Font Size
Zechariah 14:1-2
New Catholic Bible
Zechariah 14:1-2
New Catholic Bible
VIII: The Final Combat and the New Jerusalem[a]
Chapter 14
1 Behold, a day is coming for the Lord, when the plunder taken from you will be divided in your midst. 2 For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for battle. The city will be taken, the houses plundered, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken away from the city.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- Zechariah 14:1 After the chosen people had passed through so many struggles, an editor pulled together details for a picture of a final battle. The account tests the imagination and brings the conflict between God and the forces of evil to an end with a victory of God. The style is that of the apocalypses, as seen in the discourse of Jesus on the ruins of Jerusalem and the end of the world (Mk 13; Lk 21; Mt 24). These details were perhaps imagined or gathered at the time of the Maccabean resistance in the second century B.C. At that time, Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of persecuting pagan rulers, and it was possible for the Jews to think that the end of time was at hand: the age of salvation would now begin and the outcome of the struggle would be different. The battle is followed by a great liturgy in which the Feast of Tabernacles acquires a basic importance, since this is the Feast of God as King (see the Books of the Maccabees).
It is on this history-inspired development that the priests based their theology of Jerusalem as the center of a world in which everything is sacred. This grandiose vision of the future is close to that of John’s Apocalypse (Rev 21:3-4). The literary display in the depiction of the scene is overwhelming, but at bottom the passage is a proclamation of God in the face of all seemingly dominant forces; it expresses expectation of a salvation that can only be a gift.
