Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Zechariah · About this commentary
Thirty Pieces of Silver
Zechariah 11:1-17
1 Open your doors, Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars. · WEB
The prophet is told to act out the part of a shepherd, resigns the job, and is paid a sum that values him at the price of a slave.
The chapter opens on falling timber — cedars, cypress, the oaks of Bashan — and then reveals that the trees were never the subject: a voice of the wailing of the shepherds! For their glory is destroyed. What has come down is a leadership.
Then the prophet is given a role to perform rather than a vision to watch: feed the flock of slaughter Zechariah 11:4. The flock's name is its destination, and the trade around it is described without euphemism — their buyers slaughter them and go unpunished, and the sellers bless God for their profits: blessed be Yahweh, for I am rich.
He takes two staffs and names them Favor and Union — the two things that had held the arrangement together, God's goodwill and the people's cohesion.
And then he quits. I will not feed you. That which dies, let it die. The withdrawal is complete, and the first staff is cut apart to break the covenant with all the peoples. Only one group notices what has happened: the poor of the flock that listened to me knew that it was Yahweh's word. The people at the bottom read the situation correctly.
The payment scene is brief and contemptuous on both sides. If you think it best, give me my wages; and if not, keep them — an offer that invites them to price him, with the option of paying nothing. So they weighed for my wages thirty pieces of silver.
Thirty shekels was the compensation set in the law for a slave killed by an animal. They did not refuse to pay; they settled, at the going rate for property.
God's response is bitter irony: throw it to the potter — the handsome price that I was valued at by them! The money is thrown to the potter in Yahweh's house, so the transaction ends inside the sanctuary. And the second staff is cut, breaking the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.
The chapter then closes on the opposite kind of shepherd, commissioned deliberately: one who will not visit those who are cut off, will not seek the scattered, heal the broken, or feed the sound — but he will eat the meat of the fat sheep. Every duty listed as a negative, and the appetite as the single positive.
His sentence strikes the two organs a shepherd works with: the sword will strike his arm and his right eye.
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