Zechariah10chapter 10

Ask ye of the Lord rain in the time of the latter rain: The command to ask the Lord for rain turns a natural, practical request into a test of allegiance, since the alternative named in the next verse is asking the household idols known as teraphim. Barnes notes that the latter rain fell in spring before harvest and was the difference between a full crop and a poor one, so the choice of whom to ask was not abstract theology but a farmer's daily decision. The diviners who claim to read dreams offer only vanity and lies, and the flock left to such guidance wanders, troubled, because it has no true shepherd to follow.

Mine anger was kindled against the shepherds: The Lord's anger falls on the shepherds, Judah's own failed leaders, and the goats among the flock, the strong ones who fed themselves rather than the sheep, language close to Ezekiel's own indictment of the same class. Keil reads the turn from anger at bad shepherds to the Lord's own visitation of his flock as the chapter's hinge, human leadership judged and replaced by direct divine care. The house of Judah is made as the Lord's own goodly horse in battle, an image of strength given rather than achieved.

Out of him came forth the corner: Four titles come out of Judah in one verse: the corner, the nail, the battle bow, and every ruler together, each an image of strength or stability drawn from building and warfare. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown and the older commentators read corner and nail as messianic, the same cornerstone language of Psalm 118:22 and Isaiah 28:16 and the same peg image Isaiah uses of Eliakim, both later applied to Christ as the one on whom everything else hangs. The battle bow completes the picture with a warrior's weapon, so the verse gathers ruler, foundation, and champion into a single figure without naming him.

Zechariah 10:5-7

tread down their enemies in the mire of the streets: The promised strength turns immediately practical, mighty men treading down enemies in battle because the Lord is with them, and the riders on horses, the era's most feared weapon, left confounded before them. The promise widens at once to both halves of the divided kingdom, the house of Judah strengthened and the house of Joseph, the northern tribes carried off generations earlier, saved and brought back as though never cast off. Henry reads the reunification of Judah and Ephraim as answering the ancient rivalry the divided monarchy had never healed, with Ephraim's own heart rejoicing as through wine once the promise reaches it.