Zechariah 7King James Version
A delegation comes to ask whether they should keep fasting in the fifth month as they have done for seventy years. Zechariah answers by recalling the prophets before the exile: execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother. The fast was never what God wanted most.
Two years later, a delegation from Bethel asks whether the fasting commemorating Jerusalem's destruction should continue now that restoration is underway. God responds with a sharp question: who were they fasting for? Then through Zechariah he rehearses the prophets' pre-exile message that genuine religion is justice for the vulnerable, not ritual performance. Israel's ancestors refused to hear, so God scattered them. The land lay desolate because the people made it so.
Religious ritual that sidesteps justice for the poor is not worship; it is performance for an empty audience.
"Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother." (7:9) The simplicity of this standard against the elaborate ritual question exposes the gap between what God has always required and what the people have preferred to debate.
The delegation arrives from Bethel in winter, two years into the temple rebuilding. Their question about fasting is sincere: the annual mourning rituals remember the destruction of the city and the temple, and now that both are being rebuilt, do the fasts still apply? God turns the question around. Did you fast for me, or for yourselves? Did you eat for me, or for yourselves? The honest answer is that the rituals were always more about communal identity than genuine worship.
Sherezer and Regemmelech are sent by the community at Bethel to ask the priests and prophets about fasting practices. God addresses the entire nation through Zechariah. The former prophets, unnamed but authoritative, are cited as witnesses to Israel's ancient failure. The widows, fatherless, strangers, and poor are the diagnostic group: how they are treated reveals whether the community is genuinely turning to God.
Zechariah 7 inserts prophetic ethics into the middle of a restoration narrative. The community is excited about rebuilding but needs reminding that what God wants rebuilt is not primarily a structure but a society. The passage connects directly to Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, drawing a throughline from pre-exile failure to post-exile opportunity. The question of fasting recurs in chapter 8 with a strikingly different answer.
The tone is pointed but not cruel. God's questions land as challenges to self-examination rather than accusations. The historical recap that follows carries sadness, the prophets cried and no one listened; then the people cried and God stopped listening.
1And it came to pass in the fourth year of king Darius, that the word of the LORD came unto Zechariah in the fourth day of the ninth month, even in Chisleu;
2When they had sent unto the house of God Sherezer and Regemmelech, and their men, to pray before the LORD,
3And to speak unto the priests which were in the house of the LORD of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years?
4Then came the word of the LORD of hosts unto me, saying,
5Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me?
6And when ye did eat, and when ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves?
7Should ye not hear the words which the LORD hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity, and the cities thereof round about her, when men inhabited the south and the plain?
8And the word of the LORD came unto Zechariah, saying,
9Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother:
10And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.
11But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear.
12Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the LORD of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets: therefore came a great wrath from the LORD of hosts.
13Therefore it is come to pass, that as he cried, and they would not hear; so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the LORD of hosts:
14But I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations whom they knew not. Thus the land was desolate after them, that no man passed through nor returned: for they laid the pleasant land desolate.