Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Zechariah · About this commentary
Old Men and Children in the Streets
Zechariah 8:1-8
1 The word of Yahweh of Armies came to me. · WEB
The promised restoration is pictured not in temples or armies but in the two groups a ruined city never has.
The reply to the delegation turns from the past to what God intends, and the first thing said is about intensity: I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath Zechariah 8:2. Wrath is set on the same side as the jealousy rather than against it. What looks like indifference to a small province is not indifference.
Then the return is stated as accomplished: I have returned to Zion, and will dwell in the middle of Jerusalem. And two names are given to what has been a building site — The City of Truth, and for the hill, The Holy Mountain. Neither name describes anything visible at the time.
What comes next is the most concrete promise in the book, and its power is in how ordinary it is.
Old men and old women will again dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, every man with his staff in his hand because of their old age. The streets of the city will be full of boys and girls playing in its streets Zechariah 8:4–5.
Those are precisely the two groups a besieged or newly resettled city does not have. The old die first in famine and the young are taken or never born; a population under pressure is made of working adults. Streets holding both extremes are the sign that the pressure has lifted, and no army, wall, or ceremony is mentioned. The measure of restoration is that the people who cannot defend themselves are out of doors.
The staff is worth noticing. It marks frailty, and the frailty is included in the promise rather than removed from it.
Verse 6 anticipates the obvious objection and answers it with a question: if it is marvelous in the eyes of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my eyes? The difficulty is conceded as a difficulty for them.
And verses 7 and 8 gather the scattered from the east country and from the west country, closing on the covenant formula — they will be my people, and I will be their God — with two words attached that the chapter has already made its theme, in truth and in righteousness.
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