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

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Speaker 1: Jerusalem sometime in the late six twenties before Christ. The
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Speaker 1: temple still stands on Zion, but its courts are cluttered
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Speaker 1: with altars that should not be there. Manassa, the longest
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Speaker 1: reigning king in Judah's history, has been dead less than
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Speaker 1: a decade, and his work has not been undone. Bal
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Speaker 1: still has his priests in the city. Milcom of the
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Speaker 1: Ammonites still has his platform on the flat rooftops. Men
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Speaker 1: still climb at dusk to bow toward the host of Heaven.
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Speaker 1: The boy who sits on David's throne is named Josiah.
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Speaker 1: He was eight years old when his father Amon was
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Speaker 1: murdered and the people of the land set him there.
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Speaker 1: He is now in his late teens. The great reform
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Speaker 1: that will give him his name in history, the reform
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Speaker 1: of his eighteenth year, when the Book of the Law
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Speaker 1: will be found in the temple, is still several years away.
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Speaker 1: Into this Jerusalem, half cleansed and half corrupted, a prophet
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Speaker 1: steps forward whose name almost no one knows. He is
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Speaker 1: not from a priestly line like Ezekiel. He does not
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Speaker 1: begin with a vision in the year a king died,
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Speaker 1: like Isaiah. The book that bears his name opens in
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Speaker 1: Zephaniah one verse one, with the most unusual geniality of
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Speaker 1: any prophet in the Hebrew canon. Son of Kushi, son
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Speaker 1: of Gedalia, son of a Mariah, son of Hezekiah, four generations,
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Speaker 1: royal generations. Almost certainly, the prophet whose name means Yahweh
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Speaker 1: has hidden steps out of the shadow of Manassa and Aimon,
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Speaker 1: carrying it seems the blood of Hezekiah in his veins.
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Speaker 1: His book is small, three chapters, fifty three verses. A
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Speaker 1: reader can finish it in under ten minutes, and yet
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Speaker 1: into those fifty three verses, Zephyoniah compresses what no other
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Speaker 1: prophet of the Old Testament compresses. The entire shape of
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Speaker 1: what Israel called Yom y h w H, the Day
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Speaker 1: of the Lord, the cosmic judgment of the whole earth,
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Speaker 1: the specific judgment of Judah and Jerusalem, the oracles against
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Speaker 1: the nations from Felistia to Nineveh, the final restoration of
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Speaker 1: a purified remnant under a singing king, all of it
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Speaker 1: in a single tight scroll, in a density no other
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Speaker 1: prophet matches. This is why a forgotten prophet, three short
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Speaker 1: chapters and one young king in a half reformed Jerusalem
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Speaker 1: matter the dies Irae of the medieval Latin Requiem was
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Speaker 1: lifted almost word for word from this book. The language
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Speaker 1: Paul uses for the Day of the Lord in Thessalonians,
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Speaker 1: the language Peter uses in Second Peter, the imagery John
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Speaker 1: of Patmos uses in Revelation. All of it traces back
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Speaker 1: somewhere along its line to these fifty three verses written
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Speaker 1: under Josiah. The names that will return through the rest
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Speaker 1: of this story, Maktesh, Felistia, Moab, Kush, Nineveh, the Remnant,
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Speaker 1: all begin here in a city that did not yet
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Speaker 1: know it was three decades away from its own fall.
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Speaker 1: The genealogy that opens the book in Zephaniah one verse one.
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Speaker 1: The four generation line that climbs from the prophet through Kushi, Gadalia,
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Speaker 1: Amariyah and ends at Hezekiah, is the single most unusual
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Speaker 1: feature of any prophetic introduction in the Hebrew canon. Most
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Speaker 1: prophets are given one ancestor sometimes two. Joel's son of Pethuel,
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Speaker 1: Mikah of Morsheth Hebakuk simp called the prophet Zephaniah is
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Speaker 1: given for every commentator who has worked on this book
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Speaker 1: in the modern era has had to face the same question,
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Speaker 1: why stop the genealogy at Hezekiah, and why bother mounting
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Speaker 1: four generations only to land on a name that, in
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Speaker 1: Judah's collective memory would have meant only one thing. Adele Berlin,
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Speaker 1: in the Anchor Bible commentary on Zephaniah, argues that the
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Speaker 1: only credible reason to climb four generations and stop precisely
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Speaker 1: at Hezekiah is that the editor of the book wanted
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Speaker 1: to make a claim quietly but unmistakably about the prophet's blood.
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Speaker 1: The Hezekiah at the top of the line is almost
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Speaker 1: certainly King Hezekiah of Judah, the Great Reformer, who reigned
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Speaker 1: roughly from seven hundred fifteen to six hundred eighty seven
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Speaker 1: before christ Marvin Sweeney, in his commentary on the Twelve
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Speaker 1: Prophets in the Berrito Lamb series, points out that the
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Speaker 1: timeline works without strain. Four generations from Hezekiah to Zephaniah
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Speaker 1: covers roughly a century, which fits the gap between Hezekiah's
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Speaker 1: death and Josiah's early reign almost exactly. The math behaves,
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Speaker 1: and if the math behaves, the implication is heavy. Zephaniah
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Speaker 1: is by descent a member of the Davidic royal house.
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Speaker 1: He is a great great grandson of one of the
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Speaker 1: few kings of Judah, whom the books of Kings remember
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Speaker 1: without ambivalence. He carries Hezekiah's blood into a court that
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Speaker 1: has just emerged from Manassah, Hezekiah's own son, the king
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Speaker 1: who undid everything his father had done. That detail changes
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Speaker 1: the temperature of every line that follows. The man who
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Speaker 1: opens his mouth in this book against the priests of
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Speaker 1: Bale and the rooftop worshipers of the Host of Heaven
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Speaker 1: is not an outsider shouting from a village. He is,
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Speaker 1: by descent, a member of the royal family, the reformer's bloodline,
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Speaker 1: returning into a court that had been corrupted by Manassa
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Speaker 1: and only partially purged by Josiah's first cautious reforms. The
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Speaker 1: name Kushi, the prophet's father, has provoked some debate over
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Speaker 1: whether it indicates a Kushite, that is, a Nubian or
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Speaker 1: Ethiopian ancestor, but most modern commentators, including Berlin and Sweeney,
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Speaker 1: treat the name simply as a Hebrew personal name without
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Speaker 1: necessary ethnic content. The weight of the geniality lies not
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Speaker 1: in Cushi, It lies in Hezekiah. The same opening verse
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Speaker 1: anchors the book. In time, the word came to Zephaniah.
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Speaker 1: The texts during the reign of Josiah, son of Amon,
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Speaker 1: King of Judah. Josiah's reign covers roughly six hundred and
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Speaker 1: forty to six hundred nine before Christ, a span of
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Speaker 1: thirty one years, but Zephaniah's prophecies cannot fit anywhere inside
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Speaker 1: that span. They have to fit in a narrower window,
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Speaker 1: and the text itself tells us where. In Zephaniah one
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Speaker 1: verses four and five, the prophet attacks three specific religious
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Speaker 1: practices in Jerusalem, the priests of Bale, the worshippers of
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Speaker 1: the starry host on the rooftops, and those who swear
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Speaker 1: by the Lord and by milcom in the same breath.
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Speaker 1: All three of those cults were aggressively eradicated by Josiah
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Speaker 1: in his eighteenth year, when according to second Kings twenty
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Speaker 1: two and twenty three, the Book of the Law was
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Speaker 1: found in the temple and the Great Reform began after
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Speaker 1: six h twenty two before Christ. None of those three
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Speaker 1: had public infrastructure left in the city, which means Zephaniah's
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Speaker 1: oracle has to be earlier, Edwin Theeela, in his Foundational
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Speaker 1: Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah, dated Josiah's
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Speaker 1: reign with enough precision that scholars now placed Zephaniah's ministry
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Speaker 1: with broad confidence between roughly six hundred and thirty five
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Speaker 1: and six hundred twenty five before Christ, after Josiah took
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Speaker 1: limited reform steps in his twelfth year, and before he
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Speaker 1: took the dramatic ones in his eighteenth, a window of
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Speaker 1: perhaps ten years, possibly less. The geopolitical map that frames
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Speaker 1: that window matters. In six hundred and twenty seven before Christ,
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Speaker 1: the greater Assyrian king Asherbanipal died, and the empire that
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Speaker 1: had held the Near East in a grip of iron
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Speaker 1: for almost a century began to wabble. Babylon, which had
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Speaker 1: been a vassal province for generations, started flexing toward independence
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Speaker 1: under Nabopalasa. Egypt, which had been suppressed under a serious heel,
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Speaker 1: was rising again under the twenty sixth dynasty, and in Jerusalem,
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Speaker 1: the boy king on David's throne was old enough to
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Speaker 1: begin asking what kind of king he would be, but
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Speaker 1: not yet old enough to have answered. Into that suspended
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Speaker 1: moment with the world rearranging itself overhead and the city below.
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Speaker 1: Not yet aware of how short the time was, Zephoniah
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Speaker 1: opened his mouth. He did not begin small. The first
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Speaker 1: sentence of his prophecy after the introductory formula is a
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Speaker 1: sweep across the entire surface of the earth. Zephaniah one,
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Speaker 1: Verses two and three in the new International version reads,
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Speaker 1: I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth,
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Speaker 1: declares the Lord. I will sweep away both man and beast.
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Speaker 1: I will sweep away the birds in the sky, and
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Speaker 1: the fish in the sea, and the idols that cause
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Speaker 1: the wicked to stumble. When I destroy all mankind on
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Speaker 1: the face of the earth, declares the Lord, I will
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Speaker 1: stretch out my hand against Judah and against all who
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Speaker 1: live in Jerusalem. The verb translated sweep away is the
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Speaker 1: Hebrew aesof aesof the verb asaf, repeated in an emphatic doubling,
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Speaker 1: literally gathering, I will gather away. It is a strange
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Speaker 1: and harsh construction, the kind of phrasing Hebrew uses when
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Speaker 1: ordinary verbs cannot carry the weight of what is being said.
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Speaker 1: What is being said is theological reversal the order of beings.
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Speaker 1: The prophet lists humans, beasts, birds of the air, fish
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Speaker 1: of the sea is the exact list of Genesis one.
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Speaker 1: In reverse. Genesis creates fish and birds on the fifth day,
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Speaker 1: livestock and humans on the sixth. Zephaniah unmakes them in
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Speaker 1: the opposite order. The opening of the book is a
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Speaker 1: deliberate surgical inversion of the creation account. This is not
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Speaker 1: a clean up, this is a decreation. Hosea, for four
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Speaker 1: verse three had already used a similar register. The land
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Speaker 1: dries up, and all who live in it waste away.
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Speaker 1: The beasts of the field, the birds in the sky,
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Speaker 1: and the fish in the sea are swept away. Jeremiah
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Speaker 1: for four verses twenty three to twenty six would soon
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Speaker 1: use it again. I looked at the earth and it
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Speaker 1: was formless and empty, and at the heavens, and their
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Speaker 1: light was gone. But Zepheniah condenses the theme into two
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Speaker 1: verses at the very head of the book. The day
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Speaker 1: of the Lord in his hand does not just destroy enemies,
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Speaker 1: It uncreates the world. And only then does the prophet
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Speaker 1: narrow his lens. Having opened with the cosmos, he focuses
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Speaker 1: in Zephaniah I verse four on the specific city in
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Speaker 1: front of him. The targets are exact. The priests of
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Speaker 1: Baal by name the pagan and idolatrous priests called kemerim,
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Speaker 1: the technical Hebrew word for non levitical, syncretistic clergy. Those
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Speaker 1: who bow on the rooftops to the starry host, the
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Speaker 1: Mesopotamian astral cult that Manasse had imported and that survived
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Speaker 1: into Josiah's early years. Those who swear by the Lord
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Speaker 1: and by milcom in the same breath, holding two contradictory
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Speaker 1: loyalties at once. The diagnosis is precise. This is not
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Speaker 1: a city that has rejected Yahweh outright. This is a
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Speaker 1: that has tried to keep him alongside other gods. And
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Speaker 1: the prophet treats that as the more dangerous heresy. Verse
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Speaker 1: eight widens the indictment to the political class. On the
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Speaker 1: day of the Lord's sacrifice, the text reads, I will
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Speaker 1: punish the officials and the king's sons, and all those
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Speaker 1: clad in foreign clothes. The phrase foreign clothes is not random.
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Speaker 1: It refers to the courtly habit of adopting Assyrian or
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Speaker 1: Egyptian fashion as a marker of cosmopolitan sophistication, the way
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Speaker 1: Judah's elite imitated the dress of their imperial overlords. Verse
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Speaker 1: nine ads on that day, I will punish all who
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Speaker 1: avoid stepping on the threshold. That obscure phrase has been
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Speaker 1: argued over for centuries, and the most plausible explanation defended
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Speaker 1: by both Berlin and Sweeney connects it to the the
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Speaker 1: Philistine custom recorded in First Samuel Thuster five verse five,
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Speaker 1: when Dagon's idol fell and broke at his threshold, and
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Speaker 1: the priests of Dagon afterward refused to step on it.
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Speaker 1: Some judy and elites, the prophet implies, have absorbed Philistine
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Speaker 1: ritual habits into their own behavior in the temple itself.
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Speaker 1: In verses ten and eleven, the prophet's eye moves through
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Speaker 1: the city geography. He hears a cry from the fish
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Speaker 1: gate on the northern wall, the gate where merchants entering
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Speaker 1: from the coastal roots would have brought in the day's catch.
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Speaker 1: He hears wailing from the new quarter, the Mishneh the
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Speaker 1: second district, and he hears a great crash from the hills.
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Speaker 1: Then comes the line that will name a place into
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Speaker 1: the imagination of every reader of this book, Whale. The
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Speaker 1: prophet says, you who live in the market district, All
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Speaker 1: your merchants will be wiped out, All who trade with
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Speaker 1: silver will be destroyed. The market district is the Hebrew Mactesh,
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Speaker 1: literally the mortar, named for the bowl shaped depression in
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Speaker 1: the topography of Jerusalem where the merchants gathered. Until the
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Speaker 1: late twentieth century, no one was sure exactly where Mactesh stood. Then,
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Speaker 1: between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen eighty two, the Israeli
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Speaker 1: archeologist Nama Navigat led a systematic excavation of the Jewish
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Speaker 1: quarter of the Old City and uncovered a thick layer
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Speaker 1: of late eighth and seventh century construction on the Western Hill,
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Speaker 1: including a residential and commercial expansion that perfectly matched the
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Speaker 1: Mishne and Mactesh districts named in the prophets. The Tairapoion Valley,
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Speaker 1: the depression separating the Temple mount from the Western Hill
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Speaker 1: runs exactly where the bowl shaped Zephoniah names would have lain.
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Speaker 1: Avigad Spade gave us the city. Zephyniah was looking at
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Speaker 1: the merchants whose silver and gold, the prophet says, will
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Speaker 1: not save them, were the inhabitants of houses. Avigad's team
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Speaker 1: was uncovering twenty six centuries later. Verses twelve and thirteen
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Speaker 1: pushed the indictment further down. At that time, the text reads,
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Speaker 1: I will search Jerusalem with lamps and punish those who
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Speaker 1: are complaisant, who are like wine left on its dregs,
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Speaker 1: who think the Lord will do nothing, either good or bad.
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Speaker 1: The image is of a careful householder going through every
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Speaker 1: dark corner of the city by lamplight, finding the men
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Speaker 1: who have settled into spiritual sediment. The metaphor of wine
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Speaker 1: left on its dregs is pointed undisturbed, wine grows thick, sour,
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Speaker 1: and stubborn at the bottom. The prophet is not after
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Speaker 1: open rebels, he is after the comfortable, and then in
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Speaker 1: verses fourteen through eighteen, the prophet steps fully into the
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Speaker 1: language that would echo through every subsequent generation of theological imagination.
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Speaker 1: Zephaniah Ie Verses fourteen to eighteen in the new International
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Speaker 1: version reads, the great day of the Lord is near, near,
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Speaker 1: and coming quickly. The cry on the day of the
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Speaker 1: Lord is bitter. The mighty warrior shouts his battle cry.
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Speaker 1: That day will be a day of wrath, a day
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Speaker 1: of distress and anguish, a day of trouble and ruin,
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Speaker 1: a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds
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Speaker 1: and blackness, a day of trumpet and battle cry, against
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Speaker 1: the fortified cities and against the corner towers. I will
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Speaker 1: bring such distress on all people that they will grope
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Speaker 1: about like those who are blind, because they have sinned
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Speaker 1: against the Lord. Their blood will be poured out like dust,
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Speaker 1: and their entrails like dung. Neither their silver nor their
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Speaker 1: gold will be able to save them. On the day
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Speaker 1: of the Lord's wrath, in the fire of his jealousy,
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Speaker 1: the whole earth will be consumed. For he will make
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Speaker 1: a sudden end of all who live on the earth,
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Speaker 1: six days stacked one on top of the other, wrath,
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Speaker 1: distress and anguish, trouble and ruin, darkness and gloom, clouds
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Speaker 1: and blackness, trumpet and battle cry. No other prophet ever
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Speaker 1: wrote a passage like that. Amos, in Chapter five, verses
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Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty, had warned the Northern kingdom that those
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Speaker 1: who longed for the day of the Lord did not
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Speaker 1: understand what they were asking for. That day will be darkness,
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Speaker 1: not light. But Amos delivered the warning in three verses.
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Speaker 1: Zephaniah expands those three into five and turns them into
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Speaker 1: a hammered cadence of repeated nouns. Joel, writing later, would
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Speaker 1: draw directly from Zephaniah's vocabulary in Joel two verses one
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Speaker 1: and two, where the line a day of darkness and
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Speaker 1: gloom a day of clouds and blackness appears almost as
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Speaker 1: a direct quotation. And almost two thousand years later, in
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Speaker 1: the early thirteenth century after Christ, a Franciscan named Thomas
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Speaker 1: of Celano sat down to write a sequence for the
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Speaker 1: Latin Requiem Mass and lifted almost word for word, the
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Speaker 1: opening line of his hymn from Zephaniah one verse fifteen,
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Speaker 1: dies erae dies illa solvett zeclum in favilla day of
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Speaker 1: wrath that day will dissolve the age in ashes. The
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Speaker 1: him would stand at the heart of the Roman Catholic
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Speaker 1: Requiem until the post Vatican IWI liturgical reform of nineteen
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Speaker 1: seventy removed it from the standard order of the Requiem Mass.
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Speaker 1: For seven centuries, every funeral the Latin Church performed for
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Speaker 1: the most prominent of its dead opened with words copied
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Speaker 1: out of a book most worshippers in the pews had
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Speaker 1: never read. That is what Zephyniah does in the first
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Speaker 1: chapter alone. He opens with a cosmic reversal of Genesis.
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Speaker 1: He moves into a precise map of the religious sin
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Speaker 1: of one specific city. He names neighbourhoods that archaeology would
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Speaker 1: not confirm for another two and a half millennia, and
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Speaker 1: he closes the chapter with the single most quotable sequence
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Speaker 1: on divine judgment in the entire Hebrew Bible, the sequence
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Speaker 1: that would furnish the medieval West with its picture of
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Speaker 1: the end of the world. All of this still inside
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Speaker 1: chapter one. The book has not yet turned to the nations.
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Speaker 1: The prophet has not yet named Nineveh. He has not
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Speaker 1: yet uttered the word remnant. He is only setting the stage.
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Speaker 1: If chapter one closes the curtain on Judah, Chapter two
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Speaker 1: lifts the prophet's voice across borders. But before the oracles
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Speaker 1: against the nations begin, Zephaniah pauses. He inserts in chapter two,
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Speaker 1: verses one through three, the only conditional offer in the
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Speaker 1: entire book, Gather together. Gather yourselves together, you shameful nation,
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Speaker 1: before the appointed time arrives, and that day sweeps on
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Speaker 1: like chaff, before the fierce anger of the Lord comes
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Speaker 1: upon you, Before the day of the Lord's wrath comes
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Speaker 1: upon you. Seek the Lord, all, you humble of the land,
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Speaker 1: you who do what he can, seek righteousness, seek humility.
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Speaker 1: Perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the
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Speaker 1: Lord's anger. The Hebrew verb at the head of the
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Speaker 1: passage kobbats gather yourselves sits in a deliberate echo of
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Speaker 1: the asaf doubling at the head of chapter one, where
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Speaker 1: God had said, I will gather them away. Now the
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Speaker 1: prophet says, gather yourselves before that day comes. The verb
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Speaker 1: of judgment becomes in the same breath a verb of repentance.
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Speaker 1: The prophet, who in chapter one spoke without conditional clauses,
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Speaker 1: suddenly speaks in conditional clauses. The pivot turns on a
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Speaker 1: single word. Perhaps that word in Hebrew ullai, is the
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Speaker 1: most fragile word in the prophetic vocabulary. It is the
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Speaker 1: word a prophet uses when he is not allowed to promise,
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Speaker 1: but is also not allowed to despair. Joel uses it
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Speaker 1: in chapter two, verse fourteen. Who knows he may turn
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Speaker 1: and relent? Amos uses it in chapter five, verse fifteen.
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Speaker 1: Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy. Zephyniah, in
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Speaker 1: his own voice, uses it once here, and the people
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Speaker 1: he is addressing. The only ones who receive the conditional
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Speaker 1: are the anavim, the humble, the bowed down, the ones
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Speaker 1: who do not have the rooftops on which others worshiped
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Speaker 1: the host of heaven, the ones who do not have
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Speaker 1: Assyrian style robes to wear at court. The phrase Jesus
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Speaker 1: would later use almost word for word in Matthew Stop five,
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Speaker 1: verse five, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit.
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Speaker 1: The earth runs through Zephyniah's Anavim before it reaches the
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Speaker 1: sermon on the mount. Then the prophet turns his face
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Speaker 1: westward toward the coastal plane. The first oracle against the
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Speaker 1: Nations is delivered in Chapter two, verses four through seven,
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Speaker 1: against Pelistia. Four cities are named Gaza, Ashkelon, ashdod Ekron.
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Speaker 1: Five Philistine cities had once formed the famous Pentapolis of
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Speaker 1: the southern coast, Gaza, Ashkelon, ashdod Ekron, and Gath Zephaniah
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Speaker 1: names only four Gath is missing. By the prophet's day,
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Speaker 1: Gath had already been reduced to insignificance, devastated by Hazael
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Speaker 1: of Aram in the late ninth century, before Christ and
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Speaker 1: never recovering its independent wait. Zephania's silence about Gath is
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Speaker 1: itself a chronological marker. He names what is still standing.
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Speaker 1: Gaza will be abandoned and Ashkelon left in ruins. The
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Speaker 1: prophet says, at midday ashd God will be emptied and
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Speaker 1: Ekron uprooted. The Hebrew of those four lines is held
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Speaker 1: together by a punning device that does not survive in
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Speaker 1: English translation, but that any first hero would have caught. Gaza,
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Speaker 1: Aza will be abandoned, Azuvah, Ekron, Ekron will be uprooted teaker.
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Speaker 1: The names of the cities become the verbs of their destruction.
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Speaker 1: The prophet, speaking before any of these cities had fallen,
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Speaker 1: was already pronouncing them by sounds that contained their own end.
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Speaker 1: Of the four Philistine cities, Zephynia named, the one that
25:40
Speaker 1: has yielded the most archaeological flesh in the modern era
25:45
Speaker 1: is Ekron. Beginning in nineteen eighty one and running through
25:48
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen nineties, a joint American Israeli expedition led
25:53
Speaker 1: by Truda Dothan of Hebrew University and Seymour Gittin of
25:57
Speaker 1: the WF. Al Bright Institute excavated the mound, known today
26:02
Speaker 1: as Telmigna, about thirty five kilometers west of Jerusalem. In
26:08
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six. In the final season of digging, the
26:12
Speaker 1: team uncovered in the ruins of a temple in the
26:15
Speaker 1: lower city a royal dedicatory inscription on a limestone block.
26:20
Speaker 1: The text, published in nineteen ninety seven by Geitin Dothan
26:25
Speaker 1: and the epigrapher Joseph nav In the Israel Exploration Journal,
26:31
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
26:46
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 Stalay, the basalt
28:29
Speaker 1: monument discovered in eighteen sixty eight at Diban in modern
28:32
Speaker 1: Jordan and now held at the Louver. The stalay set
28:38
Speaker 1: up by Mesha, king of Moab, in the mid ninth
28:40
Speaker 1: century before Christ boasts in his own voice that his
28:45
Speaker 1: god Kemosh delivered him from Israel and that he Mesha
28:50
Speaker 1: slaughtered seven thousand Israelites for the glory of Kemosh. The
28:54
Speaker 1: taunting that Zephaniah says God has heard from Moab was
28:58
Speaker 1: a long running culture practice recorded in Stone, two centuries
29:03
Speaker 1: before the prophet ever spoke. Kemosh and Milcom, the Moabite
29:08
Speaker 1: and Ammonite national gods, are named together by Zephyniah in
29:13
Speaker 1: Chapter two, verse eleven, where the prophet declares that the
29:17
Speaker 1: Lord will be awesome to them when he destroys all
29:20
Speaker 1: the gods of the earth, and that the nations on
29:23
Speaker 1: every distant shore will eventually bow to him. That last
29:28
Speaker 1: clause widens the oracle. The judgment on Moab and Ammon
29:33
Speaker 1: is not a private dispute. It is a piece of
29:37
Speaker 1: a global theological agenda. In a single short verse, Chapter two,
29:42
Speaker 1: verse twelve, the prophet pivots from the trans Jordan all
29:45
Speaker 1: the way to the south. You Kushites two will be
29:50
Speaker 1: slain by my sword. That is the entire oracle against
29:55
Speaker 1: Kush one verse. But the geographical reach matters. Kush in
30:00
Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible refers to the kingdom that lay south
30:04
Speaker 1: of Egypt, encompassing modern southern Egypt, Sudan, and parts of Ethiopia.
30:11
Speaker 1: By Zephania's day, Kush had recently held all of Egypt itself.
30:17
Speaker 1: The twenty fifth dynasty of Egypt, the so called Kusheit
30:21
Speaker 1: or Nubian dynasty, had ruled Egypt for the better part
30:26
Speaker 1: of a century from roughly seven forty four to six
30:29
Speaker 1: hundred fifty six before Christ. Its most famous king, to
30:34
Speaker 1: Hakka called Tirhaka in Second Kings nineteen verse nine, where
30:39
Speaker 1: he marches north to confront Senakarib of Assyria during Hezekiah's siege,
30:44
Speaker 1: had fought the Assyrians directly in the levant. Within Zepheniah's
30:49
Speaker 1: grandparents lifetime, the twenty fifth dynasty had been driven back
30:54
Speaker 1: south of Egypt by Esa Hadden and Asherbanipal in the
30:58
Speaker 1: six sixties before Christ and a native Egyptian Sat dynasty
31:03
Speaker 1: the twenty sixth had taken Egypt back, but the Khushite
31:07
Speaker 1: kingdom in the Upper Nile remained a real political weight.
31:12
Speaker 1: Zephyniah's brief verse against Kush is not a stray geographic insult.
31:17
Speaker 1: It is a recognition that the day of the Lord
31:20
Speaker 1: reaches as far south as the Hebrew imagination knew the
31:24
Speaker 1: world to extend. And then in Chapter two, verses thirteen
31:29
Speaker 1: through fifteen, the prophet turns to the heaviest oracle of
31:33
Speaker 1: the chapter, the one against Assyria and against Nineveh its capital.
31:38
Speaker 1: He will stretch out his hand against the north and
31:41
Speaker 1: destroy Assyria, leaving Nineveh utterly desolate and dry. As the
31:46
Speaker 1: desert flocks and herds will lie down there, creatures of
31:51
Speaker 1: every kind, the desert owl and the screech owl will
31:54
Speaker 1: roost on her columns. Their hooting will echo through the windows,
31:58
Speaker 1: Rubble will fill the door. Always 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 Zepheniah'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 Zephaniah himself or of his immediate hearers. The
33:04
Speaker 1: 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 Siegsarees 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
33:54
Speaker 1: Assyria sinshah Ishkun perished in the fall of his own capital,
34:01
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
35:50
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: pre 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 Zephania'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 lions.
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 frivolousous men. The priests violate the very
39:03
Speaker 1: sanctuary they are supposed to guard. The same diagnosis appears
39:08
Speaker 1: in Isaiah one, verse twenty three. Your rulers are rebels
39:12
Speaker 1: partners with thieves, and in Jeremiah five, verses thirty and
39:17
Speaker 1: thirty one. The prophet's prophesy lies the priests rule by
39:22
Speaker 1: their own authority. Zephaniah is speaking the same diagnosis his contemporaries,
39:27
Speaker 1: Jeremiah and the editors of Isaiah's later layers were speaking,
39:32
Speaker 1: but Zephyniah condenses it to a single quatrain of leadership groups, officials, rulers, prophets, priests.
39:41
Speaker 1: Every layer of institutional Judah is corrupt, and yet the
39:46
Speaker 1: prophet says, the Lord remains in her midst righteous, dispensing
39:51
Speaker 1: justice morning by morning. The contrast between the city's leadership
39:56
Speaker 1: and the God who still inhabits her is the engine
40:00
Speaker 1: the chapter. Then, in Chapter three, verses six through eight,
40:04
Speaker 1: comes one of the most theologically pointed passages in the
40:07
Speaker 1: entire book. I have destroyed nations, the prophet quotes God
40:12
Speaker 1: as saying, their strongholds are demolished. I have left their
40:16
Speaker 1: streets deserted, with no one passing through. Their cities are
40:22
Speaker 1: laid waste. They are deserted and empty. Of Jerusalem. I thought,
40:28
Speaker 1: surely you will fear me and accept correction, then her
40:32
Speaker 1: place of refuge would not be destroyed, nor all my
40:35
Speaker 1: punishments come upon her. But they were still eager to
40:39
Speaker 1: act corruptly in all they did. Therefore, wait for me
40:44
Speaker 1: declares the Lord. For the day, I will stand up
40:46
Speaker 1: to testify. The argument is theodicy by analogy. Yahweh has
40:52
Speaker 1: already destroyed nations. Their streets are empty, their walls are rubble.
40:58
Speaker 1: Jerusalem watched it happen. Within Zephyniah's lifetime, or in the
41:03
Speaker 1: immediate memory of his audience. Samaria had fallen to Sargon
41:07
Speaker 1: the Sieux of Assyria in seven twenty two before Christ,
41:12
Speaker 1: the entire northern Kingdom of Israel deported and replaced with
41:16
Speaker 1: peoples from elsewhere in the Empire. Within his audience's lifetime,
41:21
Speaker 1: the Aramian states of Damascus and Hammoth had fallen, The
41:25
Speaker 1: Phoenician cities had been crushed under Esa Hadden. The Kingdom
41:29
Speaker 1: of Israel, the brother kingdom right across the border, had
41:33
Speaker 1: been erased a century earlier, and its survivors absorbed or scattered.
41:39
Speaker 1: Judah had every available case study in front of her.
41:43
Speaker 1: The prophet's argument is not that Jerusalem cannot imagine the
41:47
Speaker 1: day of the Lord. It is that she has watched
41:49
Speaker 1: the Day of the Lord happen to other people and
41:52
Speaker 1: has chosen to assume that she alone is exempt. Surely
41:58
Speaker 1: you will fear me and act correction. The prophet quotes
42:02
Speaker 1: God as having thought. The Hebrew phrasing is poignant. It
42:07
Speaker 1: is the language of a parent who hoped against the
42:11
Speaker 1: evidence that the next child would learn from the punishment
42:15
Speaker 1: of the first, and then sharply the tone of the
42:19
Speaker 1: book turns. Beginning at chapter three, verse nine, Zephyniah pivots
42:24
Speaker 1: into a section that has confused commentators for two and
42:28
Speaker 1: a half millennia because it does not look like the
42:31
Speaker 1: same prophet. Then I will purify the lips of the peoples,
42:37
Speaker 1: that all of them may call on the name of
42:39
Speaker 1: the Lord and serve him shoulder to shoulder. From beyond
42:43
Speaker 1: the rivers of cush my worshipers, my scattered people will
42:47
Speaker 1: bring me offerings. The phrase purify the lips of the
42:52
Speaker 1: peoples savah beura in Hebrew a clean lip is a
42:57
Speaker 1: deliberate 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: Zephaniah 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 fairc
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 Zephyniah promised a unified worship
44:44
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
45:53
Speaker 1: will you be haughty on my holy hill. But I
45:56
Speaker 1: will leave within you the meek and humble emnent of
46:00
Speaker 1: Israel will trust in the name of the Lord. They
46:04
Speaker 1: will do no wrong. They will tell no lies. A
46:08
Speaker 1: deceitful tongue will not be found in their mouths. They
46:12
Speaker 1: will eat and lie down, and no one will make
46:15
Speaker 1: them afraid. The vocabulary is the same vocabulary Zephaniah used
46:21
Speaker 1: at the start of eight chapter two to describe the
46:26
Speaker 1: only people who would be sheltered on the day of
46:29
Speaker 1: the Lord's anger, the meek and humble. In chapter two,
46:35
Speaker 1: they were a hopeful possibility, perhaps they would be sheltered.
46:40
Speaker 1: In chapter three, they are an accomplished reality. They will
46:44
Speaker 1: be left. They will trust, they will not lie. The
46:48
Speaker 1: conditional has hardened into a promise, and the description of
46:53
Speaker 1: them is striking. They will not lie. They will eat
46:56
Speaker 1: and lie down without fear. The most ordinary marks of
47:01
Speaker 1: ordinary peace, eating, sleeping, telling the truth become the marks
47:07
Speaker 1: of the eschatological people. There is no temple here, no kingdom,
47:13
Speaker 1: no military, Only people who can sleep without fear. That portrait,
47:19
Speaker 1: refined and inverted, would arrive on a Galilean hillside almost
47:24
Speaker 1: six centuries later, in the third Beatitude of Matthew five
47:29
Speaker 1: and then in verses fourteen through seventeen, The book opens
47:33
Speaker 1: into the section that no other Old Testament prophet quite
47:37
Speaker 1: matches Zepheniah three, verses fourteen through seventeen in the New
47:42
Speaker 1: International version reads, sing, daughter Zion, shout aloud, Israel, be
47:49
Speaker 1: glad and rejoice with all your heart, daughter Jerusalem. The
47:54
Speaker 1: Lord has taken away your punishment. He has turned back
47:58
Speaker 1: your enemy, the low Lord, the King of Israel, is
48:02
Speaker 1: with you. Never again will you fear any harm. On
48:06
Speaker 1: that day, they will say to Jerusalem, do not fear Zion.
48:11
Speaker 1: Do not let your hands hang limp. The Lord, your
48:14
Speaker 1: God is with you, the mighty warrior who saves. He
48:19
Speaker 1: will take great delight in you. In his love. He
48:22
Speaker 1: will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you
48:26
Speaker 1: with singing. That last clause he will rejoice over you
48:32
Speaker 1: with singing is a verbal image found nowhere else in
48:36
Speaker 1: the entire Old Testament. The God of Israel is described
48:40
Speaker 1: in the prophetic literature as speaking, judging, weeping, withholding speech,
48:46
Speaker 1: withdrawing his presence. He is described occasionally as singing his
48:52
Speaker 1: judgment as a dirge, as in the Song of the
48:55
Speaker 1: Vineyard in Isaiah five. But God singing with delight over
48:59
Speaker 1: his regis deemed people. God as the joyful singer over
49:04
Speaker 1: Zion appears here and only Here the Hebrew verb yagil
49:10
Speaker 1: rejoice appears with the noun rinna song, in a construction
49:16
Speaker 1: so specific that medieval Jewish commentators puzzled over it, and
49:21
Speaker 1: Christino commentators built whole theological architectures on it. That same
49:28
Speaker 1: passage carried in the medieval Latin Vulgate, the reading that
49:32
Speaker 1: became central to Marian piety in the Western Church. Jerome's
49:37
Speaker 1: translation of verses fourteen through seventeen was read each year
49:42
Speaker 1: on the feast of the Visitation and at multiple Marian
49:45
Speaker 1: 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 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 bekirbecha. 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 department of the glory
51:01
Speaker 1: of God from the temple in chapter ten of his
51:04
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
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Speaker 1: give them praise and honor in every land where they
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Speaker 1: have suffered shame. At that time I will gather you
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Speaker 1: at that time I will bring you home. I will
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Speaker 1: give you honor and praise among all the peoples of
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Speaker 1: the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes,
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Speaker 1: says the Lord. The verb kabats v gather that the
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Speaker 1: Prophet had used at the head of chapter two to
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Speaker 1: call the people to repentance, returns now in the Divine
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Speaker 1: voice as the verb of homecoming. The scattered will be gathered,
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Speaker 1: the lame will be rescued, the shame of exile will
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Speaker 1: become honor among the peoples. The book closes on the
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Speaker 1: gathering home of a people who have not yet been scattered,
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Speaker 1: written to a city that has not yet fallen in
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Speaker 1: a vocabulary that would acquire its full weight only after
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Speaker 1: Babylon had carried Judah away in five and eighty six,
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Speaker 1: before Christ and the Prophet's words had begun slowly to
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Speaker 1: come true. The prophet of the most concentrated day of
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Speaker 1: the Lord vision in the Old Testament becomes in his
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Speaker 1: last sustained passage the prophet of the most tender promise
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Speaker 1: of divine joy. In the Old Testament, the ark is
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Speaker 1: not relief after judgment. The ark is restoration that was
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Speaker 1: always the point of the judgment. The day of darkness
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Speaker 1: and gloom that opened the book closeth in the same
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Speaker 1: fifty three verses with the King of Israel singing in
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Speaker 1: the midst of his people. No other prophet in three
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Speaker 1: short chapters traveled that distance. Within thirty eight years of
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Speaker 1: Zephyonia's prophecy, the Babylonian army of Nebucudnetta breached the walls
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Speaker 1: of Jerusalem. The temple was burned, the royal house was
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Speaker 1: led in chains to Ribla. The eyes of King Zedekiah
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Speaker 1: were put out after his sons had been slaughtered before him.
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Speaker 1: The city the prophet had named the City of Oppressors
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Speaker 1: fell in the summer of five hundred eighty six before Christ,
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Speaker 1: exactly as the book had said it would. The first
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Speaker 1: fulfillment was historical, not escatological. Zepheniah's Day of the Lord
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Speaker 1: arrived first as a Babylonian campaign in the lifetime of
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Speaker 1: children who had heard the prophet preach, but the vocabulary
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Speaker 1: outran the event. The great Day of the Lord did
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Speaker 1: not stay. In the seventh century. Paul, writing to a
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Speaker 1: small congregation in Thessalonica around the year fifty one after Christ,
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Speaker 1: would tell them that the day of the Lord will
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Speaker 1: come like a thief in the night. Peter in Second
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Speaker 1: Peter three, verse ten would say that the day of
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Speaker 1: the Lord will come like a thief, and the heavens
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Speaker 1: will pass away with a loud noise. John of Patmos
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Speaker 1: in Revelation six, verse seventeen would describe the kings of
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Speaker 1: the Earth hiding in caves and crying out the great
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Speaker 1: day of their wrath has come, and who can stand.
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Speaker 1: All three are quoting in different keys the prophet. The
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Speaker 1: line they share the great day the wrath, The question
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Speaker 1: of who can stand is line by line Zephaniah's line,
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Speaker 1: and the dyes erae of the Latin Requiem, opening with
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Speaker 1: the words Thomas of Celano had lifted from Zephaniah one
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Speaker 1: verse fifteen, would carry the same vocabulary into seven centuries
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Speaker 1: of Christian funerals. This is what the three chapter Scroll did.
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Speaker 1: It compressed cosmic judgment, oracles against the nations, and the
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Speaker 1: restoration of a singing remnant into fifty three verses, and
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Speaker 1: that compression became the architectural template. Every later writer working
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Speaker 1: on the Day of the Lord would borrow from the
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Speaker 1: Prophet of Royal Blood, whom Manasse's Jerusalem produced and whom
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Speaker 1: Josiah's reform would soon partly satisfy, disappeared into his own book,
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Speaker 1: The Day of the Lord did not. It became the
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Speaker 1: lens through which Paul read the Return of Christ, through
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Speaker 1: which Peter read the Dissolution of the heavens, through which
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Speaker 1: John of Patmoss read the end of the Age, and
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Speaker 1: through which the medieval Latin Church read its own death.
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Speaker 1: The prophet almost no one reads is the prophet almost
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Speaker 1: every one quotes, without knowing