CHAPTER 7
In the fourth
year
of King
Darius,
the word
of the LORD
came
to
Zechariah
on the fourth
day of the ninth
month,
the month of Chislev.
Now the people of Bethel
had sent
Sharezer
and
Regem-melech,
along with their men,
to plead
before
the LORD
by asking
the priests
of the house
of the LORD
of Hosts
as well as the prophets,
“Should I weep
and fast
in the fifth
month,
as
I have done
these
many
years?”
“Ask
all
the people
of the land
and the priests,
‘When
you fasted
and mourned
in the fifth
and seventh months
for these
seventy
years,
was it really for Me
that you fasted?
Are these not
the words
that
the LORD
proclaimed
through
the earlier
prophets,
when Jerusalem
and its surrounding
towns
were
populous
and prosperous,
and the Negev
and the Lowland
were inhabited?’”
“This is what
the LORD
of Hosts
says:
‘Administer
TRUE
justice.
Show
loving devotion
and compassion
to
one
another.
Do not
oppress
the widow
or the fatherless,
the foreigner
or the poor.
And do not
plot
evil
in your hearts
against one
another.’
But they refused
to pay attention
and turned
a stubborn
shoulder;
they stopped up
their ears
from hearing.
They made
their hearts
like flint
and would not listen to
the law
and
the words
that
the LORD
of Hosts
had sent
by His Spirit
through
the earlier
prophets.
Therefore great
anger
came
from
the LORD
of Hosts.
Therefore
just as
I had called
and they would not
listen,
so
when they called
I would not
listen,
says
the LORD
of Hosts.
But I scattered them with a whirlwind
among
all
the nations
that
they had not
known,
and the land
was left desolate
behind them,
so that no one could come
or go.
Thus they turned
a pleasant
land
into a desolation.”