Saint Zechariah

Zechariah is one of the twelve minor prophets, and his name means “the Lord remembers.” He began to prophesy around 520 before Christ — the text is precise: “in the eighth month of the second year of Darius.” Those were the years of the return from the Babylonian exile. The Jews had come back to Jerusalem and found a city in ruins and the Temple destroyed; rebuilding it seemed a pointless undertaking, and the work had stopped. Zechariah, together with Haggai, spent his life persuading them to start again. He came from a priestly family, like Ezekiel, and his book is full of difficult visions: the four horses, the golden lampstand, the flying scroll, the woman inside the ephah. They are images that have fed art and literature for centuries, and that turn up almost unchanged in Revelation. There are also two passages Christians have always read with the Gospels in mind. One is the king who enters Jerusalem “humble, and riding on a donkey”; the other is the thirty shekels of silver, the price of a slave, thrown into the temple treasury. Scholars distinguish at least two parts in the book, by different hands and from different times. He is venerated as a saint and remembered on September 6. He shouldn’t be confused with the other Zechariah, the father of the Baptist. If your name is Zachary, today is your name day.