Biblion Bible Commentary
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Holy to Yahweh
Zechariah 14:12-21
12 This will be the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the peoples who have fought against Jerusalem: their flesh will consume away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will consume away in their sockets, and their tongue will consume away in their mouth. · WEB
The book ends by writing the high priest's inscription on harness bells and making every cooking pot in the city as holy as the altar.
The plague described in verse 12 is unlike any other judgment in the book: their flesh will consume away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will consume away in their sockets, and their tongue will consume away in their mouth. Decay arriving before death, in the three organs used for seeing, speaking, and standing.
And the second stroke is internal: a great panic from Yahweh will be among them; and they will each seize the hand of his neighbor, and his hand will rise up against the hand of his neighbor. An army destroying itself by reaching for support.
Then the survivors, and the turn is abrupt. Everyone who is left of all the nations that came against Jerusalem will go up from year to year to worship the King, Yahweh of Armies Zechariah 14:16. The people who besieged the city become its annual pilgrims.
The feast named is the feast of booths, and the choice is pointed. Of the three annual feasts this was the one kept in temporary shelters, commemorating a wilderness the nations never crossed. They are given a memory that is not theirs to keep, and the sanction for refusing is agricultural: on them there will be no rain. Egypt is singled out — a country watered by a river rather than by rainfall, and therefore the hardest case for that particular threat.
And then the last two verses, which are where the whole book has been going.
In that day there will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, HOLY TO YAHWEH. Those exact words were engraved on a gold plate worn on the high priest's forehead, the single most restricted object in the sanctuary Exodus 28:36. They are now stamped on harness fittings. And the crowning of a priest earlier in the book had reached for the same turban Zechariah 3:5.
The temple vessels follow: ordinary pots in Yahweh's house become like the bowls before the altar, and then every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah will be holy — cookware in private kitchens included, and pilgrims may boil sacrifices in them.
The distinction being abolished is between sacred and common, not between clean and unclean. Nothing here becomes less holy; the boundary moves out until it includes the kitchen.
And the final clause keeps one line drawn: there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of Yahweh of Armies. The word is the name of the displaced nation, and the same root does duty for a trader — so what is excluded is either the outsider who never belonged or the man doing business on the premises. Either way the house is not for sale.
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