Zechariah 1:2

The LORD hath been sore displeased with your fathers.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

1:1-6 God's almighty power and sovereign dominion, should engage and encourage sinners to repent and turn to Him. It is very desirable to have the Lord of hosts for our friend, and very dreadful to have him for our enemy. Review what is past, and observe the message God sent by his servants, the prophets, to your fathers. Turn ye now from your evil ways, and from your evil doings. Be persuaded to leave your sins, as the only way to prevent approaching ruin. What is become of our fathers, and of the prophets that preached to them? They are all dead and gone. Here they were, in the towns and countries where we live, passing and repassing in the same streets, dwelling in the same houses, trading in the same shops and exchanges, worshipping God in the same places. But where are they? When they died, there was not an end of them; they are in eternity, in the world of spirits, the unchangeable world to which we hasten apace. Where are they? Those of them who lived and died in sin, are in torment. Those who lived and died in Christ, are in heaven; and if we live and die as they did, we shall be with them shortly and eternally. If they minded not their own souls, is that a reason why their posterity should ruin theirs also? The prophets are gone. Christ is a Prophet that lives for ever, but all other prophets have a period put to their office. Oh that this consideration had its due weight; that dying ministers are dealing with dying people about their never-dying souls, and an awful eternity, upon the brink of which both are standing! In another world, both we and our prophets shall live for ever: to prepare for that world ought to be our great care in this. The preachers died, and the hearers died, but the word of God died not; not one jot or title of it fell to the ground; for he is righteous.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Wroth was the Lord against your fathers with wrath - o, that is, a wrath which was indeed such, whose greatness he does not further express, but leaves to their memories to supply. Cyril: "Seest thou how he scares them, and, setting before the young what befell those before them, drives them to amend, threatening them with the like or more grievous ills, unless they would wisely reject their fathers' ways, esteeming the pleasing of God worthy of all thought and care. He speaks of great wrath. For it indicates no slight displeasure that He allowed the Babylonians to waste all Judah and Samaria, burn the holy places and destroy Jerusalem, remove the elect Israel to a piteous slavery in a foreign land, severed from sacrifices, entering the holy court no more nor offering the thank-offering, or tithes, or first-fruits of the law, but precluded by necessity and, fear even from the duty of celebrating his prescribed and dearest festivals. The like we might address to the Jewish people, if we would apply it to the mystery of Christ. For after they had "killed the prophets" and had "crucified the Lord of glory" Himself, they were captured and destroyed; their famed temple was levelled, and Hosea's words were fulfilled in them; "The children of Israel shall abide many days without a king and without a prince, without a sacrifice and without an image, without an ephod and without teraphim" .

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

2. God fulfilled His threats against your fathers; beware, then, lest by disregarding His voice by me, as they did in the case of former prophets, ye suffer like them. The special object Zechariah aims at is that they should awake from their selfish negligence to obey God's command to rebuild His temple (Hag 1:4-8).

sore displeased—Hebrew, "displeased with a displeasure," that is, vehemently, with no common displeasure, exhibited in the destruction of the Jews' city and in their captivity.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

The Lord, the holy, the mighty One, your God, the just Governor of the world, hath been sore displeased; so long provoked, that his displeasure at last enkindled within his breast, and broke out into that flame which hath consumed your land, city, and temple.

With your fathers; all that were progenitors, forefathers to the returned captives, from their entrance into Canaan, but especially since the apostacy in Jeroboam’s time; for many hundred years your predecessors have provoked God by their notorious sins, even to the days of their captivity.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

The Lord hath been sore displeased with your fathers. Who lived before and at the time of the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, and which was manifest by their captivity; all which were occasioned by their sins, with which they provoked the Lord to sore displeasure against them; and this is mentioned as a caution to their children, that they might not follow their example, and incur the like displeasure.

Geneva Study Bible

The LORD hath been {c} sore displeased with your fathers.

(c) He speaks this to make them afraid of God's judgments, so that they should not provoke him as their fathers had done, whom he so grievously punished.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

2. sore displeased] Lit. displeased with displeasure. The addition of the noun serves to give emphasis to the verb. Comp. Luke 22:15. What a commentary on this “sore displeasure” was the scene on which the prophet and his hearers gazed, in its contrast with the past: the House, which had once been “exceeding magnifical, of fame and of glory throughout all countries” (1 Chronicles 22:5), now slowly rising above its foundations, the poor and feeble representative of its former self: the city, which had once been “beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth,” now such as Nehemiah some seventy-five years after saw it, on that memorable night when he “on his mule or ass, accompanied by a few followers on foot, descended into the ravine of Hinnom, and threaded his way in and out amongst the gigantic masses of ruin and rubbish …; the gate, outside of which lay the piles of the sweepings and offscourings of the streets; the masses of fallen masonry, extending as it would seem all along the western and northern side; the blackened gaps left where the gates had been destroyed by fire; till at last by the royal reservoir the accumulations became so impassable, that the animal on which he rode refused to proceed” (Stanley, Jewish Church, Vol. III. p. 125, Nehemiah 2:12-15): the people, once “many as the sand which is by the sea in multitude, eating and drinking and making merry” (1 Kings 4:20), now scattered among the heathen, represented on their native soil only by the poor and subject “remnant,” to whom the prophet addressed himself!

2. The company of horsemen and their Leader;

2–6. The call to Repentance. Zechariah’s first message is one of warning, by the example of their fathers and the earlier prophets. On their fathers, as they well knew, the displeasure of Almighty God had fallen heavily (Zechariah 1:2). Now, for the first time in this new era of their history, God is sending to them, as He did to their fathers of old, His servants the prophets, himself and Haggai, with a call to repentance and a promise of reconciliation, Zechariah 1:3. Let them not be like their fathers, who turned a deaf ear to the remonstrances of the prophets and refused to amend, Zechariah 1:4; lest, being like them in their sin, they should be like them in their punishment also, and should have with them to confess, in the bitter experience of their accomplishment, that God’s unheeded threatenings would surely take effect, Zechariah 1:5-6.

Pulpit Commentary

Verses 2-6. - § 2. The prophet admonishes the people not to follow their forefathers evil example, but to turn to the Lord with all their heart. Verse 2. - Hath been sore displeased; literally, displeased with displeasure, which the versions render, ὠργίσθη ὀργὴν μεγάλην: iratus iracundia (el. ver. 15). Not only events connected with their earlier history proved that God had been incensed with their forefathers, but the ruin of their kingdom, and the late Captivity, and the desolation around them, were evidence of the same sad truth. Zechariah 1:2

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The first word of the Lord was addressed to the prophet Zechariah in the eighth month of the second year of the reign of Darius, and therefore about two months after Haggai's first prophecy and the commencement of the rebuilding of the temple, which that prophecy was intended to promote (compare Zechariah 1:1 with Haggai 1:1 and Haggai 1:15), and a few weeks after Haggai's prophecy of the great glory which the new temple would receive (Haggai 2:1-9). Just as Haggai encouraged the chiefs and the people of Judah to continue vigorously the building that had been commenced by this announcement of salvation, so Zechariah opens his prophetic labours with the admonition to turn with sincerity to the Lord, and with the warning not to bring the same punishment upon themselves by falling back into the sins of the fathers. This exhortation to repentance, although it was communicated to the prophet in the form of a special revelation from God, is actually only the introduction to the prophecies which follow, requiring thorough repentance as the condition of obtaining the desired salvation, and at the same time setting before the impenitent and ungodly still further heavy judgments.

(Note: "The prophet is thus instructed by God, that, before exhibiting to the nation the rich blessings of God for them to look at under the form of symbolical images, he is to declare the duty of His people, or the condition upon which it will be becoming in God to grant them an abundant supply of these good things." - Vitringa, Comm. in Sach. p. 76.)

Zechariah 1:1. Bachōdesh hasshemı̄nı̄ does not mean "on the eighth new moon" (Kimchi, Chr. B. Mich., Koehl.); for chōdesh is never used in chronological notices for the new moon, or the first new moon's day (see at Exodus 19:1). The day of the eighth month is left indefinite, because this was of no importance whatever to the contents of this particular address. The word of the Lord was as follows: Zechariah 1:2. "Jehovah was angry with wrath concerning your fathers. Zechariah 1:3. And thou shalt say to them, Thus saith Jehovah of hosts, Return ye to me, is the saying of Jehovah of hosts, so will I return to you, saith Jehovah of hosts. Zechariah 1:4. Be not like your fathers, to whom the former prophets cried, Thus saith Jehovah of hosts, Turn now from your evil ways, and from your evil actions! But they hearkened not, and paid no attention to me, is the saying of Jehovah." The statement in Zechariah 1:2 contains the ground for the summons to turn, which the prophet is to address to the people, and is therefore placed before ואמרתּ in Zechariah 1:3, by which this summons is introduced. Because the Lord was very angry concerning the fathers, those who are living now are to repent with sincerity of heart. The noun qetseph is added as the object to the verb, to give it greater force. The nation had experienced the severe anger of God at the destruction of the kingdom of Judah, and of Jerusalem and the temple, and also in exile. The statement in Zechariah 1:15, that Jehovah was angry מעט, is not at variance with this; for מעט does not refer to the strength of the anger, but to its duration. ואמרתּ is the perf. with Vav consec., and is used for the imperative, because the summons to repentance follows as a necessary consequence from the fact stated in Zechariah 1:2 (cf. Ewald, 342, b and c). אלהם does not refer to the fathers, which might appear to be grammatically the simplest interpretation, but to the contemporaries of the prophet, addressed in the pronoun your fathers, the existing generation of Judah. שׁוּבוּ אלי does not presuppose that the people had just fallen away from the Lord again, or had lost all their pleasure in the continuance of the work of building the temple, but simply that the return to the Lord was not a perfect one, not a thorough conversion of heart. So had Jehovah also turned to the people again, and had not only put an end to the sufferings of exile, but had also promised His aid to those who had returned (compare אני אתּכם in Haggai 1:13); but the more earnestly and the more thoroughly the people turned to Him, the more faithfully and the more gloriously would He bestow upon them His grace and the promised salvation. This admonition is shown to be extremely important by the threefold "saith the Lord of Zebaoth," and strengthened still further in Zechariah 1:4 by the negative turn not to do like the fathers, who cast the admonitions of the prophets to the winds. The "earlier prophets" are those before the captivity (cf. Zechariah 7:7, Zechariah 7:12). The predicate ראשׁנים points to the fact that there was a gap between Zechariah and his predecessors, namely the period of the exile, so that Daniel and Ezekiel, who lived in exile, are overlooked; the former because his prophecies are not admonitions addressed to the people, the latter because the greater part of his ministry fell in the very commencement of the exile. Moreover, when alluding to the admonitions of the earlier prophets, Zechariah has not only such utterances in his mind as those in which the prophets summoned the people to repentance with the words שׁוּבוּ וגו (e.g., Joel 2:13; Hosea 14:2-3; Isaiah 31:6; Jeremiah 3:12., Zechariah 7:13, etc.), but the admonitions, threatenings, and reproofs of the earlier prophets generally (compare 2 Kings 17:13.). The chethib מעליליכם is to be read מעליליכם, a plural form עלילים from עלילה, and is to be retained, since the preposition min is wanting in the keri; and this reading has probably only arisen from the offence taken at the use of the plural form ‛ălı̄lı̄m, which does not occur elsewhere, in the place of ‛ălı̄lōth, although there are many analogies to such a formation, and feminine forms frequently have plurals in ־ים, either instead of those in ־ות or in addition to them.