30 Zechariahs

Reference · 9 minute read

The Name Means “God Remembers”

I went looking for one Zechariah and found more than thirty. Then I noticed how many of them were murdered.

The name is a sentence. Zekaryah — the LORD has remembered. Whoever picked it was making a claim, not choosing a sound they liked.

It was a wildly popular name. More than thirty men in Scripture carry it1 — kings, priests, prophets, gatekeepers, harp players, a man whose entire biblical footprint is his name in a list of trumpet players. Most of them get one verse and vanish.

What I didn’t expect was the body count. And I really didn’t expect three of them to die in the same building, nine centuries apart.

The one who was stoned by the boy his father saved

Start with the worst of it, because it’s also the best story.

Athaliah murdered the royal family to take the throne of Judah. One infant survived — Joash, smuggled out by his aunt Jehosheba and hidden in the temple for six years by her husband, the high priest Jehoiada (2 Chronicles 22:10–12). Jehoiada raised that boy in secret, staged the coup that crowned him at seven, and then spent decades as the closest thing Joash had to a father. The Chronicler is blunt about the arrangement: Joash did right in the eyes of the LORD all the years of Jehoiada the priest (2 Chronicles 24:2).

Jehoiada died at a hundred and thirty. They buried him with the kings.

And Joash drifted. The officials flattered him, the nation went back to Asherah poles, and God sent prophets nobody listened to. So the Spirit came on Zechariah son of Jehoiada — the priest’s own boy, raised alongside the king, more or less his foster brother — and he stood up above the people and said it plainly: Why do you disobey the LORD’s commands? You will not prosper.

He was killed in the building that had hidden the king who killed him.

His last words are the part I keep turning over. A man whose name means the LORD remembers, dying under a pile of rocks, says: May the LORD see this and call you to account (2 Chronicles 24:22). He didn’t forgive. He asked God to remember. He spent his last breath on his own name.

Eight centuries later another man is dying under rocks in Jerusalem, and Stephen says the opposite — Lord, do not hold this sin against them (Acts 7:60). I don’t think that contrast is an accident. Within the year, Joash was murdered in his bed by his own officials, and the Chronicler tells you exactly why they did it (2 Chronicles 24:25). God remembered.

The one who lasted six months

Fifty years on, up in the northern kingdom, a different Zechariah inherits a throne.

He’s the son of Jeroboam II, and he’s the fourth generation of Jehu’s line — which matters, because God had told Jehu almost a century earlier that his sons would sit on Israel’s throne to the fourth generation (2 Kings 10:30). Jehoahaz, Jehoash, Jeroboam II, Zechariah. That’s four.

Zechariah reigned six months. Then Shallum son of Jabesh attacked him in front of the people and killed him, and the writer of Kings doesn’t even pause for grief. He just notes the arithmetic: So the word of the LORD spoken to Jehu was fulfilled (2 Kings 15:12).

That one unsettles me more than the stoning does. A promise gets made, four generations go by, and it settles up on schedule — on a man whose name announced that this is exactly what God does. Israel never had a stable dynasty again.2

The one who got the book — and a quiet ending

The famous one is the prophet, son of Berechiah, grandson of Iddo — a priest and a prophet both, which is rarer than it sounds. He was probably born in exile and came home to rubble. Alongside Haggai he pushed a demoralized remnant to finish the second temple, and his oracles carry three exact dates: October 520 BC, February 519, December 518 (Zechariah 1:1, 1:7, 7:1).

Then he goes into visions — a man on a red horse, a flying scroll, a lampstand, a high priest in filthy clothes getting a change of wardrobe in a courtroom. And the lines that end up all over the Gospels: a king coming to Jerusalem righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). Thirty pieces of silver thrown to the potter (11:12–13). They will look on me, the one they have pierced (12:10). Strike the shepherd and the sheep scatter (13:7).

Scripture never says how he died. The old tradition says he came back from Babylon an old man, served out his years as a priest in Jerusalem, died at a great age, and was buried beside Haggai.3 Of all of them, he’s the one who got the ordinary ending — and he’s the one who wrote the most about God remembering.

The one who lost his voice

Five hundred years later, an old priest of the division of Abijah draws the lot for the incense offering. There were hundreds of priests in rotation, serving two weeks a year; most got that turn once in a lifetime and plenty never got it at all. This was his one morning (Luke 1:5–9).

Gabriel meets him at the altar and tells him the prayer he and Elizabeth had given up on is answered. Zechariah asks for proof. He loses his voice for nine months (Luke 1:18–20). He gets it back the moment he writes His name is John on a tablet, and the first thing he does with it is prophesy over the baby (Luke 1:63, 67–79).

Then Luke drops him. Chapter one, verse eighty jumps straight to John growing up in the wilderness, and the father is never mentioned again.

Tradition wouldn’t leave it alone. The Protoevangelium of James, written maybe a century later, has Herod’s men come looking for the infant John, and when Zechariah won’t say where his son is hidden, they kill him in the temple — he answers, I am God’s martyr if you shed my blood.4 Gregory of Nyssa tells a stranger version where the mob kills him at the altar over a dispute about Mary.5 A fourth-century tomb in the Kidron valley carries an inscription naming him the martyr, the holy priest, the father of John.6

The puzzle Jesus left behind

Here’s where it gets genuinely knotty, and I love it.

Jesus, indicting the religious leadership, says the blood of every prophet will come on that generation — from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar (Matthew 23:35).

Two things are happening at once.

The first is beautiful. Abel is murdered in Genesis 4. Zechariah son of Jehoiada is murdered in 2 Chronicles 24. In the Hebrew ordering of the canon, Chronicles is the last book — so Jesus is naming the first murder in the Bible and the last one, and sweeping in everything between. It’s the equivalent of saying “from Genesis to Revelation.” He’s not building a chronology. He’s drawing a bracket around the whole story.7

The second is a headache. Chronicles says Zechariah son of Jehoiada. Matthew says son of Berekiah — which is the prophet’s father, four hundred years later. Luke’s version of the same saying skips the patronymic entirely (Luke 11:51).

The proposals, roughly in order of how often I’ve seen them defended:

1. Jehoiada was the grandfather, Berekiah the actual father. “Son of” routinely skips a generation in Hebrew.
2. A very early copyist added “son of Berekiah” in the margin, thinking of the prophet, and it migrated into the text — which would explain why Luke doesn’t have it.
3. Jehoiada went by two names. Common enough in that world.
4. Jesus was speaking prophetically about a murder that hadn’t happened yet.

Which brings us to the one Josephus saw

Around AD 68, with Jerusalem coming apart, the Zealots decided to get rid of a wealthy citizen named Zacharias son of Baruch. He was, Josephus says, a man who hated wickedness and loved liberty — which was his problem.

So they staged a trial. Empaneled seventy leading citizens as judges. Charged him with plotting to hand the city to the Romans. Produced no evidence at all.

And the seventy acquitted him. Unanimously. Josephus says they chose rather to die with him than to have his death on their hands.

Two Zealots rushed him in the middle of the temple and killed him where he stood, and said over the body: now you have our verdict too, and a surer acquittal. Then they threw him into the valley below.8

A man named “God remembers,” killed between the temple and the altar, roughly thirty-five years after Jesus said those words in that courtyard. Some readers think that’s what he meant. I can’t prove it. I only know I stopped reading and sat there a minute.

And the rest of them

Most Zechariahs died the way most people do — unrecorded. They’re worth a minute anyway, because a name this common in the record means it was this common in the street.

There are more. A grandfather of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:2). A Levite whose descendant Jahaziel prophesied that Judah wouldn’t have to fight (2 Chronicles 20:14). Sons of Jehoshaphat, temple supervisors under Josiah, family heads on Ezra’s roster, priests blowing trumpets on the wall with Nehemiah (2 Chronicles 21:2; 35:8; Ezra 8:16; Nehemiah 12:35). The name is everywhere, which is the point.

What I’m taking from it

I started this looking up one man’s dates and ended up with a list of graves.

What strikes me is that the name is a claim, and the lives mostly look like counterevidence. A boy is named “the LORD remembers” and gets stoned by his foster brother in his father’s temple. Another gets six months and a knife. A third loses his voice on the one morning of his life that mattered. If you were grading the name against the outcomes, you’d say the parents overpromised.

Except the ledger keeps settling. Joash dies for what he did. Jehu’s line ends on the generation it was told it would end on. The old priest gets his voice back and uses it to bless a baby. The prophet who wrote the most about God remembering is the one who got to grow old.

The name was never a prediction about how the man’s life would go. It was a statement about who God is, hung on a kid, and carried around for eighty years as a walking argument.

Say a name like that out loud often enough and you’re making the case whether you meant to or not.