Commentary on Zechariah

Commentary on Zechariah 13

COMMENTARY ON ZECHARIAH 13 n that day every place will be open in the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem for transformation and aspersion (Zec 13.1). On that day—a term already frequently commented on—this is what will happen in addition to the other events: every place will be opened in the house of David in Jerusalem, a transformation occurring with a view to a godly aspersion. Now, the place opened to the house of David is the divinely inspired Scripture, in particular the Scripture before the coming of the savior; and the place opened to Jerusalem is the Jerusalem on high, mother of the righteous and “heavenly city of the living God.” The place in the text, however , is to be understood not as what circumscribes and limits a body, but the one distinguished with a view to propositions and arguments. On the opening of the places determined this way there will follow a transformation from the letter to the spirit, from the shadow to the reality, and—to put it in a nutshell— from the temporal to the eternal, and from the visible and earthly to the lofty and invisible.1 What follows on the transformation is nothing other than the sprinkling that confers perfect purification. This aspersion is performed with the savior’s divine blood, about which the chief of the apostles, Peter, writes in making this prediction to those to whom he sends the letter, “Grace to you and peace in abundance for obedience and sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ.” The divine blood is sprinkled on the conscience of the worshipers of the living God, “ransoming” the participants “from the futile ways inherited from their ancestors,” as is stat307 1. Gal 4.26; Heb 12.22. Didymus has not detected the LXX’s reading a similar form “place” for Heb. “fountain,” which Theodoret will arrive at by consulting the alternative versions; and so he proceeds to develop the faulty notion by recourse to Aristotelian categories of place. ed in the same letter from the wise spiritual guide, “You know that you have been ransomed not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish.” Those sprinkled in this way to obtain a pure heart appeal constantly and incessantly to the one capable of conferring the purification, and thus say as one, “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” It is to this purity, “religion pure and undefiled,” that the sacred verse urges us in its exhortation, “Wash, make yourselves clean.”2 If we also are affected by a longing for this aforementioned sprinkling, let us show interest in living as citizens of the spiritual Jerusalem with David as our king, so that the place in the sense explained may be completely opened to us for an aspersion after moving from shadowy realities to the perception of wisdom that is original and real.3 On that day, says the Lord, I shall eliminate the names of the idols from the land, and there will be no further remembrance of them; I shall remove the false prophets and the unclean spirit from the land (v.2). When the aforementioned transformation takes place with a view to the aspersion and the truth, then the fictions of the heretics (referred to figuratively as idols) will be eliminated from the land; people will no longer be deceived, idolatry in a figurative sense will be shown up by the manifestation of truth, and all the false prophecy will be removed as well as the unclean spirit responsible for it that was found in the human being before faith in Christ. It is also possible that there is reference in elimination from the earth to material statues and the demons associated with them. Proof that the images are suggested by this term can be gained from the psalmist’s statement, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold; they have feet but do not walk,” and so on. And the fact that the one term is used for the actual shrines and the demons lurking within them the prophet Isaiah confirms in a passage beginning thus: “Bewail, carvings in 308 DIDYMUS THE BLIND 2. 1 Pt 1.2; Heb 9.14; 10.22; 1 Pt 1.18–19; Ps 51.7; Jas 1.27; Is 1.16. 3. Didymus makes a rare exhortation of his own, unfortunately based on the...