Not by Might

Two months after the tools came out again, a second prophet began speaking in Jerusalem: Zechariah, son of Berechiah, son of Iddo. Somebody in one of his visions calls him “that young man.” Haggai got them started; Zechariah kept them going. And Zechariah saw things. His first word was short. “Turn to me, and I will turn to you, says the Lord. Do not be like your fathers. The prophets said to them, ‘Turn away from your evil ways’ — and they would not listen. Where are your fathers now? And do the prophets live for ever? But my words caught up with them in the end.” And the people answered. They did not argue. “Whatever the Lord Almighty decided to do to us, according to our ways and the things we did — that is what he has done.”

Then, in the eleventh month, at night, Zechariah began to see. Eight things, one after another. A messenger stood beside him all night, and he kept asking — my lord, what are these? — and most of the time he was told. First: a man on a red horse in the shadows between the mountains, with red and gray and dappled and white horses behind him. They reported, the way riders do off patrol. “We have gone all over the earth, and look — the whole earth is settled, and quiet.” And the man among the mountains said, “Lord Almighty — how long will you keep your mercy back from Jerusalem and the cities of Judah? It has been seventy years.” The answer came in good words, comforting words, and Zechariah was told to shout them out. “I am deeply jealous for Jerusalem. I was only a little angry with my people, and the nations went far past that. So I am coming back to Jerusalem with pity in me. My house will be built in it, and the measuring line stretched over it again, and my cities will overflow with good things.” The city he stood in had half a house on the hill and rubble in half its streets.

He saw four horns, the nations that had scattered Judah and Israel, and four workmen coming with tools to sharpen against them. Then he saw a man walking along with a measuring line, and asked him where he was going. “To measure Jerusalem. To find out how wide it is and how long.” And a second messenger came running, with something to say before the measuring was done. “Run and speak to that young man. Jerusalem is going to be lived in, and it will overflow — such a crowd of people and cattle inside it. And I myself will be a wall of fire all round her, says the Lord, and I will be the glory inside her.” And a word went out to everyone still in Babylon: come away from the north, because whoever touches you touches the pupil of God’s eye.

Then he was shown Jeshua the great priest — the same Jeshua he saw every day — standing in front of the messenger of the Lord, with the Accuser at his right hand to accuse him. And Jeshua’s clothes were filthy. A priest is meant to be clean. He stood there in them and never said one word in the whole vision. The Lord spoke instead. “The Lord rebuke you, Accuser. The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you. Is this man not a burning stick, pulled out of the fire?” Then, to the ones standing there: “Take those filthy clothes off him. Look, Jeshua — I have taken your wrongdoing off you. Put a long robe on him, and a clean turban on his head.” And they did it, while the messenger of the Lord stood and watched. Then Jeshua was charged: walk in my ways, and you will judge my house and guard my courts. “And the stone I have set in front of you has seven eyes on it. I will search out all the wrong of this land and take it away in one day. And on that day every one of you will call his neighbor over to sit under his vine and under his fig tree.”

Then the messenger came back and woke him, the way you shake somebody awake. “What do you see?” “A lampstand, all of it gold, with a bowl on the top and seven lamps, and seven little pipes running to the lamps. And two olive trees standing over it, one on the right of the bowl and one on the left. My lord — what are they?” “Do you not know what these are?” “No, my lord.” And this was the answer. “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel. Not by great power, and not by strength, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty. Who are you, great mountain standing in front of Zerubbabel?” “Zerubbabel’s own hands laid the foundation of this house, and Zerubbabel’s own hands are going to finish it. Who has thought little of these small days? They will be glad when they see the tin stone in Zerubbabel’s hand.” The tin stone is the little weight a builder hangs on a string to see whether his wall is going up straight. That is what they were told to watch for: one man on a half-built wall in a small poor town, holding a plumb line. Zechariah asked twice more about the olive trees, and the two branches pouring golden oil down two golden pipes; and twice the messenger asked whether he really did not know; and twice he said no. And he was told, “These are the two sons of oil, who stand beside the Lord of the whole earth.” That was all.

There were more that night: a sickle flying over the country, a curse against thieves and men who swear to lies; a woman shut in a basket under a lead lid, whose name was Lawlessness, carried off to Babylon; four chariots coming out between two mountains of bronze. And afterward a word about a crown — make crowns of silver and gold for Jeshua the great priest, and say to him: “Look at the man whose name is Rising. He will build the house of the Lord, and sit and rule, with a priest at his right hand.”

Two years later some men came with a question about fasting. Every year in the fifth month, all through the seventy years, the people had gone without food and mourned, because that was the month the city burned. Now there was a temple going up. Did they still have to? The answer did not come back about the fast. It came back about them. “When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and the seventh, all these seventy years — did you really fast for me? And when you eat and drink, is that not for yourselves?” Then he told them what the older prophets had said, and it had nothing to do with going without meals. “Judge fairly. Deal with your brother in mercy and pity. Do not squeeze the widow, or the child with no father, or the newcomer living among you, or the poor man. And do not sit thinking up harm against your brother in your heart.” “But they turned their backs and made their ears heavy so they should not hear. He called and they would not listen; so they called, and I would not listen.” That was the answer to the question about fasting.

Then the word came again, and this time all of it was promises. I will come back to Zion, God said, and live inside Jerusalem, and it will be called the City of Truth. “Old men and old women will sit in the streets of Jerusalem again, each with a stick in his hand because he has lived so long. And the open squares of the city will be full of boys and girls, playing.” “If that looks impossible to what is left of this people, will it look impossible to me?” “Let your hands be strong. Before this a man’s wages came to nothing, and nobody going out or coming in had any peace. But I will sow peace: the vine will give its fruit, the ground its crop, the sky its dew. Speak the truth to your neighbor, and do not plan harm against him in your heart. And the fasts of the fifth month and the seventh will turn into joy and good feasts. So love truth, and love peace.” And at the end of it, ten men out of every language on earth taking hold of the hem of one Jew’s coat, saying, “We are coming with you, because we have heard that God is with you.”

And one more thing he was told to shout out loud. “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout it out, daughter of Jerusalem! Look — your King is coming to you. He is in the right, and he saves; and he is gentle, and he is riding on a donkey, on the foal of a donkey. He will break the chariots of Ephraim and the war horses of Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken, and there will be peace among the nations, and he will rule from sea to sea.”

All this time the hammers were going on the hill. And one day Tattenai, the governor of the country west of the great River, rode up with his officials, looked at the work, and asked two questions: “Who gave you the order to build this house? And what are the names of the men building it?” They gave their names. Nobody ran. And they told him the whole thing, the bad part too: our fathers made the God of heaven angry, and he handed them to Nebuchadnezzar, who pulled this house down and carried the people off; then Cyrus the king ordered it built again; and it has been building from that day to this, and it is not finished. Tattenai wrote it all down and sent it to Darius, with a fair question of his own: let the king search his treasure house and see whether Cyrus really gave that order. And while he waited, he let them keep building. The eyes of God were on the elders of Judah, and nobody stopped them.

They searched the record rooms in Babylon, and in a fortress in the country of the Medes an old scroll turned up. It said exactly what the elders had said it would. So Darius wrote to his officials west of the River. Keep away from there. Leave the work of that house of God alone. Pay for it out of my own tribute, and give them whatever the priests ask for, day by day — bulls and rams and lambs, wheat, salt, wine, oil. And a hard line at the end: “Any man who changes one word of this order: a beam will be pulled out of his own house, and he will be fastened up on it.” Tattenai read it and did exactly what it said. The men who rode up to ask who gave the orders stayed to pay for the timber.

And they built. The elders built, and the Levites, and Haggai and Zechariah prophesied beside them the whole time; and they built it up and finished it, on the third day of the month Adar, in the sixth year of King Darius. And they kept the dedication of the house of God with gladness: a hundred calves, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and twelve male goats as an offering for sin for all Israel, one for each of the tribes. And the priests were set in their divisions and the Levites in their sections, as it is written in the book of Moses. And on the fourteenth day of the first month they kept the Passover — the priests and the Levites all clean, every last man of them — for everyone who had come out of the exile, and for everybody else in that land who had joined them to go looking for the Lord. And they kept the feast of bread with no yeast seven days, glad the whole time. There was a house on the hill in Jerusalem again, and lamps burning in it, and people singing in it. It had taken them twenty years.