Text

[9]Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

Rejoice greatly, daughter Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Proclaim, daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

See your king comes to you,

Triumphant and victorious is he,

Righteous and saving is this one

Humble and riding on a donkey,

Gentle and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt

On a colt, the foal of a donkey.

[10] He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim

And he shall utterly destroy chariots from Ephraim 

And the war-horse from Jerusalem

and horse from Jerusalem

And the battle bow shall be cut off,

And he shall utterly destroy the bows of war

And he shall command peace to the nations;

And there shall be plenty and peace from the nations;

His dominion shall be from sea to sea,

And he shall rule over the waters 

And from the River to the ends of the earth

Until sea and river exit from earth

Notes on Text

The basic structure here is that verse 9 celebrates the arrival of the king and verse 10 describes the king as ushering in a utopian dominion of peace.  There are a few plausible ways to identify the king within the larger context of the passage. It is possible to read this as following a similar vein to First Zechariah,  in which case the king is either the Persian emperor or his designated proxy ruler, who has established peace within his empire and allowed the reconstruction of the temple.  I don’t think this is a very strong reading, basically because it does not align particularly well with verses 11-17, but it is at least worth mentioning as a possibility.  

Of the more likely options, one is that this passage describes the return of a human monarch in the mold of David, who restores a greater Israel (rather than the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah) and ushers in a utopian era of peace and prosperity.  The other option is that rather than there being a human monarch, the king being described here is God.  This latter interpretation is my preferred interpretation, for a few reasons.  First, reading verse 8, “I will encamp at my house” seems like it is clearly referring to God, and so it seems possible to read the arrival of the king as describing God’s occupation of his house.  The NRSV text describes this king as “triumphant and victorious,” which seems an apt description for the series of triumphs described in verse 1-8 and also for the victories described in the later verse of chapter 9, which we have yet to cover.  The LXX describes him as “righteous and saving,” which lends itself better to understanding the king as God than a human being. The argument in favor of a human being is that obviously it is difficult to imagine God riding a donkey. I don’t think that it makes sense to get too hung up on the human vs. God division that I have been discussing here, since it is also quite possible that the assumption is that although there is a human agent, the actual credit and power belong to God. Certainly in the context of early Christian thought, this last understanding seems to be the case, since Matthew and John both assume this verse refers to Jesus, human being and agent of God.  As we shall see in the next couple of posts, this assumption carries with it some expectations about the kingdom Jesus is supposed to usher in.