Zechariah 13:1-6

The result of the national repentance is the removal of guilt. The figure of the fountain is perhaps suggested by Ezekiel 47. The first sign of Judah's true restoration will be the abolition of all idolatry and of the spirit of uncleanness, i.e. Greek disregard of Hebrew laws of purity. There will also be a total abolition of all the professional prophets who, like modern fortune-tellers and palmists, traded upon the credulity of the foolish. The utter disrepute into which the prophetic order had fallen was due to the abandonment by the better teachers since Ezra's time of the older forms of prophecy for the exposition of the written Scripture. In other words, the true prophets had become scribes, while those who merely prophesied for a livelihood still carned on the calling which they had brought into disrepute. Some of the scribes were no doubt in the highest sense of the word prophets, but since they no longer spoke in the authoritative manner of the ancient prophets, it seemed to their contemporaries that the era of prophecy had passed away (cf. Psalms 74:9 1Ma 14:41). The writer looks forward to a time when those who wear a hairy garment to deceive will be no more tolerated, and when the popular indignation against them will be so great, that even the parents of one who claims to be a prophet will have no hesitation in putting him to death. Then if anyone be accused of prophesying on the ground that he has wounds like the self-inflicted lacerations which the prophets exhibit as a proof of their inspired frenzy, he will prefer to charge himself with disgraceful conduct rather than admit the truth, and will pretend that the wounds have been inflicted on him in some vile debauch. The word rendered friends means elsewhere lovers and that in a bad sense. A different vocalisation would give the sense amours; i.e. the false prophet will pretend that he has been wounded by the indignant relatives of the victims of his lusts. [J. G. Frazer (Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 3 i. 74f.) thinks that the wounds between the arms were marks tattooed on his shoulders in token of his holy office, the lovers being the Baalim. The shoulders are among some primitive peoples the sensitive part of the medicine-man, and are often covered with an infinite number of small marks, like dots, set close together. A. S. P.]