Zechariah 7-8

With the building of the Second Temple and the end of the seventy years of exile, the people began to wonder how to relate to the fast days which were decreed after the destruction of the First Temple. Perek 7 begins with a description of the arrival of a delegation, apparently from the Babylonian exile, to the priests and prophets in Jerusalem in order to ask about one of the fast days (7:1-3). Zechariah’s answer includes several short prophecies which are based on quotes from earlier prophecies of the “former prophets”, mostly from Yirmiyahu. At the beginning and again at the end Zechariah addresses the question of the status of the fast days directly, and in the middle he reviews the past and remembers the early prophecies of doom and then the prophecies of consolation. These prophecies are presented in a chiastic structure and together are designed to deal with this question.