Zechariah2chapter 2

Post-exilic Jerusalem was small and thin. The walls were down, whole quarters were empty, and Nehemiah would later have to hold a lottery just to move enough families inside the city to make it viable.

So a young man going out with a measuring line to size up the city is a natural act — and he is stopped. Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls, for the multitude of people and cattle in it, and God Himself will be a wall of fire around her and the glory in her midst.

A city without walls in that world was defenseless by definition. Walls were the difference between a city and a village. The promise deliberately trades the stone for the presence.

The chapter then turns and calls to the Jews still in Babylon: "Ho, ho, come forth, and flee from the land of the north." Most of the exile community never came back. Babylon had become home — they had houses, businesses, and by this point grandchildren born there. The return under Cyrus was a minority movement, and the call here is for more to come.

The line "he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye" uses an image of the most protected and most sensitive part of the body.