On my first several readings of Zechariah, this chapter struck me as something to be glossed over, I think in part because it is not explicitly cited in the New Testament, and where later chapters are more likely to seem like an inseparable part of a unified whole, there is some sense to which Zechariah 10 just seems to be the poetic reiteration of well-trod themes. This interpretation eventually gave way to my current opinion, which is that there are a couple of important aspects of this chapter that should be very relevant to us as we read the New Testament.  

One of those aspects is the bad shepherd imagery which is introduced here. I could be convinced that this imagery was a later insertion to make Zechariah 10 integrate more harmoniously with later chapters, but as we shall see, this is a recurring motif in Zechariah that impacts how we should interpret its citation in the New Testament.  

The other aspect that is quite relevant is the theme of God’s favor returning and God’s people returning from exile, and particularly the ambiguity which surrounds whether they have actually done anything to deserve this, or their elites continue to actively perform misdeeds.  In contemporary Christian morality, and especially in the Christian morality of conservative Evangelicals, there is a tendency to view morality in the sense of “A godly person does x, y, & z but an ungodly person does 1, 2, & 3,” with salvation attached to his formula of behavior.  And this is despite the fact that particularly for the Protestant versions of Christianity, grace and thus undeserved redemption is a core theological concept.  

Here, I think that we see the influence of broader culture on religion.  Even the forms of conservative Protestant Christianity that most strenuously object to science are influenced by the legacy of Enlightenment rationality. We tend to assume that the world operates by regular rules.  Our governments, for example, have the rule of law, and behave predictably (as opposed to the arbitrary exercise of power in an ancient empire). The natural world is broadly understood to operate with regular rules (gravity, for example) that can be consistently understood, and although there are some Christian sects that explicitly deny the validity of science, there is a strong argument to be made that these sects explicitly claim that Christian theology is as consistent and rule-bound as science.¹ Our basic experience of the natural world is also substantially different than the experiences of ancient authors.  We have mostly mastered famine, modern medicine has defanged plague for the most part, we have elaborately engineered solutions to (or at least reliable advance warning systems for) most natural disasters.  

As a whole, our modern lives are much more rational, regularized, and predictable than those of the authors of Biblical texts, and this is reflected in our understanding of salvation. But God in the Hebrew Bible is often depicted as one arbitrary force among others, with fidelity owed because of God’s supreme power.  The relationship between God and the chosen people is sometimes described in transactional terms: in exchange for their fidelity, God bestows upon them his bounty and mercy.  But a major theme of the Hebrew Bible is the repeated failures of the chosen people to actually live up to their end of the bargain, and God’s repeated redemption of them despite these failings.  

Here in Zechariah 10, God is possibly returning his flock to favor despite their continued transgressions, and God boasts “I will make them strong in the LORD, / And they shall walk in his name, say the LORD” as if the fidelity of the chosen people is something that God turns on and off at will.  This is a very different moral schema than that professes by much of Christianity today, and we would be well served to keep this difference in mind as we read Scripture. 

Footnotes

[1]  This argument is made by Karen Armstrong in The Battle for God, which is an excellent book that I highly recommend. <back to top>