Zechariah13chapter 13

Zechariah 13:1

In that day a fountain is opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness, immediately following the mourning of chapter 12's close, so that grief over the pierced one issues directly into cleansing. Clarke and Keil read the fountain as sacrificial and typical language, the washing the Levitical system pictured now finally supplied, with the older bench applying it to the blood of Christ at full strength and the note carrying that reading as theirs. The single verse joins the two chapters into one movement, piercing, mourning, and cleansing in that order.

Zechariah 13:2-3

The Lord promises to cut off the names of the idols from the land so they are no longer remembered, and to remove the prophets and the unclean spirit along with them, purging false worship and false prophecy in the same stroke. The purge reaches into the family itself, if a son should still prophesy, his own father and mother will tell him he speaks lies in the name of the Lord and will thrust him through for it. Gill and Wesley read the extremity of the household's own hand turned against a false prophet as measuring how seriously the restored community will guard the Lord's name, without the notes claiming the law was ever carried out to that letter.

Zechariah 13:4-6

The false prophets of that day are ashamed of their own visions and no longer wear the rough hairy garment that once marked their office, choosing instead to deny the title outright, calling themselves husbandmen taught to keep cattle from their youth. Asked about wounds in his hands, the denying prophet answers that he was wounded in the house of his friends, a line most of the bench reads as the self-inflicted marks pagan prophets cut into their own flesh in ecstatic worship, now embarrassing evidence he must explain away. Henry and Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown also note the verse's language has long been read typologically of Christ wounded by those nearest him, a secondary application named beside the primary sense and not substituted for it.

Zechariah 13:7

Awake, O sword, against my shepherd: The sword is called awake against the Lord's own shepherd, the man that is his fellow, an equality of standing with the Lord himself the older commentators read as reaching toward the shepherd's own deity. Smiting the shepherd scatters the sheep, and the Lord turns his hand even upon the little ones, sparing none from the shock of the shepherd's fall. Matthew 26:31 and Mark 14:27 record the Lord quoting this very verse of himself on the night of his arrest, so the chapter's shepherd is identified by his own citation rather than left to inference.

Zechariah 13:8-9

Two parts of the land are cut off and die while a third is left, the remnant then brought through the fire and refined as silver, tried as gold, a process the commentators read as purification rather than mere reduction. The refined third calls on the Lord's name and is answered, and the covenant formula closes the book's central movement, I will say, It is my people, and they shall say, The Lord is my God. Pusey and Barnes read the formula as the mutual claim of Exodus renewed on the far side of judgment, the remnant's smallness answered by the completeness of the bond it now holds.