Zechariah opens not with a vision but with the oldest word in the prophets: shuv, “return.” “Return to me — declares Jehovah of hosts — and I will return to you” (v3) is the whole prophetic corpus compressed into six words, and it turns entirely on grace: the repentance is answered, not earned; God moves first and last (the verse is bracketed three times by “says Jehovah of hosts,” as if the promise needed sealing). The verb shuv then runs through the chapter like a thread — the fathers who would not turn (v4), the fathers who finally turned back and confessed (v6), and God himself who has returned to Jerusalem (v16). ASV “Return unto me … and I will return unto you, saith Jehovah of hosts”; NWT the same; KJV “Turn ye unto me … and I will turn unto you.”

He calls the great prophets before him “the FORMER prophets” (v4). Zechariah is self-consciously LATE — he looks back on Isaiah, Jeremiah and the rest as a closed roll whose warnings all came true (“your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live forever? — but my words … did they not overtake your fathers?”, vv5–6). The men die; the word outlives them and catches up with the generation that ignored it. It is a prophet aware he is near the end of prophecy itself.

The dating (v1) sets him beside Haggai to the month. “The eighth month, the second year of Darius” is late October 520 BC — between Haggai’s second oracle (the seventh month) and his third (the ninth). The two prophets are working the same small crowd on the same building site in the same season; Ezra 5:1 names them together as the pair whose preaching got the temple rebuilt (see Haggai 1:1). ⚠ Zechariah’s pedigree carries a famous puzzle. He is “son of Berechiah, son of Iddo” — Iddo being a priest who returned from exile (Nehemiah 12:4, 16), so Zechariah is, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, a priest as well as a prophet; Ezra shortens it to “son of Iddo” (grandson). But Jesus, at Matthew 23:35, names “Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” — and the Zechariah killed in the temple court (2 Chronicles 24:20–21) was son of Jehoiada, not Berechiah. Whether the Gospel conflates the two Zechariahs, preserves a lost tradition that the prophet too was martyred, or reflects a copyist’s slip (Luke 11:51 gives only “Zechariah”) is an old crux. The library records it and does not decide.

With verse 7 the prophet becomes a SEER, and a new kind of book begins. The eight night visions of Zechariah 1–6 open the age of APOCALYPTIC: symbolic images that must be decoded, an interpreting angel who does the decoding, a heavenly court glimpsed behind the earthly one. This is the seedbed from which Daniel’s visions and the whole book of Revelation grow — Revelation’s coloured horses, its “how long?” from the souls under the altar, its angel who “signifies” the meaning, are all already here in embryo. The date (24 Shevat, the eleventh month) is about two months after the temple work resumed — the building has restarted, and now heaven shows the seer what it means.

“A man riding on a red horse, standing among the myrtle trees in the ravine” (v8): the hadassim, the myrtles, are lowly fragrant evergreen shrubs (the branches waved at the Feast of Booths, Nehemiah 8:15; Esther’s Hebrew name Hadassah is “myrtle”), set here in a metzulah — a shadowed hollow, a deep glen. It is a picture of Israel: small, low, in the shade — and yet God’s cavalry is standing right there among them. ⚠ The horses’ colours — red, saruq (“sorrel,” a reddish-brown or perhaps dappled), and white — are NOT explained by the text, and the ancient versions already guessed at saruq (KJV “speckled,” DRB from the Vulgate “varii” = mottled, ASV “sorrel”). They are not the four colours of Zechariah’s OWN later vision of the chariots (ch 6), nor the four of Revelation; the translation keeps them as given and does not assign them meanings the prophet withholds.

“The angel who talked with me” (ha-mal’ach ha-dover bi, v9) is new to prophecy. Isaiah and Jeremiah heard God directly; Zechariah needs a heavenly guide to explain what he sees — and that mediating interpreter, the angel who walks the seer through the vision, becomes a fixture of every later apocalypse, down to the angel of Revelation 1:1 who “made it known.” The seer’s helpless “What are these, my lord?” is the posture of the whole genre.

The horsemen are a divine PATROL — and their report is the problem. “These are the ones Jehovah has sent to patrol the earth” (v10), and they come back to say, “all the earth sits still and at rest” (yoshevet ve-shoqatet, v11). In another book that would be good news; here it is ominous. The Persian empire under Darius has just crushed its rebellions and settled into a heavy peace — the world is calm, the nations comfortable, and Zion is still a heap of rubble with no vindication in sight. The vision opens on the ache of a quiet world in which nothing is being put right. ASV “all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest”; NWT “the whole earth is sitting quiet and undisturbed.”

The angel asks the question the whole Bible keeps asking: ‘ad matai, “HOW LONG?” — “Jehovah of hosts, how long will you withhold compassion from Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, against which you have been indignant these SEVENTY YEARS?” (v12). The seventy years are Jeremiah’s (Jeremiah 25:11; 29:10) — the measured span of exile — and by 520 BC that clock has nearly run out. The cry “how long?” is the exact cry the martyrs will raise under the altar in Revelation 6:10; here it is an angel who raises it, interceding for a city that cannot see its own rescue coming. NWT “how long will you yourself not show mercy to Jerusalem”; ASV “how long wilt thou not have mercy on Jerusalem.”

And the answer, before its content, is a TONE: “good words, comforting words” (devarim tovim, devarim nichumim, v13). The root is nacham, “to comfort, console” — the root behind the name Noah and the name Nahum (“Comfort”) — and it will ring twice more before the chapter ends (v17). God’s reply to “how long?” is not a date but a comfort.

“I am jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with a great jealousy” (qin’ah gedolah, v14). ⚠ This is the same word — qin’ah, jealous zeal — that Zephaniah aimed AT Jerusalem (“the whole earth consumed in the fire of his jealousy”); here it is turned the other way, jealousy FOR her, the fierce protectiveness of a husband for a wife wronged. (Not to be confused with its near-homograph qinah, a funeral lament — a different word.) God’s zeal, so often the engine of judgment, is here the engine of rescue.

And the flip side of that zeal is anger at “the nations at ease” (ha-goyim ha-sha’ananim, v15) — the comfortable empires of v11’s calm — “for I was only a LITTLE angry, but they helped toward evil.” It is the theology of Isaiah 10: Assyria (and then Babylon) were the rod of God’s measured anger, but they swung it far past their commission, taking a pleasure in Judah’s ruin that was never authorized. The punisher who enjoys the punishment becomes, in turn, the one to be judged. ASV “the nations that are at ease … I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction.”

The vision lands on three “agains.” “I have RETURNED to Jerusalem with compassion” (shavti — the shuv of v3 now spoken by God himself); “my house will be built in it” (the temple Haggai restarted); and “a measuring line will be stretched out over Jerusalem” (qav, v16). A measuring line can mark a city for DESTRUCTION (2 Kings 21:13; Lamentations 2:8, God stretching the line to tear Zion down); here it is reversed — the surveyor’s cord of REBUILDING, and the very next vision (the man with the measuring line) will pick it up. Then v17’s promise: “my cities will again OVERFLOW with prosperity; Jehovah will again COMFORT (nicham) Zion, and again CHOOSE Jerusalem” — comfort, and election, renewed. NIV “my towns will again overflow with prosperity”; ASV “my cities through prosperity shall yet be spread abroad; and Jehovah shall yet comfort Zion, and shall yet choose Jerusalem.”

⚠ Here the Hebrew and the English chapters part company. The Masoretic Text ends chapter 1 at verse 17, on this word of comfort. The next vision — the FOUR HORNS and the four craftsmen who terrify them — is Hebrew 2:1–4, which English Bibles renumber as 1:18–21 (so their chapter 1 runs to twenty-one verses and their chapter 2 is four verses shorter than the Hebrew’s). We follow the Masoretic count: chapter 1 has seventeen verses and closes on “again choose Jerusalem.” The four horns open the next chapter.