The prophet of the book — 'Jehovah remembers' (zakhar + the divine name), a programmatic name for a book of restoration. Haggai's exact contemporary in 520 BC, he is 'son of Berechiah, son of Iddo' — Iddo heading a priestly family that returned from exile (Nehemiah 12:4, 16), so Zechariah is, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, a priest as well as a prophet. Ezra 5:1 and 6:14 name him and Haggai as the two prophets whose preaching got the second temple built. Where Haggai is plain and administrative, Zechariah is the first true APOCALYPTIC seer — eight night visions decoded by an interpreting angel — and his book's second half feeds the Passion narratives with more images than any prophet but Isaiah (the king on a donkey, the thirty pieces of silver, the pierced one, the struck shepherd). ⚠ At Matthew 23:35 Jesus names 'Zechariah son of Berechiah' as murdered 'between the temple and the altar' — but the temple-court martyr of 2 Chronicles 24 was Zechariah son of JEHOIADA; whether the Gospel conflates the two, preserves a lost tradition of this prophet's martyrdom, or reflects a copyist's slip (Luke 11:51 gives only 'Zechariah') is an ancient crux. ⚠ 'Zechariah' is one of the commonest names in the Bible (kings, priests, gatekeepers, John the Baptist's father in Luke 1), which is why this entry answers only to the full 'Zechariah son of Berechiah.'