Zechariah 11:9

11:4-14 Christ came into this world for judgment to the Jewish church and nation, which were wretchedly corrupt and degenerate. Those have their minds wofully blinded, who do ill, and justify themselves in it; but God will not hold those guiltless who hold themselves so. How can we go to God to beg a blessing on unlawful methods of getting wealth, or to return thanks for success in them? There was a general decay of religion among them, and they regarded it not. The Good Shepherd would feed his flock, but his attention would chiefly be directed to the poor. As an emblem, the prophet seems to have taken two staves; Beauty, denoted the privileges of the Jewish nation, in their national covenant; the other he called Bands, denoting the harmony which hitherto united them as the flock of God. But they chose to cleave to false teachers. The carnal mind and the friendship of the world are enmity to God; and God hates all the workers of iniquity: it is easy to foresee what this will end in. The prophet demanded wages, or a reward, and received thirty pieces of silver. By Divine direction he cast it to the potter, as in disdain for the smallness of the sum. This shadowed forth the bargain of Judas to betray Christ, and the final method of applying it. Nothing ruins a people so certainly, as weakening the brotherhood among them. This follows the dissolving of the covenant between God and them: when sin abounds, love waxes cold, and civil contests follow.

Then said I, I will not feed you,.... That is, any longer; either personally, or by his apostles; he fed them himself, during his public ministry; and afterwards by his apostles, whom he ordered to preach the Gospel to the Jews first; but that being contradicted, blasphemed, and despised by them, they were ordered to turn away from them, and go to the Gentiles: this shows that not the shepherds only, but the body of the people, abhorred Christ and his Gospel: and therefore it was taken away from them: that that dieth, let it die; literally, by the pestilence, that going by the name of death in Scripture; and spiritually, they that are dead in sin, let them continue so; let them die through famine of the word they have despised; let them die in their sins, and die the second death, they justly deserve: and that that is to be cut off, let it be cut off; literally, by the sword; spiritually, the meaning is, that whereas some were in righteous judgment appointed to ruin, vessels of wrath fitted to destruction; let them be left to themselves, to a judicial blindness, and hardness of heart, and be cut off as unfruitful branches, and be no more in a church state here, and hereafter cast into everlasting burnings: and let the rest eat everyone the flesh of another; through famine; or destroy each other in their internal divisions, which was the case of the Jews, when Jerusalem was besieged; see Galatians 5:15.

Zechariah 11:9 . Then said I, will not feed you — I will no longer exercise a tender paternal care over you; that that dieth, let it die — Or rather, the dying let it die; that which has a deadly disease, let it perish by that disease. Or, that which is ready to die, and will not be cured, but hath rejected the shepherd’s love and skill, let it die. Thus Jesus said, If ye believe not, ye shall die in your sins. For this seems to be spoken of the miseries to which the Jewish people were delivered up for their manifold sins, and in particular for their rejection of Christ, which filled up the measure of their iniquity. And that that is to be cut off — Namely, by the sword of the enemy; let it be cut off; and let the rest eat every one the flesh of another — Either live to be besieged till hunger and famine make the living eat the dead, or cruelly kill their children and others, that they may eat their flesh; a calamity threatened, Deuteronomy 28:52-58 ; or else, by seditious and bloody intestine quarrels, destroy each other; all which happened to them in the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Then; after that time of his patient and vigilant feeding the flock, and after his cutting off the three unfaithful shepherds, and after the ill resentment he met with for it; when he deserved love and thanks for it, he is repaid with disdain and hatred by the people, as well as by the shepherds; when he saw all this, then , &c. Thus they rejected Christ, the true Shepherd. I will not feed you; next he rejecteth them, he will no more take care of them, or provide for them. That that dieth, let it die; that which is ready to die, and will not be cured, but hath rejected the Shepherd’s love and skill, let it die; it is like that. If ye believe not, ye shall die in your sins. That that is to be cut off, let it be cut off; either the same repeated, to confirm and affect them more, or else it intends to leave them naked and unguarded to their enemy, to cut them off by the sword or famine, &c. Let the rest eat every one the flesh of another; either live to be besieged till hunger and famine make the living eat the dead, or cruelly kill that they may eat, as threatened, Deu 28:52-58 ; or else by seditions and bloody intestine quarrels destroy each other: all which happened to them in the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans.

9. Then said I—at last when all means of saving the nation had been used in vain (Joh 8:24). I will not—that is, no more feed you. The last rejection of the Jews is foretold, of which the former under Nebuchadnezzar, similarly described, was the type (Jer 15:1-3; 34:17; 43:11; Eze 6:12). Perish those who are doomed to perish, since they reject Him who would have saved them! Let them rush on to their own ruin, since they will have it so. eat … flesh of another—Let them madly perish by mutual discords. Josephus attests the fulfilment of this prophecy of threefold calamity: pestilence and famine ("dieth … die"), war ("cut off … cut off"), intestine discord ("eat … one … another").

Verse 9. - I will not feed you. In consequence of their contumacy, the shepherd abandons the flock to their fate, as God threatened ( Deuteronomy 31:17 ; comp. the very similar passage in Jeremiah 15:1-3 ). Three scourges are intimated in the succeeding words - plague, war, famine, combined with civil strife. Eat every one the flesh of another (comp. Isaiah 9:20 ). Many see here a reference to the awful scenes enacted when Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans, and intestine feuds filled the city with bloodshed and added to the horrors of famine. Zechariah 11:9

And I said, I will not feed you - God, at last, leaves the rebellious soul or people to itself, as He says by Moses, "Then My anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and will hide My Face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall find them" Deuteronomy 31:17 : and our Lord tells the captious Jews; "I go My way, and ye shall seek Me and shall die in your sins" John 8:21 . That which dieth, let it die - Zechariah seems to condense, but to repeat the abandonment in Jeremiah; "Cast them out of My sight, and let them go forth. And it shall be, if they shall say unto thee, Where shall we go forth? then thou shalt tell them, Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the captivity, to the captivity" o. First, God gives over to death without violence, by famine or pestilence, those whose lot it should be; another portion to violent death by the sword; "that which is cut off shall be cut off; and the rest," the flock of slaughter, would be turned into wolves; and, as in the awful and horrible siege of Jerusalem, those who had escaped these deaths, "the left-over, shall eat every one of the flesh of his neighbor," every law of humanity and of nature broken. Osorius: "So should they understand at last, how evil and bitter a thing it is for all who lived by My help to be despoiled of that help?"

From Zechariah 11:7 onwards the feeding of the flock is described. Zechariah 11:7 . "And I fed the slaughtering flock, therewith the wretched ones of the sheep, and took to myself two staves: the one I called Favour, the other I called Bands; and so I fed the flock. Zechariah 11:8 . And I destroyed three of the shepherds in one month." The difficult expression לכן, of which very different renderings have been given (lit., with the so-being), is evidently used here in the same sense as in Isaiah 26:14 ; Isaiah 61:7 ; Jeremiah 2:33 , etc., so as to introduce what occurred eo ipso along with the other event which took place. When the shepherd fed the slaughtering flock, he thereby, or at the same time, fed the wretched ones of the sheep. עניּי הצּאן, not the most wretched of the sheep, but the wretched ones among the sheep, like צעירי הצּאן in Jeremiah 49:20 ; Jeremiah 50:45 , the small, weak sheep. עניּי הצּאן therefore form one portion of the צאן ההרגה, as Hofmann and Kliefoth have correctly explained; whereas, if they were identical, the whole of the appended clause would be very tautological, since the thought that the flock was in a miserable state was already expressed clearly enough in the predicate הרגה, and the explanation of it in Zechariah 11:5 . This view is confirmed by Zechariah 11:11 , where עניּי הצּאן is generally admitted to be simply one portion of the flock.

To feed the flock, the prophet takes two shepherds' staves, to which he gives names, intended to point to the blessings which the flock receives through his pastoral activity. The fact that he takes two staves does not arise from the circumstance that the flock consists of two portions, and cannot be understood as signifying that he feeds one portion of the flock with the one staff, and the other portion with the other. According to Zechariah 11:7 , he feeds the whole flock with the first staff; and the destruction to which, according to Zechariah 11:9 , it is to be given up when he relinquishes his office, is only made fully apparent when the two staves are broken. The prophet takes two staves for the simple purpose of setting forth the double kind of salvation which is bestowed upon the nation through the care of the good shepherd. The first staff he calls נעם, i.e., loveliness, and also favour (cf. Psalm 90:17 , נעם יהוה). It is in the latter sense that the word is used here; for the shepherd's staff shows what Jehovah will thereby bestow upon His people. The second staff he calls חובלים, which is in any case a kal participle of חבל fo elpic. Of the two certain meanings which this verb has in the kal, viz., to bind (hence chebhel, a cord or rope) and to ill-treat (cf. Job 34:31 ), the second, upon which the rendering staff-woe is founded, does not suit the explanation which is given in Zechariah 11:14 of the breaking of this staff.