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Zechariah Chapter 1 1:1 In the eighth month of Darius' second year, the word of the LORD came to the prophet Zechariah, son of Berechiah son of Iddo, as follows: The inspired historian who wrote Zechariah’s prophecies dates his ministry as beginning during the reign of Darius of Persia, meaning that Zechariah (like Haggai) began at the time when the Jews had already begun their return from exile in Babylon and were rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. Zechariah was a prophet who heard directly the word of the Lord, and his family line is noted probably to emphasise that, like Ezekiel, he was a priest as well as a prophet. It appears that although they started off well, at the end of his ministry, the challenges of this man of God were too much for the stubborn religious leaders; Jesus speaks of Zechariah’s martyrdom at their hands (Matt. 23:35). 1:2 The LORD was very angry with your ancestors. The question of ‘why have we been in exile? What is this return to Israel all about?’ must have been an important one to those returning from exile in Babylon ,since very few would have survived who had ever been in Israel at all, or who remembered the former temple and the way of life in Jerusalem. Why did our ancestors leave Israel, and why are we returning now? A political answer might have been, because Nebuchadnezzar conquered our country and took us as his slaves. But Zechariah wants to underline the moral and spiritual reasons which lay behind world events. It was because God was very angry with your ancestors that he gave them into the hand of their enemies who carried them off as slaves. It was because they had turned from God that God cast them out of the land they were living in. To a Jew, the blessing of God and the promised land were inseparable joined. Their national identity rested largely on this, that God had brought them out of slavery in Egypt to be his people, and had given them the land to live in. A removal from the land was a sign of God’s anger, but a return to the land was a sign of his gracious favour.