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Zechariach 13:1-6

NRSV

[1] On that day a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity. 

[2] On that day, says the LORD of hosts, I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, so that they shall be remembered no more; and also I will remove from the land the prophets and the unclean spirit. [3] And if any prophets appear again, their father and mothers who bore them will say to them, “You shall not live, for you speak lies in the name of the LORD”; and their father and their mothers who bore them shall pierce them through when they prophesy. [4] On that day the prophets will be ashamed, every one, of their visions when they prophesy; they will not put on the hairy mantle in order to deceive; [5] but each of them will say, “I am no prophet, I am a tiller of the soil; for the land has been my possession since my youth.” [6] And if anyone asks them, “What are these wounds on your chest?” the answer will be “The wounds I received in the house of my friends.”

LXX

[1] On this day every place shall be opened in the house of David. [2] And it shall be on this day, says the Lord, I shall utterly destroy the names of the idols from the earth, and no longer shall there be a memory of them.  And the false prophets and the unclean spirit I shall remove from the earth.  [3] And it shall be that if a person would yet prophecy, his father and his mother who begat him would also say to him “You shall not live, because you speak lies in the name of the Lord.” And they shall bind his feet together in his prophesying, his father and his mother who begat him. [4] And it shall be on this day that the prophets will be ashamed each from his vision in his prophesying, and shall put on a hair cloak since they lied. [5] And he shall say “I am not a prophet, since I am a person working the earth, because a person begat me from my youth. [6] And I shall say to him, “What are these wounds in the middle of your hands?” and he shall say “What I was wounded in the house of my beloved.”

Notes on Text

There are some intriguing differences between the Hebrew and Greek texts here.  In the NRSV, vv. 1 reads almost like it is the closing verse of the previous chapter, whereas its more succinct counterpart in the LXX reads much more like it is intended to preface vv. 2.  The other critical distinction between the two text forms is the distinction between the NRSV’s “prophets” and the LXX’s “false prophets,” with the former phrasing creating a much more ambiguous passage.  Particularly, the NRSV version almost seems to expand on the idea of “the one who they pierced” from Zechariah 12:10, and it is possible to read this passage as saying something along the lines of “the idols will be destroyed, thus prophets (who mostly were arguing against idolatry) are unnecessary and no one will believe them, thus they will be wounded by their family and will claim to be farmers.” The other plausible interpretation is that the prophets are implicitly false prophets, and the passage can be read similarly to the LXX version, in which the prophets are false prophets and are seemingly justly punished, with some minor deviations (their feet are bound together rather than they are pierced, they put on a hair cloak to indicate their shame).  
It is also worth talking in a bit more detail about the phrase “the wounds between your hands” in vv. 6.  I have translated this literally here, and my copy of the NRSV has an annotation which notes that the actual Hebrew reads “wounds between your hands” rather than “wounds on your chest” (presumably this is a Hebrew idiom).  The Greek words here for wounds, αἱ πληγαί hai plēgai, is interestingly enough the root for the English word “plague” but means generally a blow or wound, with a primary implication that it is the result of being beaten.  When I initially read this phrase, my first inclination was “whoa this could quite easily be read as referring to Jesus’ wounded hands,” which is perhaps an anachronistic reading that overlooks how obvious the idiom might have seemed to early Christian audiences, but as we shall see when we consider the second half of this chapter, it is also possible to read the Hebrew version of this passage as promising the affliction of God’s rightful prophets as part of the events which will bring about the utopian restoration of God’s Kingdom.

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