, if on the threshold 
 of His restored temple, the unworthy and 
 guilt-laden community should be rejected ? 
 
 71 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 This was a fear, indeed, which could not be 
 suppressed. It forced its way upwards to 
 the ear and bar of the Eternal ; and finding 
 there a suitable expression in the impeach- 
 ment of the great accuser, it demanded with 
 all the sophistry of a malignant imputation 
 the total rejection of the people. Because 
 of Israel's long-continued and ineradicable 
 sin, let the whole nation be treated as a brand 
 fit for the fire. 
 
 But what is the reply of the angel of the 
 Lord ? It is at once a complete refutation 
 of the vindictive charge, and a stern silencing 
 of the one who brought it. " The Lord 
 Himself rebuke thee, O Satan (note the 
 emphatic Paseq introduced by Baer after 
 the term * Jehovah ') ; yea, the Lord who 
 is choosing (the present participle indicating 
 the duration or continuity of the divine 
 action) Jerusalem, rebuke thee ; is not 
 this ^ a brand plucked out of the fire ? " 
 The same figure is used in Amos iv. ii, 
 
 1 Wickes regards the double Mer'kha on this word as 
 «*an irregular and unmeaning accentuation," but see the 
 author's remarks on Hab. i. 3 in Sermons in Accents ^ p. 55. 
 
 72 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 where with a distinct allusion to the terrible 
 throes of earthquake, the grandees of 
 Samaria are reminded that the refugees 
 from that appalling disaster were as a fire- 
 brand plucked out of the burning. In 
 the present instance, it is the exile and not 
 the earthquake which is at the basis of the 
 prophet's description. On the plains of 
 Babylonia the Jewish captives had been 
 cast as into a burning fiery furnace, and 
 there the malicious accuser of the brethren 
 would fain have left them as they were. 
 But Jehovah who had chosen Israel at the 
 first, and who had again returned in mercy 
 to the object of His choice, realised the 
 value of the half-burnt piece of wood, and 
 graciously snatched it out of the fire. And 
 on the basis of this redemptive and com- 
 pleted act, how could anyone listen to the 
 vindictive and reckless plea that the scorched 
 and blackened bit of timber should again 
 be consigned to the flames ? No, " the 
 gifts and the calling of God are without 
 repentance." Israel, the sinful nation, had 
 been forgiven much ; and this, the first 
 
 73 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 step in her full restoration, could never be 
 revoked. If a restored people, like a renewed 
 soul, be rescued by a miracle of grace, it 
 shall never be left as the prey of the great 
 accuser. Let this be written for the com- 
 fort of the Church in all ages : the rescued 
 one is " a brand flucked out of the fire." 
 
 2. Installed as a Priest. 
 
 " And Joshua was clothed with filthy 
 garments, and was standing before the angel 
 of the Lord. And the angel said unto those 
 that stood before him, Take the filthy 
 garments from off him — And unto him he 
 said (as in a gracious undertone). Behold, 
 I have caused thine iniquity to pass from 
 thee — and clothe him with robes flowing 
 down to the feet, and set a fair mitre upon 
 his head (omitting the verb ' I said ' at the 
 beginning of ver. 5, and translating both 
 verbs as imperatives with the LXX). So 
 they set a fair mitre upon his head, and 
 clothed him with garments ; and the angel 
 of the Lord stood by." 
 
 This is the second stage in Israel's re- 
 
 74 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 storatlon. Deliverance from destruction is 
 now to be followed by worship and service. 
 And yet was even the head of the priestly 
 nation worthy to appear before Jehovah ? 
 No doubt they had been delivered from 
 the Babylonian captivity, and brought back 
 to their own land, and to that extent they 
 could justly confide in the Divine mercy. 
 But to draw near as priests within the 
 sphere of the divine sanctity was another 
 and very different matter ! Were they fit 
 to approach the altar of incense in the 
 robes of glory and beauty, enumerated in 
 Ex. xxix. 5-6, or to appear in the dress of 
 pure white linen prescribed for the great 
 day of atonement (Lev. xvi. 4) ? Little 
 marvel if the revived consciousness of the 
 people faltered at the prospect, or trembled 
 at the thought of their unfitness for the 
 perfect exercise of their calling. They had 
 faith, indeed, to be saved ; but had they 
 faith also for this spiritual service ? Alas, 
 for the reality. Instead of the variegated 
 robes of Aaron and his sons, they were 
 dressed in the filthy garments of a nation's 
 
 IS 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 unaccountable folly. The sordidness of 
 their aims had raised up an impassable 
 barrier between them and the golden altar. 
 They were not fit to enter as priests into 
 the holy place. Nevertheless, their hope 
 was in Jehovah, Israel's God. In the striking 
 parenthesis introduced into ver. 4 (accom- 
 panied, no doubt, by a dramatic change of 
 tone), the angel of the Lord turned to 
 Joshua, and said, " Behold, I have caused 
 thine iniquity to pass from thee " ; and 
 as a symbolical representation of its removal, 
 he was to listen to the angel's instructions 
 to those who were standing by. Addressing 
 these attending ministers, he continued, 
 " Remove the squalid garments from off 
 him — garments which so vividly portray 
 the nation's sense of sin ; and clothe him 
 in those robes of glory and beauty, which 
 no less fitly symbolise his acceptance as a 
 priest." And the attending angels did so. 
 They clothed him with garments down to 
 the feet, and set a fair mitre upon his head, 
 and the angel of the Lord stood by. The 
 guilty fears of the people were shown to 
 
 76 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 be entirely groundless ; and because they 
 were, Israel must now listen to the solemn 
 teaching which follows, that the symbolical 
 change of raiment having been effected, 
 the sacrament of investiture must be 
 vindicated and crowned by the unswerving 
 loyalty of obedience. " Thus saith the Lord 
 of hosts, If thou wilt walk in my ways, 
 and if thou wilt keep my charge, then thou 
 also shalt judge my house, and shalt also 
 keep my courts (the emphatic pronoun 
 * thou,' and the repeated adverb ' also ' 
 being a sufficient justification for beginning 
 the apodosis at this point), and I will give 
 thee a place of access (R.V.) among them 
 that stand by." Instead of being treated 
 as an outcast, Joshua is to be admitted freely 
 into the divine presence as the people's 
 representative. If installation is followed 
 by obedience, obedience, in turn, will be 
 rewarded by communion with the divine. 
 And in that freedom of access among those 
 who encircled God's throne, the spiritual 
 ideal of Israel would itself be crowned. 
 In fine, Israel, the people of Jehovah, is 
 
 77 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 graciously accepted as a reinvested kingdom 
 of priests. The filthy garments have been 
 laid aside for the rich apparel of the King. 
 
 3. Honoured as a Type. 
 
 " Hear now, O Joshua, the high priest, 
 thou and thy colleagues that sit before thee 
 {i.e. the priestly conclaves) ; for they are 
 men which are a sign ; for behold I w^ill 
 bring forth my servant the Branch " (ver. 8). 
 Baffled by the failures of the past, and grieved 
 by the sordidness of the present, does the 
 prophet suggest in these concluding verses 
 that for a complete reaffirming of Israel's 
 faith, the leaders must have recourse to the 
 shifting screen of the future ? If so, he 
 never possessed a more suitable starting- 
 point for his Messianic vaticination than 
 in the spiritual functions, but also the 
 confessed limitations of Israel's reinstated 
 priests. If they failed in realising fully 
 the greatness of their spiritual calling, they 
 could at least point forward to One w^ho in 
 the glory of Israel's golden age would give 
 a perfect realisation to that transcendent 
 
 78 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 hope. Hence the greatest thing that could 
 be said of Joshua and his priestly colleagues 
 was that they were a type or portent of 
 the coming Messianic fulfilment. They 
 were not merely a wonderful illustration of 
 Jehovah's saving grace (A.V.), or men who 
 could interpret marvels, like the soothsayers 
 of ancient times (LXX) ; they were also 
 types or symbols of the long-promised 
 Messianic ideal ; and therefore a definite 
 ground of assurance for Israel's undying 
 hope. 
 
 The hope itself is vividly depicted in 
 verses 8^-9. It is at once a living shoot that 
 springs up out of obscurity into wide- 
 spreading luxuriance ; and an equally 
 significant stone^ which, brought out and 
 adorned by the Master Builder, will yet 
 ensure the erection and ultimate comple- 
 tion of the temple. The figure of the 
 " Branch," which appears as a proper name 
 in Zech. vi. 12, is already familiar from 
 passages like Jer. xxiii. 5, xxxiii. 15, Isa. Iv. 2, 
 xi. I ; and even the profoundly solemn oracle 
 in Deutero-Isaiah, where the ideal Servant 
 
 79 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 of Jehovali is represented as " a root out of 
 a dry ground," with no form nor comeliness, 
 and no beauty that we should desire him 
 (Isa. liii. 2). Thus humbly and obscurely 
 would the coming Messiah appear as a 
 branch ; but, unlike the charred brand fit 
 only for the fire, He would grow and flourish 
 like the goodly cedar, until its benign 
 shadow would fill the land. The services 
 of Joshua and his colleagues might be re- 
 stricted in various ways — both by the 
 earthliness of their aims and by the local 
 character of their sanctuary — but who could 
 set any bounds to the priesthood of God's 
 servant the Branch ? He would appear in 
 the power of an endless life, and sacrifice 
 and intercede for all. Here, indeed, was a 
 hope that might well fill the people of 
 Jehovah with a fully assured faith. In the 
 greatness and glory of the Messianic fulfil- 
 ment their profound spiritual ideal would be 
 verified. 
 
 But what of the urgency of their present 
 national distress ? This suggested the com- 
 panion picture of a " stone," which having 
 
 80 
 
The Purification of the Church 
 
 been set before Joshua, the high priest, was 
 to ensure the ultimate completion and 
 adequate adornment of the Jewish temple. 
 " Behold the stone that I have set before 
 Joshua ; upon that one stone shall be 
 directed seven eyes — the seven eyes which 
 symbolise the universal providence and 
 care of Jehovah (cf. iv. lo) — and behold 
 whatever decoration be necessary in order 
 to fit the stone for its place at the corner 
 or capital, I myself will engrave the engrav- 
 ing thereof ; until when it is finally placed 
 in position, and the Messianic temple has 
 become a completed fact, I will remove 
 the iniquity of that land in one day." In 
 a word, the ideal temple, like the ideal 
 Jerusalem, will be a house of prayer for all 
 nations ; and the luxuriance of my Servant 
 the Branch will throw its welcome shadow 
 over the whole. Then, indeed, the ultimate 
 goal of Old Testament pedagogy will be 
 reached ; each man will sit under his vine 
 and under his fig-tree, and invite his 
 neighbour to come and share in the blessings 
 of an enduring peace. 
 F 8i 
 
VI 
 
 THE UPBUILDING OF THE COMMUNITY 
 
 Chapter IV, 
 
THE UPBUILDING OF THE 
 COMMUNITY 
 
 This naturally follows the restoration and 
 purification of the Church. Joshua, their 
 ecclesiastical ruler, has been installed into 
 office ; and now a suitable message has to 
 be prepared and conveyed to their civil 
 head, Zerubbabel. This is the meaning of 
 Zech. iv. In most communities the dis- 
 tinction between the two spheres is easily 
 defined and appreciated, and no serious 
 difficulty is experiened in specifying the 
 functions of each. But in Israel's case, the 
 two offices were so closely allied, and the 
 religious factor so strongly accentuated as 
 in chap, iii., that the prophet must have 
 felt it a delicate task, not simply to hold 
 the balance between them, but to find any 
 place in his ideal kingdom for the person 
 and work of Zerubbabel. The delicacy 
 
 8s 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 of this problem, and not any spiritual 
 exhaustion produced by the preceding 
 visions, is sufficient to account for the 
 significant pause observable in ver. i. He 
 had lingered so long in the grove of myrtles 
 trying to reconcile these conflicting interests, 
 that a considerable interval elapsed before 
 he was able to throw into shape his fully- 
 matured convictions. And when the truth 
 did dawn upon his mind with all the force 
 of a divine illumination, he could only liken 
 it to a return of his angel interpreter, and a 
 spirit-taught awakening out of sleep. " The 
 angel that talked with me came again, and 
 waked me ; as a man that is waked (daily ^) 
 out of sleep." 
 
 I. The Re-emphasising of Israel's 
 Spiritual Calling. 
 
 The message to Zerubbabel can only 
 begin with a re-affirming of Israel's spiritual 
 
 1 The frequentative imperfect denotes the repeated ex- 
 perience of a man, and is quite distinct from the single, 
 completed action depicted by the perfect in chap. ii. 17 
 (Heb.). 
 
 86 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 calling. " He said unto me, What seest 
 thou (cf. Jer. i. 12) ? And I said, I see, and 
 behold a candlestick all of gold, with a 
 bowl (LXX) upon the top of it, and its 
 seven lamps thereon ; and seven pipes to 
 the lamps which are upon it (omitting the 
 first * seven ' with the LXX) ; and two 
 olive trees by it, one upon its right side 
 (Kittel) and the other upon its left. And 
 I answered and spake to the angel that 
 talked with me, saying, What are these, 
 lord ? Then the angel that talked with 
 me, said . . . This is the word of the 
 Lord unto Zerubbabel, saving. Not by 
 martial force (Heersmacht^ Orelli) nor by 
 power, but by My spirit, saith the Lord 
 of hosts." 
 
 One can have no hesitation in saying that 
 this is a perfect picture of Israel's spiritual 
 ideal. The seven-branched candlestick is 
 an expressive symbol of the holy nation 
 engaged in priestly service. She had been 
 chosen of God to reflect His praise and to 
 illumine the surrounding darkness, until, 
 all darkness being scattered, the whole 
 
 87 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 earth would become a tabernacle filled 
 with heaven's own light. Her election, 
 therefore, did not mean the rejection of 
 others. Why should the shutting in of 
 some be the means of shutting others out ? 
 This is not the meaning of election in any 
 age. It was election to serve^ and the 
 very idea of service implied that the others 
 could be served. Instead of leading the way 
 to a Judaism that hated humanity, divine 
 revelation was ever seeking to utter the 
 words : — " Mine house shall be called a 
 house of prayer for all peoples " (Isa. Ivi. 7). 
 And thus the priestly nation, having been 
 bathed in the laver of purification (chap, iii.), 
 was now summoned by the symbolism of 
 the golden candlestick to enter into the 
 service of Jehovah, and hold aloft the torch 
 of truth among the surrounding nations. 
 
 Election and insfiration — this is the 
 teaching of the oil. The candlestick had to 
 be fed continually with " pure olive oil 
 beaten " — that is, oil prepared in the way 
 which yielded the whitest, purest light by 
 beating the unripe, green olives in a mortar 
 
 88 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 (Ex. xxvii. 20). And this, as all expositors 
 agree, is a suggestive symbol of the divine 
 spirit. " It is not by might nor by power, 
 but by My spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." 
 This is the application of the figure made in 
 Zechariah's vision, when the attending 
 angel interpreted the two olive trees that 
 stood beside the golden lampstand, and fed 
 it perpetually with consecrated oil. The 
 light which Israel was to give back in service 
 was first of all divinely supplied by inspira- 
 tion. The shining was dependent on the 
 anointing. No one was sent a warring on 
 his own charges. The calling was supple- 
 mented by the chrism of a divine endowment. 
 In the light of this higher teaching what 
 was the duty of every true patriot in Jeru- 
 salem ? Was it not to conserve the sanctity, 
 and enforce the spirituality of Israel's high 
 calling ? Israel's ideal, as already noted, 
 was not political, but religious. She was 
 not an empire, but a Church. Hence if 
 the leaders in general, or Zerubbabel in 
 particular, were cherishing any secular 
 ambitions in connection with the restoration 
 
 89 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 of Jerusalem, the sooner they surrendered 
 this illusive dream, and found their supreme 
 concern in the higher interests of religion, 
 the sooner would they gain a firm footing in 
 the holy land, and rise to their destined 
 place in the approved comity of nations. 
 It was the lack of this which had proved 
 Israel's snare in the past. The dream of a 
 political supremacy, or the hope of holding 
 their own amid the clash of empires, had 
 ever been the ignis fatuus which allured 
 their fathers to their doom. Both Ephraim 
 and Judah had become joined to these 
 idols ; and therefore, first in Samaria, and 
 then in Jerusalem, they had the downfall 
 of the State. It had been a ruinous policy 
 from first to last ; and if the old folly was 
 not to be repeated in the times of the 
 second temple, the solemn teaching given 
 to Zerubbabel must be laid seriously to 
 heart, that it was not by martial force or 
 political ascendency that Israel was to rise 
 to future greatness, but by absolute devotion 
 to the spirit of the theocracy which alone 
 could make her a burning and a shining lamp 
 
 90 
 
upbuilding of the Community 
 
 — a divine lampstand, replenished not by 
 anything human, but by the perennial and 
 inexhaustible supplies of God's covenant 
 mercy. It was a sacred calling — one far 
 beyond the sparks of Israel's own kindling. 
 The torch that was to lighten the world 
 must be lit at the altar of God. She 
 required an unction from the Holy One. 
 
 2. The Part Played by Zerubbabel. 
 
 According to the present vision the role 
 of the civil ruler was to be confined to the 
 erection of the temple. Instead of being 
 directed to the founding and strengthening 
 of a State, he was summoned to support the 
 leaders of the sacerdotal order in their 
 eflForts to reorganise the worship. And if 
 he did so with devotion — resisting the 
 temptation to bring Israel into an inde- 
 pendent position by consolidating her ex- 
 ternal power — he was promised that the 
 difficulties which had lain so long in the 
 way of the temple restoration would be 
 removed out of his path — levelled by the 
 
 91 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 command and divine assistance of Jehovah, 
 Israel's God. Every high hill would be 
 brought low. This is the teaching of 
 verses 7-10, which may be paraphrased as 
 follows : — " That great mountain which 
 stands before Zerubbabel / will set as a 
 plain (Kittel's emendation) ; and he shall 
 bring forth the headstone amid the acclama- 
 tions and prayers of the people. For thus 
 saith the Lord, The hands of Zerubbabel 
 have laid the foundation of this house, and 
 his hands shall finish (it) ; and despite the 
 gloomy forebodings of some who bemoan 
 the insignificance of its beginning, the 
 seven eyes of Jehovah shall see with joy the 
 plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel, and 
 mark with approbation the dedicatory 
 services connected with that auspicious day. 
 And if even divine Omniscience thus 
 approve of the temple dedication, who can 
 presume to depreciate or ridicule the 
 work ? " 
 
 Did the old men who moved about 
 among the rising walls of the temple affect 
 to despise it ? Did they help to discourage 
 
 92 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 the hearts of the builders hy dwelling upon 
 the dimensions of the former sanctuary, 
 and peevishly suggest that the present 
 building was as nothing in their eyes 
 (Hag. ii. 3) ? The disparagement was 
 utterly inexcusable. It had only the sem- 
 blance of validity, if one was prepared to 
 ignore the greatness of Israel's spiritual 
 ideal. Viewed in the light of that higher 
 teaching, the complaint was not worthy of 
 those who sought to keep in touch with 
 present necessities, and who were still 
 capable of being thrilled with the buoyancy 
 of a spirit-taught hope. To men who had 
 caught a glimpse of Israel's future — and 
 surely Zerubbabel would try to be one of 
 them — its comparatively insignificant be- 
 ginning did not appear as a day of small 
 things ; for even now, in the light of their 
 spiritual destiny, it was big with the promise 
 of what might yet be. It was not unlike 
 the bursting of the seed in springtime. 
 Anyone may stand priestlike beside the 
 opening bud, and say, " It doth not yet 
 appear what it shall be " ; for rolled up in 
 
 93 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 its tiny folds, as in a cradle, is the germinal 
 principle of animation, and this is endowed 
 with the mysterious property and potency 
 of growth. Massive and inert may be the 
 weight of brown earth through which the 
 tender blade has to push its way upwards 
 in the spring ; but the slender spike of 
 green is a living thing, and we cannot 
 afford to despise the feebleness of its origin ; 
 for it will yet help to cover the entire field 
 with the fulness and glory of harvest. 
 
 Besides, the part played by Zerubbabel 
 is not to be exhausted by the temple 
 dedication. Faithfulness at the present 
 juncture will be rewarded and crowned by 
 an ever-increasing service in the future. 
 He, too, will be accepted as a man of 
 " portent." The prince, no less than the 
 priest, is a type of the coming " Branch." In 
 truth, the completion of the temple is only 
 an august beginning. It will be succeeded, 
 in due course, by the erection of the city 
 walls. And these, in turn, will sweep out 
 into that ideal kingdom depicted in 
 chap. ii. 8 (Heb.), when Jerusalem will be 
 
 94 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 inhabited as villages without walls, and 
 when royalty, no less than priesthood, will 
 prepare the way for the Messianic fulfilment, 
 and usher in God's Servant, the Branch, who 
 is both King and Priest. Is this not the 
 precise teaching of verses -11-14 ? "Then 
 answered I, and said unto him. What are 
 these two olive trees upon the right side of 
 the candlestick, and upon the left side 
 thereof ? And (not waiting for an answer) 
 I asked the second time, saying. What be 
 these two olive branches (or, tufts, from 
 which the oil flows into the bowl, Orelli) 
 which by means of the two golden spouts 
 (or, beaks, LXX) empty the golden oil out 
 of themselves ? And he answered me, and 
 said . . . These are the two sons of oil 
 (R.V.) that stand by the Lord of the whole 
 earth." In other language, the two olive 
 trees are the two offices of kingship and 
 priesthood, instituted in Israel by the 
 chrism of a divine anointing ; and the two 
 tufts, which empty the golden oil into the 
 bowl, are the two representatives of these 
 offices, viz., Zerubbabel and Joshua — the 
 
 95 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 whole symbolism being well designed to 
 teach Israel that so long as her civil and 
 religious affairs were administered with 
 discretion, so long would Jehovah enable 
 them, through these appointed channels, 
 not only to triumph over their present 
 difficulties, but to shine as a lamp among 
 the surrounding nations, and usher in the 
 greatness and glory of the Messianic age. 
 Zerubbabel is not set before Joshua, and 
 still less is Joshua set before Zerubbabel. 
 They are placed on a footing of perfect 
 equality beside the Lord of the whole 
 earth, and the conflicting interests connected 
 with the two offices are most happily 
 reconciled. The one leader may simply 
 use the trowel in the furtherance of Israel's 
 cause, while the other uses the censer 
 and sprinkles the sacrificial blood ; but if a 
 similar spirit of devotion be found behind 
 the two actions, the services of the two 
 representatives will be divinely equalised. 
 Only let Zerubbabel do his part well in 
 helping to reorganise the worship, and 
 both his official position and personal 
 
 96 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 service will be duly recognised and acknow- 
 ledged. There is no distinction between 
 secular and sacred in the spiritual ideal of 
 Israel. The divine spirit of the theocracy 
 may be equally honoured in both ; and 
 " those that honour Me, I will honour." 
 
 3. The Meaning of the Vision for Us. 
 
 Instead of being weakened or eclipsed 
 by the greatness of the Messianic fulfilment, 
 it has only been illumined and intensified 
 by being " baptized into Christ." There is 
 (i) the lesson of the divine fulness of 
 blessing as symbolised by the oil. The 
 two olive trees which stood beside the 
 golden lampstand were the type of a 
 perennial and inexhaustible supply. There 
 was no need, as in the Mosaic tabernacle, 
 to replenish daily the exhausted lamps, or 
 to prepare the oil according to divine 
 prescription, so as to secure the highest 
 degree of excellence in the light. Human 
 agency in this respect was not introduced 
 at all. The tw^o living trees produced by 
 G 97 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 themselves an abundant and unfailing 
 supply, and by means of the two golden 
 spouts which communicated with the bowl 
 upon the lampstand, they fed the seven 
 lamps with a continuous stream of oil, 
 which was the type of Israel's fulness of 
 blessing received from Jehovah. And that 
 divine fulness is intended for us. In the 
 God of Israel there is a sufficiency of grace 
 and goodness for all His creatures. No one 
 is asked to remove mountains in his own 
 strength. No one is expected to shine like 
 a lamp in the sparks of his own kindling. 
 No one is under any necessity of preparing 
 the oil or creating a holy spirit for himself. 
 " If ye know how to give good gifts unto your 
 children, how much more shall your heavenly 
 Father give the holy spirit to them that 
 ask him ? " That spirit presses everywhere 
 like the air we breathe. It is the very breath 
 of God touching the soul. And when, like 
 the incoming tide, it fills every crevice and 
 fissure along the shore, the individual life, 
 instead of being impoverished and weak, is 
 filled unto all " the fulness of God." 
 
 98 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 But, again (2), we have the channels 
 through which the consecrated oil had to 
 be conveyed. It was conveyed by means 
 of the two sons of oil who stood by the Lord 
 of the whole earth. And these two sons 
 of oil, or the representatives of royalty and 
 priesthood, are, as most expositors admit, 
 fitly taken up and fulfilled in the great 
 Antitype, who was at once King and Priest. 
 Through the kingly and priestly offices of 
 Christ we have the one mediatorial channel 
 through which the holy anointing oil is 
 conveyed to man. And thus we have the 
 mystic teaching of all the New Testament 
 writers, that the gifts and graces of the 
 divine spirit are brought near to us in and 
 through Him, It is only as we keep our- 
 selves in vital contact with Christ that we 
 enter, in any measure, into the divine 
 fulness of grace, holiness, and comfort, which 
 are represented to us in the golden lamp- 
 stand. *' He that spared not His own Son, 
 but delivered Him up for us all, how shall 
 He not also with Him freely give us all 
 things ? " No Zerubbabel in the church 
 
 99 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 to-day has profited as he might have done 
 by the teaching of the golden candlestick, 
 who has not sought pardon and life, fitness 
 and power to shine, through the royal and 
 priestly functions of God's divine Son. 
 
 For (3) all this is necessary in view of 
 the spirituality of Israel's ideal. That 
 ideal is equally incumbent on us. " Ye 
 are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a 
 holy nation, a people for God's own pos- 
 session, that ye may show forth the excel- 
 lencies of Him who called you out of 
 darkness into His marvellous light " (i Pet. 
 ii. 9). There are both election and endow- 
 ment in the priesthood of Christian men — 
 election to serve, and endowment of the 
 Holy Ghost — and both derived from Him 
 who walks amidst the seven golden candle- 
 sticks and holds the seven stars in His right 
 hand (Rev. i. 13). Elected to serve, per- 
 haps to suffer, certainly to shine — to shine 
 like stars in the darkness of midnight 
 when no eye sees but God's. Who is 
 sufficient for this service ? No one who 
 trusts in his own wisdom, and is blind to 
 
 100 
 
Upbuilding of the Community 
 
 the forces that are divine. It is not by 
 might nor by power, but by My Spirit, 
 saith the Lord of Hosts. The lampstand 
 that is to illumine the tabernacle of the 
 world must be lit at the altar of God. We, 
 too, need an unction from the Holy One. 
 
 lOI 
 
VII 
 
 THE CLEANSING OF THE LAND 
 
 Chapter V. 
 
THE CLEANSING OF THE LAND 
 
 In the preceding sections the prophet 
 has dealt with the leaders of the community. 
 He removed at once the guilty fears of the 
 one and the political aspirations of the 
 other, by portraying Joshua and Zerubba- 
 bel as the two sons of oil that stand by the 
 Lord of the whole earth. Political aspira- 
 tions, however, were not by any means 
 the only weakness which he had to expose. 
 As he betook himself, time after time, to 
 the grove of myrtles, he was painfully 
 conscious of being confronted by another. 
 Throughout the entire community he could 
 feel the benumbing influence of the mercen- 
 ary spirit of the times. Probably a growing 
 reluctance on the part of some to pay the 
 temple dues had brought the matter to a 
 crisis : and Zechariah had the mortification 
 of learning that not a few who dwelt in 
 
 los 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 their own " cieled houses " (Hag. i. 4) were 
 among the first to perpetrate the fraud. 
 Here, indeed, was a recrudescence of the 
 age-long evil depicted by Zephaniah, when 
 through absorbing attention to secular 
 business (i. 11) the people were sinking 
 into religious indifference, or becoming 
 "settled upon their lees" (ver. 12) — a 
 moral apathy which was sure to degenerate 
 into practical infidelity or the unbelief 
 which says, " The Lord will not do good, 
 neither will He do evil." But what availed 
 the higher ideals impressed upon the 
 leaders, if the people themselves were in 
 danger of sinking into a moral apathy like 
 this ? What if the people of Jehovah had 
 become so engrossed in secular pursuits 
 that they were gradually losing all 
 interest in, and love for, the sanctuary and 
 faith of their fathers ? Would the higher 
 aspirations of the leaders absolve or save 
 them ? No, the spirituality of the ideal 
 must be reflected in civic justice and com- 
 mercial integrity, else the doom pro- 
 nounced by Amos (chap, viii.) would go 
 
 106 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 forth as a swift curse, and alight upon the 
 ungodly nation after all. This is the new 
 aspect of the subject which appeals to 
 Zechariah in this passage ; and in the double- 
 vision recorded in these paragraphs, we 
 have the spirit-taught message with which 
 he was commissioned to go to the people. 
 
 I. A Flying Roll. 
 
 " Then, again, I lifted up mine eyes, 
 and saw, and behold a flying roll (LXX 
 * sickle '). And he said unto me, What 
 seest thou ? And I answered, I see a 
 flying roll ; the length thereof is twenty 
 cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits. 
 Then said he unto me. This is the curse that 
 goeth forth over the face of the whole 
 land (R.V.) ; for every one that stealeth 
 shall be purged out as many as they are 
 (cf. vii. 3), and every one that sweareth shall 
 be purged out as many as they are. I have 
 (perfect) caused it to go forth, saith the 
 Lord of hosts, and it shall enter into the 
 house of the thief, and into the house of 
 
 107 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 him that sweareth falsely by My name : 
 and it shall abide in the midst of his 
 house, and shall consume it with the 
 timber thereof, and the stones thereof " 
 (vers. 1-4). 
 
 As compared with the personal note in 
 this section, some may prefer to deal with 
 evil in the abstract. Drunkenness, vice, 
 oppression, fraud, or any other social evil 
 ought to be condemned in the most wither- 
 ing terms of invective ; but who would 
 care to approach and pillory the trans- 
 gressor himself, and say " Thou art the 
 man " ? Why, the individual offender 
 may have been the merest toy in the grip 
 of circumstances. Heredity, environment, 
 commercial competition, and what not, 
 may all have entered as determining and 
 therefore extenuating factors : and when 
 these and similar facts have been duly 
 weighed and discounted, the sin, it is true, 
 may still be deserving of public scorn, but 
 the individual delinquent, as the case may 
 be, ought to be pitied rather than blamed. 
 Hebrew prophecy, as might have been 
 
 108 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 expected, had no such timidity or false 
 delicacy. The sin of theft or of perjury 
 might be reprehensible enough, and call 
 forth the censure of all true patriots and 
 preachers, but they never failed to begin 
 with the person of the wrong-doer, and to 
 pronounce God's righteous judgment on 
 the guilty. Notwithstanding every ex- 
 tenuating circumstance, man is " man and 
 master of his fate," and ought to be judged 
 and treated accordingly. Hence if any 
 one went forth, like Achan, and appropri- 
 ated part of the spoils which had been 
 placed under a divine taboo, it was not 
 enough that the captain of the army should 
 denounce the sacrilege that had wrought 
 such folly in Israel : he must institute also 
 a searching inquiry for the detection and 
 punishment of the criminal, that both 
 he and his ill-gotten gains might be 
 expelled from the camp. In a similar 
 manner, when Zechariah would stigmatise 
 the deceit that tampered with the temple 
 dues, or characterise the judgment that 
 was sure to tread upon its heels, he could 
 
 109 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 only liken it to a flying roll or a swiftly 
 moving curse, which would overtake both 
 thieves and perjurers, and overwhelm them 
 in a common doom. They might cheat 
 and defraud the sanctuary if they dared, 
 but the retribution pronounced upon all 
 such duplicity would assuredly come home 
 to roost. It would come and lodge in the 
 house of each culpable transgressor, and, 
 like dry-rot fastening upon the timber, 
 it would lay the whole fabric in ruins. 
 
 The entire house ! i,e, timber and stone 
 alike, or as one might say, mit Haut und 
 Haaren (Wellhausen) ; for the destruction 
 of the tent or house was an old form of 
 punishment, signifying the expulsion of 
 the entire family from the camp or village. 
 Nothing would escape the blighting in- 
 fluence of the curse. Like a flying eagle 
 it was ready to swoop upon the prey, and 
 the whole household of the perjured 
 person would become its carrion. Dr. 
 Dods has finely illustrated this aspect of 
 the subject by the story of Glaucus in 
 Herodotus. Having received a deposit of 
 
 no 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 money in trust, he wished to appropriate 
 it for his own use ; and came to the oracle 
 at Delphi to enquire if he might take an 
 oath that he had never received it. The 
 following was the answer : — 
 
 " Best for the present it were, O Glaucus, to do as 
 
 thou wishest, 
 Swearing an oath to prevail, and so to make prize 
 
 of the money, 
 Swear then — death is the lot even of those who 
 
 never swear falsely. 
 Yet hath the Oath- God a Son, nameless, footless and 
 
 handless : 
 Mighty in strength He approaches to vengeance, and 
 
 whelms in destruction 
 All who belong to the race, or the house of the 
 
 man who is perjured." 
 
 And yet in the light of Israel's spiritual 
 ideal what is the ultimate design of all 
 such punishment ? Not surely the mere 
 destruction of the guilty, as if the satisfying 
 of divine justice were the only incentive 
 suggested by the flying roll. The end in 
 view is something far more worthy of a 
 divine moral government. It is the mould- 
 ing and purifying of the whole community 
 
 III 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 that it might be rendered fit for the perfect 
 exercise of its calling. If Achan perished 
 in the valley of Achor because of his trespass 
 in the devoted thing, Israel whom he had 
 troubled in the presence of her enemies 
 was exonerated from the baleful influence 
 of the ban. And if Zechariah, in turn, is 
 assured that the same method is to be 
 adopted in his age, he knows that the exter- 
 mination of the thieves and false swearers 
 is designed to bring the chosen people 
 one step nearer to the greatness of their 
 calling — disciplined into purity and in- 
 spired for a more perfect service. This 
 surely was an ideal that was worth the 
 discipline of obedience : and if any one 
 was so mercenary in spirit, or unspiritual 
 in outlook, as to refuse to acquiesce in the 
 refining process, little wonder if, for the 
 sake of that diviner vision, the earthly 
 soul should be removed out of the way. 
 The prohibition of the accursed thing 
 was designed for Israel's good ; but if dis- 
 obedience to the higher teaching had 
 changed the blessing into a ban, then he 
 
 112 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 who coveted the spoils of war and hid 
 them within his tent, had simply to be 
 expelled. That the sin, however, no less 
 than the sinner was duly anathematised in 
 Israel is obvious from the section that 
 follows : — 
 
 2. A Deported Ephah. 
 
 " Then the angel that talked with me 
 appeared, and said unto me. Lift up now 
 thine eyes, and see the bushel which there 
 comes into view (so Wellhausen). And 
 I said. What is it ? And he said, This is 
 their transgression (LXX) in the whole 
 land : and behold a circlet of lead was 
 lifted up, and a woman was sitting in the 
 ephah. And he said, This is Wickedness : 
 and he cast her down into the midst of the 
 ephah, and he cast the weight of lead upon 
 the mouth thereof. Then lifted I up mine 
 eyes, and saw, and behold there came forth 
 two women, and the wind was in their 
 wings : now they had wings like the wings 
 of a stork : and they lifted up the ephah 
 
 H 113 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 between the earth and the heaven. Then 
 said I . . . Whither do these bear the 
 ephah ? And he said unto me, To build 
 her an house in the land of Shinar : and 
 when it is prepared, she shall be set there 
 in her own place " (vers. 6-11). 
 
 A deported ephah ! truly a most significant 
 symbol, whether we think of its form, its 
 contents, or its destination. The measure, 
 in itself, was eloquent with meaning as to 
 the kind of evil that was threatening to 
 secularise the people. Did they possess 
 an ephah for the setting forth of wheat 
 immediately after the passing of the 
 Sabbath ? So had Jehovah, Israel's God, 
 for setting forth the character and value of 
 their actions. And if they were tempted 
 to make the ephah small and the shekel 
 great, and to deal falsely with the balances 
 of deceit (cf. Amos viii. 5) let them never 
 forget that the Great Husbandman was fully 
 aware of their duplicity, and was even now 
 weighing and measuring it, and placing it 
 to their account. It was not unlike the 
 imagery of the bow. What though the 
 
 114 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 wicked had bent their bow, and made ready 
 the arrow upon the string, that they might 
 shoot privily at the upright in heart (Ps. 
 xi. 2) ? There was Another who had bent 
 His bow long before them. God is a 
 righteous judge, yea, a God that hath 
 indignation every day. If a man turn not, 
 He will whet His sword ; He hath bent His 
 bow and made it ready (Ps. vii. 12). And 
 what will happen when all this divine 
 preparation blazes into action .? Ah, let 
 those who are prepared to grow rich by 
 violence and robbery — by dishonest trading, 
 false weights and worthless goods — tremble 
 at the thought that He whose punitive 
 energy is about to burst forth, has accurately 
 weighed all their practices and motives in 
 His ephah. 
 
 For the contents of this divine symbol 
 are even more arresting than its form. It, 
 is filled (symbolically) with the accumulated 
 mass of the nation's sin. " This is their 
 transgression in the whole land." It is the 
 sum of all their theft and perjury, fraud 
 and impiety, which would defy, desecrate 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 and destroy both tables of the law. Is It 
 represented as a woman — " full-grown, 
 seductive, plotting, prolific " (Dods) ; and 
 therefore ready to sweep out and infect 
 and poison the whole land ? All the more 
 need that it should be thrust back into the 
 midst of the ephah, and that the heavy 
 weight of lead, which had been raised for 
 a moment, should again be pressed firmly 
 upon its mouth. This was wickedness — 
 restless, defiant, insidious — a moral miasma 
 capable of poisoning the entire national 
 life ; and therefore fit only to be expelled 
 from the country, lifted up between heaven 
 and earth, and deported into another land. 
 This raised the question of its destination. 
 On outstretched wings, as if they were the 
 wings of a stork (at the time of its migra- 
 tion), two celestial genii soared aloft on the 
 breeze, and bore the sin-bushel between 
 them. And when the prophet inquired, 
 " Whither do they bear the ephah ? " he 
 was informed that, like the scapegoat led 
 away into the wilderness,and carrying Israel's 
 sin to the desert-demon Azazel (Lev.xvi. lo), 
 
 ii6 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 so the deported ephah would find a home 
 in the marshlands of the Euphrates where 
 the boom of the bittern and the multiplied 
 cry of the raven would bid it welcome. 
 Away in that land of primeval impiety 
 (Gen. xi. 4) and dishonoured commerce 
 (Ezek. xvii. 4) the peculiarly heinous sins 
 of arrogance, injustice and fraud would 
 find a congenial home, and would no longer 
 defile or plague the heritage of Jehovah. 
 In fine, like another King Arthur, the 
 broad-winged genii had successfully accom- 
 plished their task. Both by flying roll and 
 deported ephah, they had 
 
 " Cleared the dark places and let in the law, 
 And broke the bandit's holds, and cleansed the land." 
 
 And they had done so, chiefly, in the 
 light of Israel's ideal. This is the final 
 norm or test of all prophetic teaching. 
 Commerce, no less than politics, and social 
 reform, no less than worship, must be lifted 
 out of the arena of self-interest altogether, 
 and brought within the sweep of Israel's 
 spiritual destiny. Prince or peasant, lay- 
 
 117 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 man or priest, merchant or builder, shepherd 
 or metal-worker, must all live and work, 
 
 **As ever in the great Task-master's eye," 
 
 else the Kingdom of God, as a kingdom of 
 righteousness and peace, will never be seen 
 in the earth. Is this not the teaching of all 
 the generations ? " I, standing at the 
 brink of the grave, cannot keep silent," 
 writes Tolstoy, in the Fortnightly Review 
 for March 1909; and the picture he has 
 drawn of the ever-increasing wretchedness 
 of the world is simply appalling. " The 
 majority of working people, deprived of 
 land, and therefore the possibility of enjoy- 
 ing the products of their labour, hate the 
 landowners and capitalists who enslave 
 them. The landowners and capitalists, 
 aware of the attitude of the working classes 
 toward them, fear and hate them, and by 
 the aid of force, organised by government, 
 keep them enslaved. And steadily and 
 increasingly the position of the workers 
 grows worse, their dependence on the rich 
 increases ; and equally steadily and unceas- 
 
 118 
 
The Cleansing of the Land 
 
 ingly the wealth of the rich and their power 
 over the workers increase, together with 
 their fear and hatred." It is a dark pic- 
 ture ; and what, according to this modern 
 Zechariah, is the one remedy for this 
 state of wretchedness ? Loyalty to the 
 ideal, " The means of escape . . . lies in 
 the inhabitants of the Christian world 
 adopting the highest understanding of life 
 . . . which is the Christian teaching in its 
 real meaning." " The Christian teaching 
 in its full and true meaning is that the 
 essential thing in human life, and the 
 highest law that can guide it, is love.'''* 
 " And acknowledging the law of love to be 
 supreme, and its application in life to be 
 exempt from any exceptions, it cannot but 
 reject all violence, and consequently the 
 world's whole organisation which is founded 
 on violence." 
 
 Zechariah in the ancient world, and now 
 one like Tolstoy in the modern, has no other 
 message save this. He can only put the 
 trumpet to his lips, and summon the whole 
 Christian world to the glory of forgotten 
 
 119 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 ideals. The land or the Church, society 
 or the individual life, can be cleansed in 
 no other way. Each man must be loyal 
 to the supremacy of Christian love, and 
 walk in the paths of righteousness. Either 
 this or an ignominy too awful to contem- 
 plate. He who will not help to deport the 
 sin-ephah must face the flying roll 1 
 
 120 
 
VIII 
 THE JUSTIFICATION OF PROVIDENCE 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 
THE JUSTIFICATION OF 
 PROVIDENCE 
 
 We now come to the last of the present 
 series of visions, and instinctively hark 
 back to the first. Logically, it may be, 
 the prophet had no other way of finishing 
 his subject : he must complete the cycle 
 of his thinking by reviewing and recasting 
 the whole. Hence the symbolism of chap. 
 i. 7-17 is repeated in chap. vi. 1-8, depict- 
 ing four teams of parti-coloured steeds 
 going forth in all directions to vindicate 
 the ways of God in the discipline of history. 
 Educationally, too, the spiritual training 
 of Israel demanded a similar recapitulation. 
 No doubt the previous visions were admir- 
 ably adapted to encourage the hopes and 
 fire the zeal of the leaders ; but who can 
 be surprised if the prophetic teaching, on 
 the part of the people, had only been 
 
 123 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 responded to with considerable reserva- 
 tions ? Few of them, it may be surmised, 
 were endowed with the prophet's spiritual 
 insight. Few of them had meditated, as 
 he had done, in the seclusion of the myrtle 
 grove. Consequently the sordidness of 
 their present was not touched, as it might 
 have been, with the glory of their coming 
 destiny. They were strangers, in large 
 measure, to the stimulus of that undecaying 
 hope. In truth, the glory of that future 
 was very apt to be dimmed by the hard, 
 prosaic facts of the present. The prophet 
 had doubtless sketched in glowing colours 
 the future expansion of the city, the in- 
 stallation of Joshua, the honouring of 
 Zerubbabel, and the cleansing of the whole 
 land ; but where was there any sign of 
 the promised " shaking of the nations," 
 which was to be the historical starting- 
 point for all these blessings ? Where 
 was there any indication that the age- 
 long promise of divine help and deliverance 
 was about to be fulfilled ? Leaving the 
 argument ecclesiastical on one side, what 
 
 124 
 
The Justification of Providence 
 
 was the explanation or justification for 
 allowing things to remain as they were ? 
 And Zecharlah, in answer, could only re- 
 capitulate and re-emphasise the truths 
 already enunciated : or say, like another seer— 
 
 **What in me is dark, 
 Illumine ; what is low, raise and support ; 
 That to the height of this great argument 
 I may assert eternal Providence, 
 And justify the ways of God to men." 
 
 I. The Vision. 
 
 Meditating in the Kedron valley, the 
 prophet lifted up his eyes, and beheld 
 four war - chariots (Kriegszvagen, Orelli) 
 coming forth from between the two moun- 
 tains — Mount Zion on the one side, and 
 the Mount of Olives on the other — and 
 the two mountains were as mountains oi 
 brass. They rose above him as frowning 
 and unapproachable precipices ; and as 
 the valley between is represented elsewhere 
 as a theatre of divine judgment (chap, 
 xiv. 4, Joel iii. 12), the inaccessible gorge 
 
 I2S 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 from whicli the four chariots rushed forth 
 seemed to the prophet's gaze to be a fitting 
 symbol of the divine seat of government, 
 and a fitting point of departure for the 
 disciplinary providence of the Lord. In 
 the first chariot were red. horses — represent- 
 ing blood and carnage, according to the 
 usual significance of that colour (Rev. vi. 4) ; 
 in the second, hlack horses — a no less ex- 
 pressive symbol of famine and mourning ; 
 in the third, white horses — denoting, as in 
 Rev. vi. 2, joy and victory ; while in the 
 fourth chariot were grizzled or piebald 
 horses — suggesting, it may be, the more 
 normal type of divine providence, that it 
 is neither all light nor all dark, but a 
 mixture and measure of both. Beholding 
 these four teams rushing forth from the 
 rocky defile, the prophet turned to the in- 
 terpreting angel, and said, " What are 
 these, lord " ? And the angel answered 
 and said, These are divine emissaries sent 
 forth towards (so Wellhausen) the four winds 
 of heaven, in order to execute Jehovah's 
 commands. For having approached, as the 
 
 126 
 
The Justification of Providence 
 
 mounted scouts of the Lord, and given in 
 their report to the man among the myrtle- 
 trees (chap. i. li), they are now seen hasting 
 away in the early morning to punish and 
 subdue the nations, as the agents of His 
 judicial wrath. 
 
 They went forth in all directions. The 
 black horses went into the north country, 
 and were immediately followed by the 
 white ; for if Israel had been twice smitten 
 in that far-off land — first by Sennacherib 
 and Sargon in the fall of Samaria, and then 
 by Nebuchadnezzar in the siege and de- 
 struction of Jerusalem — not once, but 
 twice, would the martial might of Jehovah 
 smite that ruthless power beyond the river, 
 until the white steeds of his celestial army 
 would return with the joyous trophies of 
 His victory. Or did the Jewish community 
 look further back to the birthtime of their 
 nation, and recall the bitter oppression of 
 their fathers in the valley of the Nile ? The 
 spotted or speckled horses went forth in that 
 direction to enforce the divine will among 
 the swarthy inhabitants of the south. 
 
 127 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 While, to complete the cycle of divine super- 
 vision and government, the red horses (so 
 the Syriac and Aquila in ver. 7) rushed forth 
 full of energy and eagerness to seek a field 
 of action for themselves, and were honoured 
 by receiving a roving commission — to go to 
 and fro through the earth, and strike a blow 
 for righteousness wherever the forces of 
 evil or the purposes of Jehovah should 
 require. From no quarter of the globe, 
 indeed, was Israel to fear the approach of 
 any possible invader. For even now the 
 Lord of Hosts had seized all the strategical 
 points by means of His celestial warriors, 
 and no power on earth would be able to 
 break through their serried ranks, and 
 despoil or harass His people. In a word, 
 the long-promised " shaking of the nations " 
 was no figment of the imagination after all. 
 The black horses were a sufficient guarantee 
 that the humbling of the nations would 
 assuredly be effected : while the white team 
 afforded an equally significant pledge that 
 the succeeding era of victory and peace 
 would be signalised by manifold blessing for 
 
 128 
 
The Justification of Providence 
 
 all. Hence the vision closes with the strik- 
 ing announcement in ver. 8 that the various 
 teams, having accomplished their allotted 
 tasks, the spirit of the Lord's jealousy was at 
 last appeased in the north country, and the 
 character of His eternal Providence justified. 
 
 2. A Pledge of its Fulfilment. 
 
 The last thing the prophet saw before 
 he left the grove of myrtles was the dis- 
 appearing forms of the black and white 
 horses on their mission to the far north ; 
 and now the fi st thing that appeals to him 
 when he returns to the city and temple is 
 the sight of certain deputies from their 
 Babylonian brethren, who have arrived 
 with princely gifts for the temple in their 
 hands (vers. 9-15). To the spiritually 
 illumined insight of the prophet the white 
 steeds of the celestial army were already 
 beginning to return. For in the visit of 
 these deputies there was something more 
 than a sequel or appendix to the entire 
 scxies of visions ; there was also a distinct 
 I 129 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 pledge that the teaching contained in the 
 
 preceding paragraph was in process of being 
 
 reahsed. Even to the duller comprehension 
 
 of the people, a visit from their Babylonian 
 
 brethren was an event that could easily be 
 
 grasped and appreciated; an event, therefore, 
 
 that might easily be utilised for their moral 
 
 and spiritual advancement, if only Zechariah 
 
 their prophet and teacher knew how. 
 
 That he was not left to his own limited 
 
 resources is evident from the opening 
 
 formula of ver. 9, " ^he word of the Lord 
 
 came unto me,''^ saying, "As to the taking 
 
 of gifts from those of the captivity, even 
 
 from Heldai, from Tobijah, from Jedaiah 
 
 and from Josiah the son of Zephaniah (so 
 
 Kittel), who have come from Babylon ; 
 
 take indeed silver and gold, and make a 
 
 crown (singular, as in Job xxxi. 36), and set 
 
 it upon the head of Joshua, the son of 
 
 Jehozadak, the high priest." The crowning 
 
 of Zerubbabel, as a type of the Messianic 
 
 fulfilment, would have done equally well 
 
 (cf. iv. 14) ; but there were various reasons, 
 
 not difficult to specify, why Joshua the 
 
 130 
 
The Justification of Providence 
 
 high priest should be selected instead. For 
 one thing, a scion of the house of David, 
 like Zerubbabel, might have overlooked the 
 typical significance of the act, and been led 
 to cherish ambitions that could scarcely be 
 realised v^ithin the limits of the Jewish 
 colony. In the words of Pusey, it would 
 have been confusing in the highest degree — 
 " a seeming restoration of the kingdom, 
 when it was not to be restored ; an en- 
 couragement of the temporal hopes, which 
 were the bane of Israel." For a similar 
 reason, it might have provoked unnecessary 
 complications with Persia. Recognition of 
 a Jewish governor, with the standing of a 
 Persian satrap, was one thing ; to allow 
 him to assume the dignity and wear the 
 insignia of royalty was another and totally 
 different matter. Indeed, to one like 
 Zechariah, no such ambiguous action was 
 possible. The type of the coming Branch 
 could easily be found in a different office 
 and representative. It could be found in 
 the person of Joshua the high priest. No 
 doubt it was something new and unheard 
 
 131 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 of in Israel to see the high priest with a 
 royal crown upon his head ; but so far 
 from flattering Joshua with this instructive 
 piece of symbolism, the proclamation which 
 was immediately added (ver. 12) was a 
 sufficient reminder of the essentially typical 
 character of the act. 
 
 " Speak unto them (all those who were 
 present at the symbolical coronation — so 
 Wellhausen), saying, Thus saith the Lord 
 of hosts, Behold the man whose name is 
 the Branch ; for He shall shoot up out of 
 His place — springing up out of obscurity 
 into wide-spreading luxuriance (cf. iii. 8) ; 
 and He shall build the temple of the Lord ; 
 and He shall wear the insignia {Ehrenzierde^ 
 Orelli) and sit and rule upon his throne; 
 and He shall be a priest upon his throne — 
 not less than a ruler — and the counsel of 
 peace shall be between them both." Clearly 
 in this depiction of the coming Branch we 
 are carried a great deal further than in 
 chap. iii. 8. Not only is He to grow and 
 flourish like the goodly cedar, until His 
 benign shadow fills the land ; but, as God's 
 
 132 
 
The Justification of Providence 
 
 vicegerent on earth, He will do, what no 
 Zerubbabel or Joshua can do, build the 
 ideal, world-wide temple of Jehovah, of 
 which Zerubbabel's, or even Solomon's 
 temple, was only the instructive type. 
 Nay, more, in so building and extending 
 the spiritual kingdom of Jehovah, He will 
 exercise the dominion and wear the highest 
 honours of royalty ; He will be a priest for 
 ever after the order of Melchizedek (Ps. ex. 4). 
 He will be both King and Priest — a King 
 whose interests are entirely taken up with 
 the erection of a spiritual temple, and yet 
 a Priest whose sacerdotal functions will be 
 equally consecrated to the well-being of 
 Jehovah's throne and people. In a word, 
 He will be a spiritual king, or a royal priest, 
 whose sole object and continual endeavour 
 will be to secure an era of abiding and 
 universal peace. 
 
 Who could read so sublime a delineation 
 of Israel's future and conclude that the 
 coronation of Joshua began and ended with 
 himself ? It was a ceremonial transaction 
 that pomted far beyond its more immediate 
 
 133 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 application. It was at once a memorial and 
 a pledge — a memorial of the truth that 
 Jehovah, the God of Israel, had indeed 
 returned to His people, and a pledge of 
 the ultimate victory and supremacy of 
 Jehovah's cause. It was therefore to be 
 read in the light of Israel's spiritual calling, 
 and accepted as a vindication of her unde- 
 caying hope. The crown itself, no less than 
 the coronation, ought to be interpreted 
 and preserved from the same idealistic 
 standpoint. Let it be laid up in the temple 
 as a memorial for Heldai, and for Tobijah, 
 and for Jedaiah, and for Josiah the son of 
 Zephaniah (reading Heldai for Helem, and 
 Josiah for Hen, according to the Syriac 
 and ver. lo) — a memorial of the gifts and 
 sacrifices already brought and dedicated to 
 the service of Jehovah ; but a pledge also of 
 the far more costly presents that would yet be 
 brought and presented by all nations in the 
 glory of the Messianic fulfilment. "They 
 that are afar off shall come and build in the 
 temple of the Lord, and ye shall know that 
 the Lord of hosts hath sent me unto you." 
 
 134 
 
The Justification of Providence 
 
 And yet, finally, what is the meaning of 
 the solemn ethical condition, which this 
 preacher of righteousness has placed at the 
 close of the present chapter — " This shall 
 come to pass, if ye will diligently obey the 
 voice of the Lord your God" ? Does it mean 
 that the advent of the Messianic age and the 
 ultimate ingathering of the nations, are 
 made dependent on the loyalty and obedience 
 of Israel ? Does it suggest that the white 
 steeds of Jehovah's army will never again 
 be seen in the grove of myrtles, unless Israel, 
 according to the flesh, be there to bid 
 them welcome ? No, the vindication of 
 eternal providence is not always easy in 
 any circumstances ; but to postulate the 
 ultimate thwarting of Jehovah's plan, 
 because of the disloyalty of any particular 
 nation, would render any such vindication 
 impossible. The ethical condition is added, 
 not for the sake of the Messianic fulfilment, 
 but for Israel's sake, that she might have 
 a part, a large and worthy part, in the 
 final coronation. Her disloyalty would not 
 thwart the divine plan. The Messianic 
 
 135 
 
The Man among the Myrtles 
 
 age would assuredly be ushered in, and so, 
 too, would the final ingathering of the 
 nations ; but a disobedient Israel would not 
 be there to see it, the Lord of the whole 
 earth would be crowned without her. The 
 eternal providence of Jehovah would not 
 be thwarted. If it were not wrought out 
 in Israel's loyalty and devotion, it would 
 be wrought out in Israel's rejection. And 
 yet this need not be. The whole object of 
 Zechariah's visions has been to render all 
 such failure on the part of Israel a practical 
 impossibility. Let the chosen nation but 
 turn to the Lord, and realise the greatness 
 of her spiritual destiny, and her part in 
 the final triumph of Jehovah's cause would 
 be fully assured. The white steeds of the 
 celestial army would again be seen in the 
 Kedron valley. They would arrive and give 
 in their report to the Lord of the whole 
 earth. And when that report was trumpeted 
 forth from between the two mountains of 
 brass, all the world would know that God's 
 eternal providence had been justified. 
 
 136 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The Value of Exposition 
 
 A STRONG reaction in the direction of re- 
 vived Bible study is " one of the great 
 desiderata of our times." So writes one of 
 the ablest of our present-day teachers, and 
 all the signs seem to suggest that he is right. 
 The hour has arrived for a frank presenta- 
 tion of the positive elements of divine 
 revelation, and for a candid recognition of 
 the fact that the time of reconstruction 
 has come. This reaction ought to be 
 cordially welcomed and encouraged. In 
 addition to all our reading about the Bible 
 — its origin, its history and its inspiration — 
 we shall do well to read a good deal more 
 in it, and show through all the avenues of 
 modern education what are its true con- 
 tents and character. It may easily happen 
 that for the Church of the future there is 
 
 137 
 
Appendix 
 
 a great sp^ritual uplift along this path. God 
 will honour His word if we do. Only let 
 the practical aspects of the subject be duly 
 emphasised, and the motto of each student 
 be— 
 
 ** O my soul, thou hungry bird. 
 Taste the honey of the Word." 
 
 This, however, must imply a first-hand 
 acquaintance with the text. The exposi- 
 tion desiderated has to be true to all the 
 criteria of Bible interpretation as known 
 to modern scholarship. Hebrew syntax, 
 Septuagint Greek, New Testament syno- 
 nyms and Hebraic figures of speech are 
 all needed for a due appreciation of the 
 Sacred Writings ; and there will be no 
 powerful reaction in the direction of fresh 
 Bible study until these practical aspects of 
 grammar and Hebrew style are intelligently 
 grasped and utilised. It is from this point 
 of view that the foregoing studies in 
 Zechariah's visions have been written. At 
 every step they have sought to keep in touch 
 with the text. They have been based, first 
 and chief, on the wealth of information 
 
 138 
 
Appendix 
 
 contained in the Oxford Hebrew Lexicon^ 
 and on the suggestive and luminous foot- 
 notes in Kittel's Hebrew Bible, If, in 
 addition to these, the author were asked to 
 tabulate the six best helps, among easily- 
 accessible literature, for the preparation 
 of similar lectures on " The Man among 
 the Myrtles," he might specify the follow- 
 ing :■— 
 
 Zechariah and his Prophecies^ by C. H. 
 H. Wright. This was the Bampton Lec- 
 ture for 1878, and is easily one of the best 
 books on the subject. 
 
 Die Kleinen Profheten^ by J. Wellhausen. 
 The short exegetical notes are most illumi- 
 nating, and always provocative of thought. 
 Cf. also the article, " Zechariah," by the 
 same author in the Ency.Brit, and Ency, BibL 
 
 Die Zwolf Kleinen Propheten^ by C. von 
 Orelli, in the Kurzgefasster Kommentar, 
 of which a translation is published by 
 T. & T. Clark. 
 
 The Minor Prophets, by E. B. Pusey — ^a 
 book that will yield many a gem to the 
 expositor. 
 
 139 
 
Appendix 
 
 Haggai, Zechariahy and Malachi, by- 
 Marcus Dods, in the Series of Hand-Books 
 for Bible Classes. No preacher can read 
 this little book without being deeply in- 
 debted to it. It is a model of condensation. 
 
 The Prophets of Israel, hy C. H. Cornill, 
 in the " Religion of Science Library." For 
 any one who wishes to read a brilliant and 
 fascinating sketch of Hebrew prophecy as 
 a whole, no more helpful or reasonable 
 purchase could be suggested than this little 
 volume. It may be had through Kegan 
 Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., London, 
 price IS. 6d. 
 
 The first two studies, " The Prophet Zechariah " and 
 **The Man among the Myrtles," appeared in substance 
 in The Homiletic Review ; and thanks are due to the 
 Publishers for kind permission to reproduce them in this 
 little volume. 
 
 140 
 
INDEX 
 
 A, SCRIPTURE PASSAGES 
 
 Gen. xl. 4 . . 
 
 ,, xvii. 1-2 
 Ex. xxix. 5-6 . 
 Lev. xvi. 4 . . 
 
 ,, xvi. 10 . 
 Deut. xxxii. 10 
 Josh. V. 14 , . 
 
 1 Kings xxii. 1 1 
 
 2 Kings vi. 17 
 
 „ xxv. 7 
 2 Chron. ix. 29 
 Neh. vi. 16 
 
 „ xii. 4 . 
 Isa. iv. 2 . 
 
 „ xi. I . 
 
 ,, xii. 6 . 
 
 ,, xviii. 4 
 
 ,, xix. 24 
 
 „ xii. 19 
 
 ,, liii. 2 . 
 
 „ liv. I . 
 
 ,, Ivi. 7 . 
 Jer. i. 12, 14 
 
 ,, xxiii. 5 
 
 PAGE 
 
 117 
 
 10 
 
 75 
 
 75 
 
 116 
 
 51 
 26 
 
 39 
 29 
 
 38 
 3 
 
 53 
 4 
 79 
 79 
 62 
 
 30 
 47 
 19 
 80 
 62 
 88 
 9 
 79 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Jer. xxxiii. 15 ... . 79 
 
 Ezek. xvii. 4 . 
 
 
 . . 117 
 
 ,, xxii, 26 . 
 
 
 • • 71 
 
 Dan. viii. 7-20 . 
 
 
 . 40, 42 
 
 Amos viii. . . 
 
 
 . 107, 114 
 
 Joel iii. 12 . . 
 
 
 . . 125 
 
 Zeph. i. 12 
 
 
 
 . 106 
 
 ,, iii. 14 . 
 
 
 
 . 62 
 
 Hag. i. 4 . . 
 
 
 
 . 106 
 
 ., ii. 3 • . 
 
 
 
 93 
 
 ,, ii. 20 
 
 
 
 . 4, 17 
 
 Zech. xiv. 4. . 
 
 
 
 125 
 
 Ps. vii. 12 . . , 
 
 
 
 "5 
 
 ,, xi. 2 . . 
 
 
 
 "S 
 
 ,, ex. 4 . . 
 
 
 
 133 
 
 ,, cxxv. 2 . . 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 ,, cxxvii. 2 . , 
 
 
 
 21 
 
 ,, cxxxii. 17 . 
 
 
 
 39 
 
 ,, cxxxvii. 8-9 
 
 
 
 45 
 
 Job i. 10 . . . 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 ,, xxxi. 36 . . 
 
 
 
 130 
 
 I Pet. ii. 9 . . , 
 
 
 
 100 
 
 Rev. i. 13 . , . 
 
 
 
 100 
 
 B. SUBJECTS 
 
 Blessing, Fulness of, 97. 
 
 " Branch," The, 78, 94, 131. 
 
 Commercialism, 106, 1 15, 
 
 118. 
 Covenant love, 12. 
 Discipline, 41, 63. 
 
 Duty, The present, 55. 
 Election, 88, 100. 
 Ideal, Israel's, 57, 87, 1 17. 
 Ideal, Political, 67, 85, 90. 
 Inspiration, 23, 86. 
 Liberality, 129. 
 
 141 
 
Index 
 
 Mediation, 99. 
 Meditation, 19. 
 Patriotism, 6, 18, 61, 89. 
 Perjury, in. 
 Priesthood, 74, 133. 
 Protection, Divine, 28, 
 128. 
 
 73, 
 
 Repentance, 9. 
 
 Silence, Divine, 30. 
 
 Sin, 7, 37, 71. 
 
 Small things, Day of, 93. 
 
 Visions, 20. 
 
 War, Horror of, 37. 
 
 Youth, 4, 54. 
 
 C. QUOTATIONS 
 
 Clark, Raymund M., 28. 
 Faber, F. W., 46. 
 Herodotus, IIO. 
 Herrick, 12. 
 Horace, 9, 39. 
 Jowett, 24. 
 
 Kliefoth, 70. 
 Milton, 118, 12$. 
 Pusey, II, 131. 
 Savonarola, 20. 
 Tennyson, 117. 
 Tolstoy, 118. 
 
THE 
 
 SHORT COURSE SERIES 
 
 EDITED BY 
 Rev. JOHN ADAMS, B.D. 
 
 This Series is designed to encourage a healthy reaction in 
 the direction of expository preaching. Leading expositors in 
 all the Churches have kindly promised assistance; and the 
 Series, to be issued at the uniform price of 60 cents net per 
 volume, will furnish a sufficiently large variety for individual 
 selection. 
 
 NOW READY 
 
 A CRY FOR JUSTICE: A Study in Amos. 
 
 By Prof. J. E. McFadyen, D.D., U. F. C. College, 
 Glasgow. 
 
 THE BEATITUDES. 
 
 By Rev. Robert H. Fisher, D.D., Edinburgh. 
 
 THE LENTEN PSALMS. 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 THE PSALM OF PSALMS. 
 
 By Prof. James Stalker, D.D., Aberdeen. 
 
 THE SONG AND THE SOU.. 
 
 By Prof. W. G. Jordan, D.D., Kingston, Ontario. 
 
 THE HIGHER POWERS OF THE SOUL. 
 
 By Rev. George M'Hardy, D.D., Kirkcaldy, 
 
 JEHOVAH-JESUS. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw, D.D., Kilmarnock. 
 
 THE SEVENFOLD I AM. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Marjoribanks, B.D., Edinburgh. 
 
 THE MAN AMONG THE MYRTLES: A Study in 
 Zechariah's Visions. 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
The Following Other Volumes are in 
 Preparation, 
 
 THE STORY OF JOSEPH. 
 
 By Rev. Adam C. Welch, B.D., Th.D., Glasgow. 
 
 SCENES FROM THE LffE OF DAVID. 
 
 By Prof. H. R. Mackintosh, D.D., Edinburgh. 
 
 A MIRROR OF THE SOUL : Studies in the Psalter. 
 
 By Rev. Canon Vaughan, M.A., Winchester. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 By Rev. Charles F. Aked, D.D., San Francisco. 
 
 THE PROPHECY OF MICAH. 
 
 By Principal A. J. Tait, M.A., Ridley Hall, Cambridge. 
 
 THE EXPOSITORY VALUE OF THE REVISED 
 VERSION. 
 
 By Prof. G. Milligan, D.D., University of Glasgow. 
 
 A PREFACE TO THE GOSPEL: An Exposition of 
 Isaiah 55. 
 
 By Rev. A Smellie, D.D., Carluke. 
 
 THE SON OF MAN. 
 
 By Prof. Andrew C. Zenos, D.D., Chicago. 
 
 READINGS IN THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE. 
 
 By Prof. W. Emery Barnes, D.D., Cambridge. 
 
 THE PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON. 
 
 By Principal A. E. Garvie, D.D., New College, London, 
 
BELIEF AND LIFE: Expositions in the Fourth 
 Gospel. 
 
 By Principal W. B. Selbie, D.D., Mansfield College, 
 Oxford. 
 
 THE EMOTIONS OF JESUS. 
 
 By Prof. Robert Law, D.D., Toronto. 
 
 THE OVERTURES OF JESUS. 
 
 By Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D., Brookljoi. 
 
 IN THE UPPER ROOM. 
 
 By Rev. D. J. Burrill, D.D., LL.D., New York. 
 
 THE SEVEN WORDS FROM THE CROSS. 
 
 By Rev. A. B. Macaulay, M.A., Stirling. 
 
 THE PRAYERS OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 By Prof. W. G. Griffith Thomas, D.D., Toronto. 
 
 THE METAPHORS OF ST. PAUL. 
 
 By Rev. A. Boyd Scott, B.D., Glasgow. 
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 By Rev. F. Stuart-Gardiner, B.D., Kingstown, 
 Ireland. 
 
 THE REDEMPTION OF GOD. 
 
 By Prof. T. B. Kilpatrick, D.D., Toronto. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE APOCALYPSE. 
 
 By Prof. W. T. Davison, D.D., Richmond. 
 
 EXPOSITORY STUDIES. 
 
 By Prof. Arthur S. Peake, D.D., Manchester. 
 
 SOCIAL STUDIES. 
 
 By Rev. Canon Simpson, M.A., D.D., St. Paulas, 
 London. 
 
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 93