Canter Bridge

The medium-sized prophetic book of Zechariah seems long among the twelve ‘minor prophets’. It ends with an idiosyncratic take on a sturdy prophetic theme: the destiny of the nations in YHWH’s plan.

As with the other prophetic books that touch upon this theme, the nations’ prospects appear to the modern reader’s eyes and tastes to be decidedly mixed.

Then all who survive of the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the festival of booths. If any of the families of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, there will be no rain upon them. And if the family of Egypt do not go up and present themselves, then on them shall come the plague that the LORD inflicts on the nations that do not go up to keep the festival of booths. Such shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to keep the festival of booths. (Zechariah 14:16–19 NRSV)

First, the stock of those nations that comes here under consideration is a remnant of those peoples that have lately made war against YHWH and his city.

Yet these are offered a stunning fate: they are to make annual pilgrimage to that Zion which they had intended to obliterate, there to participate as though they were YHWH’s own Jewish people in the ‘festival of booths’.

The festival of booths is known alternatively as Sukkoth or tabernacles. A harvest festival, booths becomes in the biblical transformation of the agricultural cycle into a rhythm that celebrates YHWH’s great redemptive feats a commemoration of the forty years of Israelite wanderings in the desert prior to their ‘inheritance’ of the land that had YHWH had promised to them. Though the people experienced the frailty and predicament of nomadic aliens, YHWH’s provision got them through.

Against this backdrop, Zechariah’s vision of a YHWH-day when old distinctions will be broken down and forgotten, is quite astonishing. YHWH’s, Israel’s, and Zion’s worst enemies are, in a matter of speaking, invited into the family as kin and invited to cut the Thanksgiving turkey.

If there is a most unanticipated carrot for this privileged residue of the world’s great and arrogant powers, there is also a stick. YHWH will withhold the earth’s blessing to those who do not make annual pilgrimage, those who survive the YHWH-storm but for reasons of rebellion, ingratitude, or neglect choose not to belong.

We modern and post-modern readers may stumble here over our axiomatic conviction that matters of faith and religion are above all else matters private, voluntary, and of the heart. The Bible rarely entertains such a conceit and so is unlikely to soothe our bruised aesthetics on this count.

In Zechariah’s prophetic vision, several of the otherwise indelible fractures of human experience are broken down as YHWH has his way, unimpeded, with his world.

The old, normal, and troubling distinction between secular and sacred goes the way of all flesh. Zechariah trusts his readers to rejoice at this.

A wounded Egyptian, helped along towards Jerusalem by daughters and sons who never fully understood the depth of his former rage, shuffles bright-faced to Zion. Together—within earshot of cousins bantering the way holiday-makers do, in Hebrew—they build a booth.