Latest / truthunedited / The Book of Zephaniah - The Old Testament_s Most Concentrated Vision of the Day of the Lord

Transcript

The Book of Zephaniah - The Old Testament_s Most Concentrated Vision of the Day of the Lord · truthunedited

0:00
Speaker 1: Jerusalem sometime in the late six twenties before Christ. The
0:04
Speaker 1: temple still stands on Zion, but its courts are cluttered
0:08
Speaker 1: with altars that should not be there. Manassa, the longest
0:13
Speaker 1: reigning king in Judah's history, has been dead less than
0:17
Speaker 1: a decade, and his work has not been undone bald
0:21
Speaker 1: still has his priests in the city. Milcom of the Ammonites,
0:25
Speaker 1: still has his platform on the flat rooftops. Men still
0:30
Speaker 1: climb at dusk to bow toward the host of Heaven.
0:35
Speaker 1: The boy who sits on David's throne is named Josiah.
0:39
Speaker 1: He was eight years old when his father Amon was
0:42
Speaker 1: murdered and the people of the land set him there.
0:45
Speaker 1: He is now in his late teens. The great reform
0:50
Speaker 1: that will give him his name in history, the reform
0:53
Speaker 1: of his eighteenth year, when the Book of the Law
0:56
Speaker 1: will be found in the temple, is still several year away.
1:01
Speaker 1: Into this Jerusalem, half cleansed and half corrupted, a prophet
1:07
Speaker 1: steps forward whose name almost no one knows. He is
1:11
Speaker 1: not from a priestly line like Ezekiel. He does not
1:15
Speaker 1: begin with a vision in the year a king died,
1:18
Speaker 1: like Isaiah. The book that bears his name opens in
1:22
Speaker 1: Zephaniah one verse one, with the most unusual genealogy of
1:27
Speaker 1: any prophet in the Hebrew canon. Son of Kushi, son
1:32
Speaker 1: of Godalia, son of a Mariah, son of Hezekiah, four generations,
1:38
Speaker 1: royal generations. Almost certainly, the prophet whose name means Yahweh
1:44
Speaker 1: has hidden steps out of the shadow of Manassa and Aimon,
1:48
Speaker 1: carrying it seems the blood of Hezekiah in his veins.
1:53
Speaker 1: His book is small, three chapters, fifty three verses. A
1:58
Speaker 1: reader can finish it in under ten minutes, and yet
2:02
Speaker 1: into those fifty three verses, Zephyeniah compresses what no other
2:07
Speaker 1: prophet of the Old Testament compresses. The entire shape of
2:11
Speaker 1: what Israel called Yom y h w H, the Day
2:16
Speaker 1: of the Lord, the cosmic judgment of the whole earth,
2:20
Speaker 1: the specific judgment of Judah and Jerusalem, the oracles against
2:25
Speaker 1: the nations from Felictia to Nineveh, the final restoration of
2:30
Speaker 1: a purified remnant under a singing king, all of it
2:35
Speaker 1: in a single tight scroll, in a density no other
2:39
Speaker 1: prophet matches. This is why a forgotten prophet three short
2:44
Speaker 1: chapters and one young king in a half reformed Jerusalem matter.
2:49
Speaker 1: The dies Irae of the medieval Latin Requiem was lifted
2:53
Speaker 1: almost word for word from this book. The language Paul
2:58
Speaker 1: uses for the Day of the Lord in First Thessalonians,
3:01
Speaker 1: the language Peter uses in Second Peter, the imagery John
3:05
Speaker 1: of Patmos uses in Revelation. All of it traces back
3:10
Speaker 1: somewhere along its line to these fifty three verses written
3:14
Speaker 1: under Josiah. The names that will return through the rest
3:18
Speaker 1: of this story, Maktesh, Felistia, Moab, Kush, Nineveh, the Remnant,
3:25
Speaker 1: all begin here in a city that did not yet
3:28
Speaker 1: know it was three decades away from its own fall.
3:32
Speaker 1: The genealogy that opens the book in Zephaniah one verse one.
3:36
Speaker 1: The four generation line that climbs from the prophet through Kushi, Gedalia,
3:41
Speaker 1: Amariyah and ends at Hezekiah, is the single most unusual
3:46
Speaker 1: feature of any prophetic introduction in the Hebrew canon. Most
3:51
Speaker 1: prophets are given one ancestor sometimes two. Joel's son of Pethuel,
3:57
Speaker 1: Mikah of Morsheth Hebakuk, simply called the prophet Zephaniah is
4:03
Speaker 1: given for every commentator who has worked on this book
4:06
Speaker 1: in the modern era has had to face the same question,
4:11
Speaker 1: why stop the genealogy at Hezekiah and why bother mounting
4:15
Speaker 1: four generations only to land on a name that, in
4:19
Speaker 1: Judah's collective memory would have meant only one thing. Adele Berlin,
4:26
Speaker 1: in the Anchor Bible commentary on Zephaniah, argues that the
4:30
Speaker 1: only credible reason to climb four generations and stop precisely
4:35
Speaker 1: at Hezekiah is that the editor of the book wanted
4:39
Speaker 1: to make a claim quietly but unmistakably about the prophet's blood.
4:45
Speaker 1: The Hezekiah at the top of the line is almost
4:48
Speaker 1: certainly King Hezekiah of Judah, the Great Reformer, who reigned
4:53
Speaker 1: roughly from seven hundred fifteen to six hundred eighty seven
4:57
Speaker 1: before christ. Marvin Sweeney, in his commentary on the twelve
5:02
Speaker 1: Prophets in the beer At o Lamb series, points out
5:05
Speaker 1: that the time line works without strain. Four generations from
5:09
Speaker 1: Hezekiah to Zephaniah covers roughly a century, which fits the
5:14
Speaker 1: gap between Hezekiah's death and Josiah's early reign almost exactly.
5:20
Speaker 1: The math behaves, and if the math behaves, the implication
5:25
Speaker 1: is heavy Zephaniah is by descent a member of the
5:30
Speaker 1: Davidic royal house. He is a great great grandson of
5:34
Speaker 1: one of the few kings of Judah whom the books
5:37
Speaker 1: of Kings remember without ambivalence. He carries Hezekiah's blood into
5:44
Speaker 1: a court that has just emerged from Manassah, Hezekiah's own son,
5:49
Speaker 1: the king who undid everything his father had done. That
5:53
Speaker 1: detail changes the temperature of every line that follows. The
5:58
Speaker 1: man who opens his mouth in the book against the
6:01
Speaker 1: priests of Bale and the rooftop worshipers of the Host
6:05
Speaker 1: of Heaven is not an outsider shouting from a village.
6:09
Speaker 1: He is, by descent, a member of the royal family,
6:13
Speaker 1: the reformer's bloodline, returning into a court that had been
6:17
Speaker 1: corrupted by Manassa and only partially purged by Josiah's first
6:23
Speaker 1: cautious reforms. The name Kushi, the prophet's father, has provoked
6:29
Speaker 1: some debate over whether it indicates a Kushite, that is,
6:33
Speaker 1: a Nubian or Ethiopian ancestor, but most modern commentators, including
6:39
Speaker 1: Berlin and Sweeney, treat the name simply as a Hebrew
6:43
Speaker 1: personal name without necessary ethnic content. The weight of the
6:47
Speaker 1: geniality lies not in Cushi, It lies in Hezekiah. The
6:52
Speaker 1: same opening verse anchors the book in time the word
6:57
Speaker 1: came to Zephaniah, the text during the reign of Josiah,
7:02
Speaker 1: son of Ammon, King of Judah. Josiah's reign covers roughly
7:07
Speaker 1: six hundred and forty to six hundred nine before Christ,
7:11
Speaker 1: a span of thirty one years, but Zephaniah's prophecies cannot
7:16
Speaker 1: fit anywhere inside that span. They have to fit in
7:20
Speaker 1: a narrower window, and the text itself tells us where.
7:25
Speaker 1: In Zephaniah one verses four and five, the prophet attacks
7:30
Speaker 1: three specific religious practices in Jerusalem, the priests of Bale,
7:36
Speaker 1: the worshippers of the starry host on the rooftops, and
7:39
Speaker 1: those who swear by the Lord and by milcom in
7:43
Speaker 1: the same breath. All three of those cults were aggressively
7:46
Speaker 1: eradicated by Josiah in his eighteenth year, when according to
7:51
Speaker 1: Second Kings twenty two and twenty three, the Book of
7:55
Speaker 1: the Law was found in the temple and the Great
7:58
Speaker 1: Reform began after six and twenty two before Christ. None
8:03
Speaker 1: of those three had public infrastructure left in the city,
8:07
Speaker 1: which means Zephaniah's oracle has to be earlier, Edwin Theeela,
8:11
Speaker 1: in his Foundational Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah,
8:16
Speaker 1: dated Josiah's reign with enough precision that scholars now placed
8:20
Speaker 1: Zephaniah's ministry with broad confidence between roughly six hundred and
8:25
Speaker 1: thirty five and six hundred twenty five before Christ, after
8:28
Speaker 1: Josiah took limited reform steps in his twelfth year, and
8:32
Speaker 1: before he took the dramatic ones in his eighteenth, a
8:36
Speaker 1: window of perhaps ten years, possibly less. The geopolitical map
8:42
Speaker 1: that frames that window matters. In six hundred twenty seven
8:46
Speaker 1: before Christ, the greater Assyrian king Asherbanipal died, and the
8:51
Speaker 1: empire that had held the Near East in a grip
8:53
Speaker 1: of iron for almost a century began to wabble. Babylon,
8:58
Speaker 1: which had been a vassal province for generations, started flexing
9:03
Speaker 1: toward independence under Napopalasa. Egypt, which had been suppressed under
9:08
Speaker 1: a serious heel, was rising again under the twenty sixth dynasty,
9:13
Speaker 1: and in Jerusalem, the boy king on David's throne was
9:17
Speaker 1: old enough to begin asking what kind of king he
9:20
Speaker 1: would be, but not yet old enough to have answered.
9:25
Speaker 1: Into that suspended moment with the world rearranging itself overhead
9:30
Speaker 1: and the city below. Not yet aware of how short
9:33
Speaker 1: the time was, Zephyoniah opened his mouth. He did not
9:38
Speaker 1: begin small. The first sentence of his prophecy after the
9:42
Speaker 1: introductory formula is a sweep across the entire surface of
9:46
Speaker 1: the earth. Zephaniah one, Verses two and three in the
9:51
Speaker 1: new International version reads, I will sweep away everything from
9:56
Speaker 1: the face of the earth, declares the Lord. I will
9:59
Speaker 1: sweep away both man and beast. I will sweep away
10:03
Speaker 1: the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea,
10:06
Speaker 1: and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble. When
10:10
Speaker 1: I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth,
10:14
Speaker 1: declares the Lord, I will stretch out my hand against
10:18
Speaker 1: Judah and against all who live in Jerusalem. The verb
10:23
Speaker 1: translated sweep away is the Hebrew aesof aesof the verb asaf,
10:29
Speaker 1: repeated in an emphatic doubling, literally gathering, I will gather away.
10:35
Speaker 1: It is a strange and harsh construction, the kind of
10:39
Speaker 1: phrasing Hebrew uses when ordinary verbs cannot carry the weight
10:44
Speaker 1: of what is being said. What is being said is
10:47
Speaker 1: theological reversal the order of beings. The prophet lists humans, beasts,
10:54
Speaker 1: birds of the air, fish of the sea is the
10:58
Speaker 1: exact list of Genesis one. In reverse. Genesis creates fish
11:02
Speaker 1: and birds on the fifth day, livestock and humans on
11:06
Speaker 1: the sixth. Zephaniah unmakes them in the opposite order. The
11:10
Speaker 1: opening of the book is a deliberate surgical inversion of
11:14
Speaker 1: the creation account. This is not a clean up, this
11:18
Speaker 1: is a decreation. Hoseiah for four verse three had already
11:23
Speaker 1: used a similar register. The land dries up, and all
11:28
Speaker 1: who live in it waste away. The beasts of the field,
11:32
Speaker 1: the birds in the sky, and the fish in the
11:35
Speaker 1: sea are swept away. Jeremiah for four verses twenty three
11:40
Speaker 1: to twenty six would soon use it again. I looked
11:45
Speaker 1: at the earth and it was formless and empty, and
11:48
Speaker 1: at the heavens, and their light was gone. But Zepheniah
11:53
Speaker 1: condenses the theme into two verses at the very head
11:57
Speaker 1: of the book. The day of the Lord in his
11:59
Speaker 1: hands does not just destroy enemies, It uncreates the world.
12:05
Speaker 1: And only then does the prophet narrow his lens. Having
12:10
Speaker 1: opened with the cosmos, he focuses in Zephaniah I Verse
12:15
Speaker 1: four on the specific city in front of him. The
12:18
Speaker 1: targets are exact. The priests of Baal by name the
12:23
Speaker 1: pagan and idolatrous priests called kemerim, the technical Hebrew word
12:29
Speaker 1: for non levitical, syncretistic clergy. Those who bow on the
12:34
Speaker 1: rooftops to the starry host, the Mesopotamian astral cult that
12:39
Speaker 1: Manasse had imported and that survived into Josiah's early years.
12:44
Speaker 1: Those who swear by the Lord and by milcom in
12:48
Speaker 1: the same breath, holding two contradictory loyalties at once. The
12:53
Speaker 1: diagnosis is precise. This is not a city that has
12:57
Speaker 1: rejected Yahweh outright. This is a city that has tried
13:01
Speaker 1: to keep him alongside other gods. And the prophet treats
13:04
Speaker 1: that as the more dangerous heresy. Verse eight widens the
13:08
Speaker 1: indictment to the political class. On the day of the
13:13
Speaker 1: Lord's sacrifice, the text reads, I will punish the officials
13:17
Speaker 1: and the king's sons, and all those clad in foreign clothes.
13:22
Speaker 1: The phrase foreign clothes is not random. It refers to
13:27
Speaker 1: the courtly habit of adopting Assyrian or Egyptian fashion as
13:31
Speaker 1: a marker of cosmopolitan sophistication. The way Judah's elite imitated
13:37
Speaker 1: the dress of their imperial overlords. Verse nine ads on
13:42
Speaker 1: that day, I will punish all who avoid stepping on
13:46
Speaker 1: the threshold. That obscure phrase has been argued over for centuries,
13:53
Speaker 1: and the most plausible explanation defended by both Berlin and
13:58
Speaker 1: Sweeney connects it to the Philistine custom recorded in First
14:02
Speaker 1: Samuel Thuster five verse five, when Dagon's idol fell and
14:07
Speaker 1: broke at his threshold, and the priests of Dagan afterward
14:11
Speaker 1: refused to step on it. Some Judean elites, the prophet implies,
14:15
Speaker 1: have absorbed Philistine ritual habits into their own behavior in
14:19
Speaker 1: the temple itself. In verses ten and eleven, the prophet's
14:24
Speaker 1: eye moves through the city geography. He hears a cry
14:29
Speaker 1: from the fish gate on the northern wall, the gate
14:32
Speaker 1: where merchants entering from the coastal roots would have brought
14:36
Speaker 1: in the day's catch. He hears wailing from the new quarter,
14:40
Speaker 1: the Mishneh the second district, and he hears a great
14:44
Speaker 1: crash from the hills. Then comes the line that will
14:48
Speaker 1: name a place into the imagination of every reader of
14:52
Speaker 1: this book, Whale, The prophet says, you who live in
14:57
Speaker 1: the market district, all your urchants will be wiped out,
15:02
Speaker 1: all who trade with silver will be destroyed. The market
15:05
Speaker 1: district is the Hebrew Mactesh, literally the mortar, named for
15:11
Speaker 1: the bowl shaped depression in the topography of Jerusalem where
15:15
Speaker 1: the merchants gathered. Until the late twentieth century, no one
15:21
Speaker 1: was sure exactly where Mactesh stood. Then, between nineteen sixty
15:27
Speaker 1: nine and nineteen eighty two, the Israeli archaeologist Nama Navigat
15:32
Speaker 1: led a systematic excavation of the Jewish quarter of the
15:36
Speaker 1: Old City and uncovered a thick layer of late eighth
15:40
Speaker 1: and seventh century construction on the Western Hill, including a
15:44
Speaker 1: residential and commercial expansion that perfectly matched the Mishne and
15:49
Speaker 1: Mactesh districts named in the prophets. The Tairapoion Valley, the
15:55
Speaker 1: depression separating the Temple mount from the Western Hill runs
16:00
Speaker 1: exactly where the bowl shaped Zepheniah names would have lain.
16:04
Speaker 1: Avigad Spade gave us the city. Zephyniah was looking at
16:08
Speaker 1: the merchants whose silver and gold, the prophet says will
16:12
Speaker 1: not save them, were the inhabitants of houses. Avigad's team
16:16
Speaker 1: was uncovering twenty six centuries later verses twelve and thirteen
16:21
Speaker 1: pushed the indictment further down. At that time, the text reads,
16:27
Speaker 1: I will search Jerusalem with lamps and punish those who
16:30
Speaker 1: are complaisant, who are like wine left on its dregs,
16:35
Speaker 1: who think the Lord will do nothing, either good or bad.
16:40
Speaker 1: The image is of a careful householder going through every
16:44
Speaker 1: dark corner of the city by lamplight, finding the men
16:48
Speaker 1: who have settled into spiritual sediment. The metaphor of wine
16:53
Speaker 1: left on its dregs is pointed undisturbed, wine grows thick, sour,
16:58
Speaker 1: and stubborn at the bottom. The prophet is not after
17:02
Speaker 1: open rebels, he is after the comfortable, and then in
17:07
Speaker 1: verses fourteen through eighteen, the prophet steps fully into the
17:11
Speaker 1: language that would echo through every subsequent generation of theological imagination.
17:18
Speaker 1: Zephaniah Ie Verses fourteen to eighteen in the new International
17:23
Speaker 1: version reads, the great day of the Lord is near, near,
17:28
Speaker 1: and coming quickly. The cry on the day of the
17:32
Speaker 1: Lord is bitter. The mighty warrior shouts his battle cry.
17:37
Speaker 1: That day will be a day of wrath, a day
17:40
Speaker 1: of distress and anguish, a day of trouble and ruin,
17:45
Speaker 1: a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds
17:49
Speaker 1: and blackness, a day of trumpet and battle cry, against
17:53
Speaker 1: the fortified cities and against the corner towers. I will
17:58
Speaker 1: bring such distress on all people that they will grope
18:01
Speaker 1: about like those who are blind, because they have sinned
18:05
Speaker 1: against the Lord. Their blood will be poured out like dust,
18:09
Speaker 1: and their entrails like dung. Neither their silver nor their
18:13
Speaker 1: gold will be able to save them. On the day
18:16
Speaker 1: of the Lord's wrath, in the fire of his jealousy,
18:19
Speaker 1: the whole earth will be consumed. For he will make
18:23
Speaker 1: a sudden end of all who live on the earth,
18:26
Speaker 1: six days stacked one on top of the other, wrath,
18:31
Speaker 1: distress and anguish, trouble and ruin, darkness and gloom, clouds
18:37
Speaker 1: and blackness, trumpet and battle cry. No other prophet ever
18:42
Speaker 1: wrote a passage like that. Amos, in Chapter five, verses
18:47
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty, had warned the Northern kingdom that those
18:51
Speaker 1: who longed for the day of the Lord did not
18:54
Speaker 1: understand what they were asking for. That day will be darkness,
18:59
Speaker 1: not light. But Amos delivered the warning in three verses.
19:04
Speaker 1: Zephaniah expands those three into five and turns them into
19:08
Speaker 1: a hammered cadence of repeated nouns. Joel, writing later, would
19:15
Speaker 1: draw directly from Zephaniah's vocabulary in Joel II Verses one
19:19
Speaker 1: and two, where the line a day of darkness and
19:23
Speaker 1: gloom a day of clouds and blackness appears almost as
19:27
Speaker 1: a direct quotation. And almost two thousand years later, in
19:32
Speaker 1: the early thirteenth century after Christ, a Franciscan named Thomas
19:37
Speaker 1: of Celano sat down to write a sequence for the
19:40
Speaker 1: Latin Requiem Mass and lifted almost word for word, the
19:45
Speaker 1: opening line of his hymn from Zephaniah one verse fifteen
19:50
Speaker 1: dies erie dies illa solvett zeclum in favilla day of
19:56
Speaker 1: wrath that day will dissolve the age in ashes. The
20:00
Speaker 1: him would stand at the heart of the Roman Catholic
20:02
Speaker 1: Requiem until the post Vatican II liturgical reform of nineteen
20:08
Speaker 1: seventy removed it from the standard order of the Requiem Mass.
20:12
Speaker 1: For seven centuries, every funeral the Latin Church performed for
20:17
Speaker 1: the most prominent of its dead opened with words copied
20:21
Speaker 1: out of a book most worshippers in the pews had
20:24
Speaker 1: never read. That is what Zephyniah does in the first
20:29
Speaker 1: chapter alone. He opens with a cosmic reversal of Genesis.
20:34
Speaker 1: He moves into a precise map of the religious sin
20:37
Speaker 1: of one specific city. He names neighbourhoods that archaeology would
20:41
Speaker 1: not confirm for another two and a half millennia, and
20:46
Speaker 1: he closes the chapter with the single most quotable sequence
20:50
Speaker 1: on divine judgment in the entire Hebrew Bible, the sequence
20:56
Speaker 1: that would furnish the medieval West with its picture the
21:00
Speaker 1: end of the world. All of this still inside chapter one.
21:04
Speaker 1: The book has not yet turned to the nations. The
21:08
Speaker 1: prophet has not yet named Nineveh. He has not yet
21:11
Speaker 1: uttered the word remnant. He is only setting the stage.
21:16
Speaker 1: If chapter one closes the curtain on Judah. Chapter two
21:20
Speaker 1: lifts the prophet's voice across borders. But before the oracles
21:24
Speaker 1: against the nations begin, Zephaniah pauses. He inserts in chapter two,
21:31
Speaker 1: verses one through three, the only conditional offer in the
21:35
Speaker 1: entire book. Gather together, Gather yourselves together, you shameful nation,
21:42
Speaker 1: before the appointed time arrives, and that day sweeps on
21:46
Speaker 1: like chaff, before the fierce anger of the Lord comes
21:50
Speaker 1: upon you, before the day of the Lord's wrath comes
21:54
Speaker 1: upon you. Seek the Lord, all, you humble of the land,
21:58
Speaker 1: you who do what He can demands. Seek righteousness, seek humility.
22:04
Speaker 1: Perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the
22:06
Speaker 1: Lord's anger. The Hebrew verb at the head of the
22:11
Speaker 1: passage kubbats gather yourselves sits in a deliberate echo of
22:16
Speaker 1: the asaf doubling at the head of chapter one, where
22:20
Speaker 1: God had said I will gather them away. Now the
22:24
Speaker 1: prophet says, gather yourselves before that day comes. The verb
22:31
Speaker 1: of judgment becomes in the same breath a verb of repentance.
22:36
Speaker 1: The prophet, who in chapter one spoke without conditional clauses,
22:40
Speaker 1: suddenly speaks in conditional clauses. The pivot turns on a
22:45
Speaker 1: single word. Perhaps that word in Hebrew ullai, is the
22:51
Speaker 1: most fragile word in the prophetic vocabulary. It is the
22:54
Speaker 1: word a prophet uses when he is not allowed to
22:57
Speaker 1: promise but is also not allowed to despair. Joel uses
23:02
Speaker 1: it in chapter two, verse fourteen, who knows he may
23:06
Speaker 1: turn and relent. Amos uses it in chapter five, verse fifteen.
23:11
Speaker 1: Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy. Zephyniah, in
23:16
Speaker 1: his own voice, uses it once here, and the people
23:21
Speaker 1: he is addressing. The only ones who receive the conditional
23:25
Speaker 1: are the anavim, the humble, the bowed down, the ones
23:30
Speaker 1: who do not have the rooftops on which others worshiped
23:33
Speaker 1: the host of Heaven, the ones who do not have
23:36
Speaker 1: Assyrian style robes to wear at court. The phrase Jesus
23:40
Speaker 1: would later use almost word for word in Matthew stop five,
23:45
Speaker 1: verse five, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit.
23:49
Speaker 1: The earth runs through Zephaniah's Anavim before it reaches the
23:54
Speaker 1: Sermon on the Mount. Then the prophet turns his face
23:58
Speaker 1: westward toward the coastal plane. The first oracle against the
24:03
Speaker 1: Nations is delivered in Chapter two, verses four through seven,
24:07
Speaker 1: against Philistia. Four cities are named Gaza, Ashkelon, ashdod Ekron.
24:14
Speaker 1: Five Philistine cities had once formed the famous Pentapolis of
24:19
Speaker 1: the southern coast, Gaza, Ashkelon, ashdod Ekron, and Gath. Zephaniah
24:27
Speaker 1: names only four Gath is missing. By the prophet's day.
24:32
Speaker 1: Gath had already been reduced to insignificance, devastated by Hazael
24:37
Speaker 1: of Aram in the late ninth century before Christ and
24:41
Speaker 1: never recovering its independent wait. Zephania's silence about Gath is
24:48
Speaker 1: itself a chronological marker. He names what is still standing.
24:53
Speaker 1: Gaza will be abandoned and Ashkelon left in ruins. The
24:57
Speaker 1: prophet says, at midday Ashdo God will be emptied and
25:01
Speaker 1: Ekron uprooted. The Hebrew of those four lines is held
25:06
Speaker 1: together by a punning device that does not survive in
25:10
Speaker 1: English translation, but that any first hero would have caught Gaza.
25:16
Speaker 1: Aza will be abandoned, Azuvah, Ekron, Ekron will be uprooted.
25:22
Speaker 1: Te aker. The names of the cities become the verbs
25:26
Speaker 1: of their destruction. The prophet, speaking before any of these
25:30
Speaker 1: cities had fallen, was already pronouncing them by sounds that
25:34
Speaker 1: contained their own end. Of the four Philistine cities, Zephynia named,
25:40
Speaker 1: the one that has yielded the most archaeological flesh in
25:43
Speaker 1: the modern era is Ekron. Beginning in nineteen eighty one
25:47
Speaker 1: and running through the mid nineteen nineties, a joint American
25:51
Speaker 1: Israeli expedition led by Truda Dothan of Hebrew University and
25:56
Speaker 1: Seymour Gittin of the WF. Albright Institute excavated the mound
26:01
Speaker 1: known today as Telmigne, about thirty five kilometers west of Jerusalem.
26:07
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety six, in the final season of digging,
26:11
Speaker 1: the team uncovered in the ruins of a temple in
26:15
Speaker 1: the lower city a royal dedicatory inscription on a limestone block.
26:20
Speaker 1: The text, published in nineteen ninety seven by gheitin Dothan
26:25
Speaker 1: and the epigrapher Joseph nav in the Israel Exploration Journal,
26:30
Speaker 1: names the city explicitly Ekron and lists five generations of
26:36
Speaker 1: its rulers, ending with a king named Achish, son of Paddi.
26:41
Speaker 1: Padi is a king known from Assyrian sources from the
26:45
Speaker 1: annals of Senakarib, who freed him from imprisonment in Jerusalem
26:50
Speaker 1: during the campaign of seven o one before Christ. The
26:54
Speaker 1: Ekron inscription closed a debate that had run for almost
26:58
Speaker 1: a century. The mound was indeed Ekron, the city Zephania
27:04
Speaker 1: had named, and the building the inscription stood in had
27:07
Speaker 1: been violently destroyed in the early sixth century before Christ,
27:12
Speaker 1: in the same Babylonian sweep that would soon take Jerusalem.
27:17
Speaker 1: The prophet's line about Ekron uprooted was not metaphor. Then
27:22
Speaker 1: the Prophet swings east chapter two, verses eight through eleven
27:27
Speaker 1: addresses Moab and Ammon, the two Transjordanian peoples whom Genesis
27:33
Speaker 1: nineteen traced back to Lot and his daughters after the
27:37
Speaker 1: destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The connection is not accidental.
27:43
Speaker 1: I have heard the insults of Moab and the taunts
27:46
Speaker 1: of the Ammonites, the prophet Rites, who insulted my people
27:51
Speaker 1: and made threats against their land. Therefore, as surely as
27:55
Speaker 1: I live, declares the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel.
28:00
Speaker 1: Surely Moab will become like Sodom, the Ammonites, like Gomorrah,
28:04
Speaker 1: a place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever.
28:10
Speaker 1: The very peoples descended in Hebrew tradition from the survivors
28:15
Speaker 1: of Sodom and Gomorrah will themselves become Sodom and Gomorrah.
28:20
Speaker 1: The narrative loop closes on itself. The historical bite of
28:24
Speaker 1: the oracle is sharpened by the Mesha Staley, the basalt monument,
28:29
Speaker 1: discovered in eighteen sixty eight at Diban in modern Jordan
28:33
Speaker 1: and now held at the Louver The stalay set up
28:38
Speaker 1: by Mesha, king of Moab, in the mid ninth century
28:41
Speaker 1: before Christ boasts in his own voice, that his god
28:45
Speaker 1: Kemosh delivered him from Israel, and that he Mesha slaughtered
28:50
Speaker 1: seven thousand Israelites for the glory of Kemosh. The taunting
28:55
Speaker 1: that Zephaniah says God has heard from Moab was a
28:58
Speaker 1: long running cultural practice recorded in Stone two centuries before
29:03
Speaker 1: the prophet ever spoke. Kemosh and Milcom, the Moabite and
29:08
Speaker 1: Ammonite national gods, are named together by Zephyniah in Chapter two,
29:14
Speaker 1: verse eleven, where the prophet declares that the Lord will
29:17
Speaker 1: be awesome to them when he destroys all the gods
29:21
Speaker 1: of the earth, and that the nations on every distant
29:24
Speaker 1: shore will eventually bow to him. That last clause widens
29:29
Speaker 1: the oracle. The judgment on Moab and Ammon is not
29:33
Speaker 1: a private dispute. It is a piece of a global
29:37
Speaker 1: theological agenda. In a single short verse, Chapter two, verse twelve,
29:43
Speaker 1: the prophet pivots from the trans Jordan all the way
29:46
Speaker 1: to the south. You Kushites two will be slain by
29:50
Speaker 1: my sword. That is the entire oracle against Kush one verse.
29:57
Speaker 1: But the geographical reach matters. Bush in the Hebrew Bible
30:01
Speaker 1: refers to the kingdom that lay south of Egypt, encompassing
30:06
Speaker 1: modern southern Egypt, Sudan, and parts of Ethiopia. By Zephania's day,
30:13
Speaker 1: Kush had recently held all of Egypt itself. The twenty
30:17
Speaker 1: fifth dynasty of Egypt, the so called Kusheit or Nubian dynasty,
30:23
Speaker 1: had ruled Egypt for the better part of a century
30:27
Speaker 1: from roughly seven forty four to six hundred and fifty
30:30
Speaker 1: six before Christ. Its most famous king, to Haka called
30:35
Speaker 1: Tirhaka in Second Kings nineteen verse nine, where he marches
30:39
Speaker 1: north to confront Senakarib of Assyria during Hezekiah's siege, had
30:45
Speaker 1: fought the Assyrians directly in the Levant. Within Zepheniah's grandparents' lifetime,
30:51
Speaker 1: the twenty fifth dynasty had been driven back south of
30:54
Speaker 1: Egypt by Esa Hadden and Asherbanipal in the six sixties
30:59
Speaker 1: before Christ and a native Egyptian Sat dynasty the twenty
31:04
Speaker 1: sixth had taken Egypt back, but the Khushite kingdom in
31:08
Speaker 1: the Upper Nile remained a real political weight. Zephoniah's brief
31:13
Speaker 1: verse against Kush is not a stray geographic insult. It
31:17
Speaker 1: is a recognition that the day of the Lord reaches
31:20
Speaker 1: as far south as the Hebrew imagination knew the world
31:24
Speaker 1: to extend. And then in Chapter two, verses thirteen through fifteen,
31:30
Speaker 1: the prophet turns to the heaviest oracle of the chapter,
31:34
Speaker 1: the one against Assyria and against Nineveh its capital. He
31:38
Speaker 1: will stretch out his hand against the north and destroy Assyria,
31:43
Speaker 1: leaving Nineveh utterly desolate and dry. As the desert flocks
31:48
Speaker 1: and herds will lie down there, creatures of every kind,
31:52
Speaker 1: the desert owl and the screech owl will roost on
31:55
Speaker 1: her columns. Their hooting will echo through the windows. Rubble
31:59
Speaker 1: will fill the door y ways, the beams of cedar
32:02
Speaker 1: will be exposed. This is the city of revelry that
32:05
Speaker 1: lived in safety. She said to herself, I am the one,
32:11
Speaker 1: and there is none besides me. What a ruin she
32:14
Speaker 1: has become a lair for wild beasts. All who pass
32:19
Speaker 1: by her scoff and shake their fists. The line, I
32:23
Speaker 1: am the one and there is none besides me is
32:27
Speaker 1: a deliberate echo with deadly irony of the language yahweh
32:32
Speaker 1: uses about himself in Isaiah forty five, I am the Lord,
32:37
Speaker 1: and there is no other Nineveh. In Zephoniah's mouth has
32:43
Speaker 1: been quoting back to herself the very language of God.
32:47
Speaker 1: The prophet is not just predicting her fall, he is
32:51
Speaker 1: unmasking her theology. Ninevah fell in the summer of six
32:55
Speaker 1: hundred and twelve before Christ, almost certainly within the lifetime
32:59
Speaker 1: either of ziz Zephaniah himself or of his immediate hearers.
33:03
Speaker 1: The fall is recorded with precision in cuneiform in the document.
33:08
Speaker 1: Modern scholarship calls the Babylonian Chronicle, specifically the tablet cataloged
33:14
Speaker 1: as British Museum twenty one nine oh one the so
33:18
Speaker 1: called Fall of NINEVH Chronicle. The tablet, edited and translated
33:23
Speaker 1: for English readers by Donald J. Weismann in his nineteen
33:27
Speaker 1: fifty six publication Chronicles of Kaldian Kings and in later
33:32
Speaker 1: editions by A. K. Grayson, gives the campaign of Nabopalasa
33:37
Speaker 1: of Babylon and Siegsaes of Media, who, in the fourteenth
33:41
Speaker 1: year of Nabopalassa's reign, besieged Ninevah from June through August
33:46
Speaker 1: of six hundred and twelve before Christ breached its walls
33:50
Speaker 1: and burned it. The chronicle records that the king of Assyria,
33:56
Speaker 1: sinshah Ishkun, perished in the fall of his own capital,
34:00
Speaker 1: and that the Babylonians and Meads carried away spoiled from
34:04
Speaker 1: the city for days. The empire that had ruled the
34:07
Speaker 1: Near East for almost two centuries collapsed within a single summer.
34:12
Speaker 1: Zephania's line that the city would lie utterly desolate and
34:16
Speaker 1: dry as the desert was within roughly a generation of
34:19
Speaker 1: his prophecy literal fact. For about twenty five centuries afterward,
34:26
Speaker 1: no one knew with certainty where Nineveh had stood. The
34:29
Speaker 1: site had vanished into low mounds along the eastern bank
34:33
Speaker 1: of the Tigris River across from modern Mosul. In December
34:38
Speaker 1: of eighteen forty five, the Englishman Austin Henry Layard began
34:42
Speaker 1: excavating one of those mounds, the one called Cuyunjik, on
34:47
Speaker 1: a small grant from Stratford Canning, the British ambassador in Constantinople.
34:53
Speaker 1: By March of eighteen forty seven, Layard had uncovered the
34:57
Speaker 1: palace of Senecaib of Assyria, with its enormous bas reliefs,
35:02
Speaker 1: including the famous panels depicting the siege of Lakish in
35:07
Speaker 1: Hezekiah's day. By the early eighteen fifties, with further work
35:12
Speaker 1: by Layard, by his Iraqi born assistant Hormuzd Rassam, and
35:17
Speaker 1: later by George Smith of the British Museum, the identity
35:21
Speaker 1: of kuyunjik as Nineveh was established beyond doubt. The Royal
35:27
Speaker 1: Library of Ashurbanipal, including the cuneiform tablets that would later
35:32
Speaker 1: yield the Epic of Gilgamesh, was recovered from beneath the
35:36
Speaker 1: rubble layered. In the memoirs he later published, described those
35:41
Speaker 1: mounds before excavation as immense and silent, with only wind
35:46
Speaker 1: and the cries of birds for company. The line in
35:49
Speaker 1: Zephania two, verse fourteen, that the desert owl and the
35:54
Speaker 1: screech owl will roost on her columns describes with archaeological
35:59
Speaker 1: prisons decision. What layered spades found a city whose defining
36:05
Speaker 1: buildings had been buried, whose cedar beams had been exposed
36:09
Speaker 1: and burned, whose human population was gone, and whose only
36:13
Speaker 1: inhabitants for two and a half millennia had been wild
36:17
Speaker 1: birds and the occasional shepherd. What chapter two does, taken whole,
36:22
Speaker 1: is something almost no other prophet manages in a single chapter.
36:27
Speaker 1: It moves from the doorstep of Judah westward to Philistia,
36:32
Speaker 1: eastward to Moab and Ammon, southward to Cush, and northward
36:37
Speaker 1: to Nineveh, the four points of the compass traced in
36:41
Speaker 1: fifteen verses. The day of the Lord in Zephenia's hand
36:48
Speaker 1: is not provincial. It does not care about the borders
36:52
Speaker 1: of Israel. It moves with the surface of the known
36:55
Speaker 1: Earth itself, naming city after city until every horizon the
37:00
Speaker 1: prophet's audience could see has been marked. And in the
37:04
Speaker 1: case of Nineveh, the most powerful of those names, history
37:08
Speaker 1: would within a single generation prove him exactly right. If
37:13
Speaker 1: chapters one and two of Zephyniah work outward from Jerusalem
37:17
Speaker 1: to the Cosmos and then to the four corners of
37:20
Speaker 1: the known Earth. Chapter three closes the spiral by returning
37:25
Speaker 1: to Jerusalem. The prophet, who has surveyed Felictia, Moab, Ammon, Kush,
37:32
Speaker 1: and Nineveh, now plants his feet again in the city
37:35
Speaker 1: he started in, And the second time he speaks of her,
37:39
Speaker 1: the woe is louder. Chapter three, verses one through five
37:43
Speaker 1: reads woe to the city of oppressors. Rebellious and defiled.
37:48
Speaker 1: She obeys no one, she accepts no correction, She does
37:52
Speaker 1: not trust in the Lord. She does not draw near
37:55
Speaker 1: to her God. Her officials within her are roaring lion.
38:00
Speaker 1: Her rulers are evening wolves who leave nothing for the mourning.
38:06
Speaker 1: Her prophets are unprincipled. They are treacherous people. Her priests
38:11
Speaker 1: profane the sanctuary and do violence to the law. The
38:16
Speaker 1: Lord within her is righteous. He does no wrong mourning.
38:21
Speaker 1: By morning he dispenses his justice, and every new day
38:26
Speaker 1: he does not fail. Yet the unrighteous know no shame.
38:31
Speaker 1: The diagnosis sharpens what Chapter one had already named. There
38:36
Speaker 1: the prophet had targeted ritual sins. Here he names the
38:40
Speaker 1: moral and institutional sins. Officials are lions. Rulers are evening
38:47
Speaker 1: wolves who leave nothing for the morning, the image of
38:51
Speaker 1: a predator that does not even pace itself. The prophets
38:56
Speaker 1: are pottersim light frivolous, treous men. The priests violate the
39:03
Speaker 1: very sanctuary they are supposed to God. The same diagnosis
39:07
Speaker 1: appears in Isaiah one, verse twenty three. Your rulers are
39:11
Speaker 1: rebels partners with thieves, and in Jeremiah five, verses thirty
39:17
Speaker 1: and thirty one. The prophet's prophesy lies the priests rule
39:21
Speaker 1: by their own authority, Zephaniah is speaking the same diagnosis
39:26
Speaker 1: his contemporaries Jeremiah and the editors of Isaiah's later layers
39:31
Speaker 1: were speaking, but Zephyniah condenses it to a single quatrain
39:35
Speaker 1: of leadership groups, officials, rulers, prophets, priests. Every layer of
39:42
Speaker 1: institutional Judah is corrupt. And yet the prophet says, the
39:47
Speaker 1: Lord remains in her midst righteous, dispensing justice morning by morning.
39:53
Speaker 1: The contrast between the city's leadership and the God who
39:57
Speaker 1: still inhabits her is the engine of the chapter. Then,
40:01
Speaker 1: in Chapter three, verses six through eight, comes one of
40:04
Speaker 1: the most theologically pointed passages in the entire book. I
40:09
Speaker 1: have destroyed nations, the prophet quotes God as saying, their
40:14
Speaker 1: strongholds are demolished. I have left their streets deserted, with
40:18
Speaker 1: no one passing through. Their cities are laid waste. They
40:23
Speaker 1: are deserted and empty. Of Jerusalem. I thought, surely you
40:28
Speaker 1: will fear me and accept correction, then her place of
40:32
Speaker 1: refuge would not be destroyed, nor all my punishments come
40:36
Speaker 1: upon her. But they were still eager to act corruptly
40:40
Speaker 1: in all they did. Therefore, wait for me, declares the Lord,
40:45
Speaker 1: for the day I will stand up to testify. The
40:48
Speaker 1: argument is theodicy by analogy. Yahweh has already destroyed nations.
40:54
Speaker 1: Their streets are empty, their walls are rubble. Jerusalem watched
40:59
Speaker 1: it happen. Within Zephyniah's lifetime, or in the immediate memory
41:04
Speaker 1: of his audience. Samaria had fallen to Sargon the Sieux
41:08
Speaker 1: of Assyria in seven twenty two before Christ, the entire
41:13
Speaker 1: northern Kingdom of Israel deported and replaced with peoples from
41:17
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the Empire. Within his audience's lifetime, the Aramian
41:22
Speaker 1: states of Damascus and Hammoth had fallen, The Phoenician cities
41:26
Speaker 1: had been crushed under Esa Hadden. The Kingdom of Israel,
41:30
Speaker 1: the brother kingdom right across the border, had been erased
41:33
Speaker 1: a century earlier, and its survivors absorbed or scattered. Judah
41:39
Speaker 1: had every available case study in front of her. The
41:43
Speaker 1: prophet's argument is not that Jerusalem cannot imagine the day
41:47
Speaker 1: of the Lord. It is that she has watched the
41:49
Speaker 1: Day of the Lord happen to other people and has
41:53
Speaker 1: chosen to assume that she alone is exempt. Surely you
41:58
Speaker 1: will fear me and accept correction. The prophet quotes God
42:03
Speaker 1: as having thought. The Hebrew phrasing is poignant. It is
42:07
Speaker 1: the language of a parent who hoped against the evidence
42:12
Speaker 1: that the next child would learn from the punishment of
42:15
Speaker 1: the first, and then sharply the tone of the book turns.
42:20
Speaker 1: Beginning at chapter three, verse nine, Zephyniah pivots into a
42:25
Speaker 1: section that has confused commentators for two and a half
42:28
Speaker 1: millennia because it does not look like the same prophet.
42:33
Speaker 1: Then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that
42:37
Speaker 1: all of them may call on the name of the
42:39
Speaker 1: Lord and serve him shoulder to shoulder. From beyond the
42:43
Speaker 1: rivers of cush my worshipers, my scattered people will bring
42:48
Speaker 1: me offerings. The phrase purify the lips of the peoples
42:53
Speaker 1: savah beura in Hebrew a clean lip is a deliberate
42:58
Speaker 1: reversal of Genesis eleven. In the Tower of Babel narrative,
43:03
Speaker 1: God confused human language as judgment for human pride. Now,
43:09
Speaker 1: in Zephaniah's vision, God restores a single pure language to
43:13
Speaker 1: all peoples so that they may call on his name together.
43:18
Speaker 1: The language barrier introduced in Genesis eleven is dismantled in
43:22
Speaker 1: Zepheniah three verse nine. Adel Berlin in her commentary and O.
43:27
Speaker 1: Palmer Robertson in his commentary on Nahem Habakuk and Zephaniah
43:33
Speaker 1: in the New International Commentary on the Old Testament series.
43:37
Speaker 1: Both note that this is the reversal not just of Babel,
43:42
Speaker 1: but of every previous oracle. Zephyniah has just delivered. The
43:47
Speaker 1: same Cush, whose people, the prophet had said in fac
43:50
Speaker 1: and verse twelve would be slain by the sword, now
43:53
Speaker 1: becomes in three verse ten, the place from which God's
43:57
Speaker 1: own scattered worshippers come to bring him offerings. The geography
44:02
Speaker 1: of judgment becomes in two chapters the geography of mission.
44:07
Speaker 1: The line from Cush is not nationalism, it is universalism.
44:12
Speaker 1: Wherever the Day of the Lord reached to destroy, the
44:16
Speaker 1: morning after the Day reaches to gather. The New Testament
44:21
Speaker 1: hears this passage clearly in Acts Stuck two, when the
44:25
Speaker 1: spirit falls at Pentecost and the disciples speak in many languages,
44:30
Speaker 1: and the assembled crowd from every nation under heaven hears
44:35
Speaker 1: the wonders of God in their own tongue. Luke is
44:38
Speaker 1: presenting the fulfillment of what Zepheniah promised, a unified worship
44:43
Speaker 1: through purified speech. In Revelation seven, when John of Patmos
44:49
Speaker 1: sees the great multitude that no one could number, from
44:53
Speaker 1: every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne
44:58
Speaker 1: and the Lamb, he is seeing what Zephyniah described. Whether
45:03
Speaker 1: the prophet's original horizon was the post exilic restoration of
45:07
Speaker 1: Judah or a more distant eschatology has been debated since
45:11
Speaker 1: the Rabbinic period and continues to be debated. Berlin reads
45:16
Speaker 1: the passage as immediately post exilic, Robertson reads it as
45:21
Speaker 1: fundamentally messianic. Both readings agree that the trajectory of the
45:27
Speaker 1: verse arks forward well beyond the Jerusalem of Josiah, into
45:32
Speaker 1: a horizon the prophet himself could only point at. The
45:36
Speaker 1: remnant emerges in Chapter three, verses eleven through thirteen. On
45:41
Speaker 1: that day, you, Jerusalem, will not be put to shame
45:45
Speaker 1: for all the wrongs you have done to me, because
45:48
Speaker 1: I will remove from you your arrogant boasters. Never again
45:52
Speaker 1: will you be haughty on my holy hill. But I
45:56
Speaker 1: will leave within you the meek and humblement of Israel.
46:01
Speaker 1: Will trust in the name of the Lord. They will
46:04
Speaker 1: do no wrong, They will tell no lies. A deceitful
46:09
Speaker 1: tongue will not be found in their mouths. They will
46:12
Speaker 1: eat and lie down, and no one will make them afraid.
46:17
Speaker 1: The vocabulary is the same vocabulary Zephyniah used at the
46:22
Speaker 1: start of it chapter two to describe the only people
46:27
Speaker 1: who would be sheltered on the day of the Lord's anger,
46:31
Speaker 1: the meek and humble. In chapter two, they were a
46:35
Speaker 1: hopeful possibility, perhaps they would be sheltered. In chapter three,
46:41
Speaker 1: they are an accomplished reality. They will be left, They
46:45
Speaker 1: will trust, they will not lie. The conditional has hardened
46:49
Speaker 1: into a promise, and the description of them is striking.
46:54
Speaker 1: They will not lie. They will eat and lie down
46:57
Speaker 1: without fear. The most ordinary marks of ordinary peace, eating, sleeping,
47:05
Speaker 1: telling the truth become the marks of the eschatological people.
47:10
Speaker 1: There is no temple here, no kingdom, no military, only
47:15
Speaker 1: people who can sleep without fear. That portrait, refined and inverted,
47:21
Speaker 1: would arrive on a Galilean hillside almost six centuries later,
47:26
Speaker 1: in the third Beatitude of Matthew five, and then in
47:30
Speaker 1: verses fourteen through seventeen, the book opens into the section
47:34
Speaker 1: that no other Old Testament prophet quite matches. Zepheniah three
47:39
Speaker 1: verses fourteen through seventeen in the New International version reads, sing,
47:45
Speaker 1: Daughter Zion, shout aloud, Israel, be glad and rejoice with
47:51
Speaker 1: all your heart, daughter Jerusalem. The Lord has taken away
47:55
Speaker 1: your punishment. He has turned back your enemy. The law Lord,
48:00
Speaker 1: the King of Israel, is with you. Never again will
48:04
Speaker 1: you fear any harm. On that day, they will say
48:07
Speaker 1: to Jerusalem, do not fear, Zion. Do not let your
48:12
Speaker 1: hands hang limp. The Lord, your God is with you,
48:16
Speaker 1: the mighty warrior who saves. He will take great delight
48:21
Speaker 1: in you. In his love. He will no longer rebuke you,
48:25
Speaker 1: but will rejoice over you with singing. That last clause,
48:31
Speaker 1: he will rejoice over you with singing is a verbal
48:34
Speaker 1: image found nowhere else in the entire Old Testament. The
48:38
Speaker 1: God of Israel is described in the prophetic literature as speaking, judging, weeping,
48:45
Speaker 1: withholding speech, withdrawing his presence. He is described occasionally as
48:51
Speaker 1: singing his judgment as a dirge, as in the Song
48:54
Speaker 1: of the Vineyard in Isaiah five. But God singing with
48:58
Speaker 1: delight over his retiars deemed people, God as the joyful
49:03
Speaker 1: singer over Zion appears here and only here. The Hebrew
49:09
Speaker 1: verb Yagil rejoice appears with the noun rinna song in
49:15
Speaker 1: a construction so specific that medieval Jewish commentators puzzled over
49:20
Speaker 1: it and Christino commentators built whole theological architectures on it.
49:27
Speaker 1: That same passage carried in the medieval Latin Vulgate, the
49:31
Speaker 1: reading that became central to Marian piety in the Western Church.
49:37
Speaker 1: Jerome's translation of verses fourteen through seventeen was read each
49:41
Speaker 1: year on the feast of the Visitation and at multiple
49:45
Speaker 1: Marian celebrations as a foreshadowing of the Annunciation. The Filia Scion,
49:51
Speaker 1: the daughter of Zion, exhorted to rejoice because the king
49:56
Speaker 1: is in her midst. Luke has one verse twenty e eight,
50:00
Speaker 1: when the Angel says to Mary rejoice highly favored one
50:04
Speaker 1: uses the Greek verb share the same imperative. The Septuagint
50:09
Speaker 1: of Zephaniah three verse fourteen applies to daughter Zion. Whether
50:14
Speaker 1: Luke had Zephanias specifically in mind or whether he was
50:18
Speaker 1: working with broader prophetic vocabulary. The medieval Western Church heard
50:23
Speaker 1: the connection unmistakably and embedded it in liturgy. But the
50:28
Speaker 1: deeper claim in these verses is the line at the
50:31
Speaker 1: heart of the passage repeated twice in slightly different form,
50:36
Speaker 1: The Lord, your God is with you in Hebrew y
50:40
Speaker 1: h w h elohicha bekerbecha. The phrase is anti exilic
50:47
Speaker 1: in the most literal sense. The exile that Zephania's contemporaries
50:52
Speaker 1: are about to enter, that his disciple generation will live through.
50:57
Speaker 1: That Ezekiel will describe as the departure of the glory
51:00
Speaker 1: of God from the temple in chapter ten of his
51:03
Speaker 1: own book, is not the last word. The God who
51:07
Speaker 1: left will return. The God who returns will not just
51:11
Speaker 1: be present, He will sing. The book does not end
51:16
Speaker 1: with the singing. After verses fourteen through seventeen, Zephyniah closes
51:21
Speaker 1: with three more verses, the gathering coda of chapter three,
51:26
Speaker 1: verses eighteen through twenty. I will remove from you all
51:30
Speaker 1: who mourn over the loss of your appointed festivals, which
51:34
Speaker 1: is a burden and reproach for you. But that time
51:38
Speaker 1: I will deal with all who oppressed you. I will
51:41
Speaker 1: rescue the lame. I will gather the exiles. I will
51:44
Speaker 1: give them praise and honor in every land where they
51:48
Speaker 1: have suffered shame. At that time I will gather you.
51:52
Speaker 1: At that time I will bring you home. I will
51:54
Speaker 1: give you honor and praise among all the peoples of
51:57
Speaker 1: the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes,
52:03
Speaker 1: says the Lord. The verb kobats vu gather that the
52:08
Speaker 1: prophet had used at the head of chapter two to
52:11
Speaker 1: call the people to repentance, returns now in the divine
52:15
Speaker 1: voice as the verb of homecoming. The scattered will be gathered,
52:20
Speaker 1: the lame will be rescued, the shame of exile will
52:24
Speaker 1: become honor among the peoples. The book closes on the
52:28
Speaker 1: gathering home of a people who have not yet been scattered,
52:32
Speaker 1: written to a city that has not yet fallen in
52:35
Speaker 1: a vocabulary that would acquire its full weight only after
52:39
Speaker 1: Babylon had carried Judah away in five and eighty six,
52:43
Speaker 1: before Christ and the Prophet's words had begun slowly to
52:47
Speaker 1: come true. The prophet of the most concentrated day of
52:51
Speaker 1: the Lord vision in the Old Testament becomes in his
52:55
Speaker 1: last sustained passage the prophet of the most tender promise
53:00
Speaker 1: of divine joy. In the Old Testament, the ark is
53:04
Speaker 1: not relief after judgment. The ark is restoration that was
53:09
Speaker 1: always the point of the judgment. The day of darkness
53:13
Speaker 1: and gloom that opened the book closeth in the same
53:16
Speaker 1: fifty three verses with the King of Israel singing in
53:20
Speaker 1: the midst of his people. No other prophet in three
53:24
Speaker 1: short chapters traveled that distance. Within thirty eight years of
53:29
Speaker 1: Zephynia's prophecy, the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezza breached the walls
53:35
Speaker 1: of Jerusalem. The temple was burned, the royal house was
53:40
Speaker 1: led in chains to Ribbla. The eyes of King Zedekiah
53:44
Speaker 1: were put out after his sons had been slaughtered before him.
53:48
Speaker 1: The city the prophet had named the City of Oppressors
53:51
Speaker 1: fell in the summer of five hundred eighty six before Christ,
53:56
Speaker 1: exactly as the book had said it would. The first
54:00
Speaker 1: fulfillment was historical, not escatological. Zephoniah's Day of the Lord
54:06
Speaker 1: arrived first as a Babylonian campaign in the lifetime of
54:11
Speaker 1: children who had heard the prophet preach, but the vocabulary
54:15
Speaker 1: outran the event. The great Day of the Lord did
54:19
Speaker 1: not stay. In the seventh century. Paul, writing to a
54:23
Speaker 1: small congregation in Thessalonica around the year fifty one after Christ,
54:28
Speaker 1: would tell them that the day of the Lord will
54:30
Speaker 1: come like a thief in the night. Peter in Seco
54:34
Speaker 1: Peter three, verse ten would say that the day of
54:37
Speaker 1: the Lord will come like a thief, and the heavens
54:41
Speaker 1: will pass away with a loud noise. John of Patmos
54:44
Speaker 1: in Revelation six, verse seventeen would describe the kings of
54:48
Speaker 1: the Earth hiding in caves and crying out the great
54:52
Speaker 1: day of their wrath has come, and who can stand.
54:56
Speaker 1: All three are quoting in different keys the prophet The
55:01
Speaker 1: line they share the great day the wrath, The question
55:06
Speaker 1: of who can stand is line by line Zephaniah's line,
55:11
Speaker 1: and the dyes erae of the Latin Requiem, opening with
55:15
Speaker 1: the words Thomas of Celano had lifted from Zephaniah one
55:20
Speaker 1: verse fifteen, would carry the same vocabulary into seven centuries
55:24
Speaker 1: of Christian funerals. This is what the three chapter Scroll did.
55:30
Speaker 1: It compressed cosmic judgment, oracles against the nations, and the
55:35
Speaker 1: restoration of a singing remnant into fifty three verses, and
55:40
Speaker 1: that compression became the architectural template. Every later writer working
55:44
Speaker 1: on the Day of the Lord would borrow from the
55:47
Speaker 1: Prophet of Royal Blood, whom Manassa's Jerusalem produced and whom
55:52
Speaker 1: Josiah's reform would soon partly satisfy, disappeared into his own book,
55:57
Speaker 1: The Day of the Lord did not. It became the
56:01
Speaker 1: lens through which Paul read the Return of Christ, through
56:05
Speaker 1: which Peter read the dissolution of the heavens, through which
56:08
Speaker 1: John of Patmoss read the end of the Age, and
56:12
Speaker 1: through which the medieval Latin Church read its own death.
56:16
Speaker 1: The prophet almost no one reads is the prophet almost
56:21
Speaker 1: every one quotes without knowing