Commentary on Zechariah

Commentary on Zechariah 12

COMMENTARY ON ZECHARIAH 12 n oracle of the word of the Lord on Israel. Thus says the Lord, who stretches out heaven, lays the foundation of earth, and forms a spirit of a human being in it: Lo, I am making Jerusalem like a shaken threshold for all the peoples round about and in Judah; there will be a siege against Jerusalem. On that day I shall make Jerusalem a stone trodden on by all the nations; everyone who treads on it will mockingly mock it, and all the nations of the earth will gather against it (Zec 12.1–3). The prophet Zechariah prophesies the fate of Judah and Jerusalem and its inhabitants after the crucifixion of Jesus, receiving his message from the creator of everything, who stretches out heaven, lays the foundation of earth, and forms a spirit of a human being in it. It was remarked above that the divinely inspired prophets are in a state of possession when in receipt of the word in virtue of which they prophesy the future. Not to repeat the same information many times, we should be content with what was already said.1 God stretches out heaven and lays the foundation of earth, bringing from non-existence to existence these primordial created realities which comprise in themselves the other beings, as the great revealer says, “Heaven and earth and their whole universe were complete.” In beginning Genesis, at any rate, he clearly said, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth,”2 that is, 1. Predictably, Didymus does not resonate with those modern commentators who would see the beginning of a new piece of composition at this point, signaled by the very feature of the text Didymus is implicitly highlighting, the occurrence of “oracle,” lh`mma, as occurred also at 9.1. The term encourages him again to speak of the prophets as qeolhptouvmenoi (as he had done at the beginning of the work without that encouragement), to which he adds kavtocoi, both terms implying possession. He makes no attempt to develop any (admittedly obscure ) historical situation that Zechariah may have in mind. 2. Gn (here Kosmopoii?a) 2.1; 1.1. Doutreleau (SC 85.892–93) points out that Didymus will employ in comment on these verses a series of Stoic terms. Jerome will (not surprisingly) reduce this detailed excursus. 286 he stretched out heaven and laid the foundation of earth. There has been frequent explanation already of the manner of stretching out heaven and laying the foundations of earth when commentary was given on such texts where God says, “I alone stretched out heaven,” and the psalmist on the creator, “He set the earth on its firm foundations, it will never be overturned .”3 He who unfolded heaven by stretching it out and set earth on its foundations also created the human being, Forming in it its spirit, that is, combining and uniting the soul with the body, to the extent possible, so as to produce one complete living being composed of soul and body. Now, the spirit of the human being is formed not simply but in it: it is of a nature that is not bodily but rational. Beforehand, however, the human being’s body was formed, as was said by Moses, “God formed the human being from dust of the earth.” The spirited and courageous Job was aware of this manner of creation when emboldened to say to the creator, “Remember that you formed me from mud, and you turn me back to the earth.” Yet he also says of the origins of what is composed of soul and body, “Your hands made me and formed me,”4 the body being “formed,” the soul “made”; the latter being called “spirit,” he formed it in the human being to partake of the faculty of sense as a result of its composition, so that the whole person emerges as ensouled, sensate, alive. In addition to this way of seeing it, there is another way of putting it. The human being’s spirit formed in it is what the apostle describes in writing: “What human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is in it?” The spirit is something different from the rational soul, called “the human being hidden in the heart.” Its formation is not like that of the body, however: it is what the holy psalmist prays to occur in his own heart: “Create a pure heart in me, O God.” It...