The twelfth chapter of the book of Zechariah is timid about neither the Zion-centered nationalism that it celebrates nor the corresponding defanging of the nations that besiege Jerusalem ‘in that day’. To the contrary, the Lord announces through his prophet that he will make Jerusalem ‘a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling’. Then, via the extravagant mixing of metaphors that is characteristic of the genre, the Lord ‘will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves.’
The harassed Judahite city will become the Archimedean point that cannot be shifted while its attackers are levered violently this way and that, their former belligerence reduced suddenly to drunken impotence. (more…)
Canter Bridge 