What is Zechariah 1 About? Let’s turn our attention to Zechariah, chapter 1. We’ll be studying the first six verses in this chapter.

So, as we overviewed the entire book last time, we saw that there is a lot of hope and encouragement that Zechariah is giving the people of his day – the Jews who had returned from the exile in Babylon.

And so it’s kind of unexpected to receive this first message from the Lord in which he warns these people to not sin like their ancestors. And yet, in order to get to the encouragement, God needs to address the previous sins and get some assurance from these Jews that they do not intend to repeat the sins of those who have gone before them.

And I think that we’ll see at the end of this section that the people commit themselves to the Lord anew, which then allows God to move on to the rest of the encouragements in this book in subsequent messages.

We’ll read these six verses all together and then we’ll study each verse in detail…

So, let’s consider that first verse.

KJV Zechariah 1:1 ¶ In the eighth month, [in/of] the second year of Darius, came the word of the LORD unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet [Zec. Is the prophet, not Iddo…], [saying/as follows],

Now, Darius was of course a king of Persia who ruled after king Cyrus. Cyrus was the one who is quoted in the Bible as allowing the Jews to return to their land and build a temple. Darius after him then ruled Persia from 522-486 BC. And that places this first prophecy of Zechariah’s at 520 BC. We’re not given a day, but the month mentioned would indicate a time of somewhere around October, November, or December.

Now, as I mentioned Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their land. However, in Ezra 4:5 we’re told that the people of the land – the non-Jews who were already there at the time – they discouraged the Jews from building their temple. It says that that discouragement lasted, “all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.”

So, the temple building began under Cyrus but really faltered until Darius took the throne. And now in his second year in 520 BC God is taking some action to make sure that his people start doing what he sent them there to do.

And what kind of action is God taking? Well, he’s sending his word.

That phrase we just read, “came the word of the Lord” occurs 222 times in the Old Testament. The first time it occurs in Scripture is in Genesis 15 regarding Abraham after he had defeated the kings to recover his nephew Lot and right before God made a covenant with him. But the majority of the uses of this phrase occurs in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel – one, a prophet to Judah before the exile and the other, a prophet during the exile.

And now Zechariah comes on the scene and he uses this same exact phrase that had been in use for so many centuries. He utters this phrase 9 times – all in chapters 1-8. The Lord’s word is coming to him just like it did to Abraham so many centuries before and just like it came to the prophets of old – before and during the exile.

And as we know, the Lord’s word came to this man named Zechariah, after whom this book is named.

He’s identified as the son of Berechiah – who is himself the son of a man named Iddo.

Now, there are several Zechariahs mentioned in Scripture: