Zephaniah

“ The short prophecy of Zephaniah, who prophesied "in the days of Josiah ben Amon king of Judah," and was therefore a contemporary of Jeremiah, is best explained by reference to this crisis in the affairs of Western Asia. Zephaniah's very first word is a startling menace. "I will utterly away with everything from off the face of the ground, saith Iahvah." "I will away with man and beast, I will away with the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumblingblocks along with the wicked (i.e. the idols with their worshippers) ”

“ Zephaniah found the historical occasion for his prophecy in the moral depravity of Judah and Jerusalem, in the depth to which his people had fallen in idolatry, and in their obstinate resistance to all the efforts made by the prophets and the pious king Josiah to stem the corruption, and thus avert from Judah the judgment threatened even by Moses and the earlier prophets, of the dispersion of the whole nation among the heathen. ”

“ In the first few verses of Zephaniah we see almost as much of Jerusalem as in the whole book either of Isaiah or Jeremiah.
For so young a man the vision of Zephaniah may seem strangely dark and final. Yet not otherwise was Isaiah’s inaugural vision, and as a rule it is the young and not the old whose indignation is ardent and unsparing. Zephaniah carries this temper to the extreme. There is no great hope in his book, hardly any tenderness and never a glimpse of beauty. A townsman, Zephaniah has no eye for nature ”

“ It was a time of revival (2Ki. 22) , but the captivity was impending, nevertheless, and Zephaniah points out the moral state which, despite the superficial revival under Josiah (Jeremiah 2:11-13) , made it inevitable. ”

“ Zephaniah stands too near to judgment and the last things. Character is fixed, the time for pleading is past; there remains only the separation of bad men from good. It is the same standpoint (at least ethically) as that of Christ’s visions of the Judgment. Perhaps also an austere gospel was required by the fashionable temper of the day. The generation was loud and arrogant; it gilded the future to excess, and knew no shame. [184] The true prophet was forced to reticence; he must make his age feel the desperate earnestness of life, and that salvation is by fire. ”

“ The prophecies of Zephaniah and Jeremiah, called forth by the Scythian invasion,198 have also been thought of, although the point of view there is different from that of Ezekiel. In Jeremiah and Zephaniah the Scythians are the scourge of God, appointed for the chastisement of the sinful nation; whereas Gog is brought up against a holy people, and for the express purpose of having judgment executed on himself. On the supposition that Ezekiel's vision was coloured by his recollection of the Scythians, this view has no doubt the greatest likelihood. ”

“ If we are right, that Zephaniah was a young man towards 625, then Kushi must have been born towards 663, about the time of the conflicts between Assyria and Egypt, and it is possible that, as Manasseh and the predominant party in Judah so closely hung upon and imitated Assyria, the adherents of Jehovah put their hope in Egypt, whereof, it may be, this name Kushi is a token. [106] The name Zephaniah itself, meaning Jehovah hath hidden, suggests the prophet’s birth in the “killing-time” of Manasseh. There was at least one other contemporary of the same name—a priest executed by Nebuchadrezzar. ”

“ Jeremiah's older and younger contemporaries, Zephaniah and Ezekiel, alike confirm his testimony. In the spirit and even the style afterwards used by Jeremiah, Zephaniah enumerates the sins of the nobles and teachers of Jerusalem. "Her princes within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves.... Her prophets are light and treacherous persons: her priests [Pg 277] have polluted the sanctuary, they have done violence to the law." [282] Ezekiel xx. traces the defections of Israel from the sojourn in Egypt to the Captivity. ”

“ For the present I shall put down those predictions about Christ by the prophet Zephaniah, who prophesied with Jeremiah. “Wait ye upon me, saith the Lord, in the day of my resurrection, in the future; because it is my determination to assemble the nations, and gather together the kingdoms.” [7] And again he says, “The Lord will be terrible upon them, and will exterminate all the gods of the earth; and they shall worship Him every man from his place, even all the isles of the nations.” ”

“ The heathen being overthrown, Israel is free, and may have her king again. Therefore Zechariah is ordered—it would appear on the same day as that on which he received the Visions—to visit a certain deputation from the captivity in Babylon, Heldai, Tobiyah and Yedayah, at the house of Josiah the son of Zephaniah, where they have just arrived ”

“ Do not speak to him.—Do not look at him.—He is the most infamous of men.—A curse lies on him.—Utter not his name.—Utter not his name.
Zephaniah
Who is it that spake, saying “Blinded?” I am sure I know the voice.
Voices
Ask not his name.—He is one accurst.—He is rejected of God.
A Woman
He is the curse of God, sent for our burning torment. He is the scourge of God.—Jeremiah, Jeremiah!
Zephaniah
[With a wild outcry, stretching forth his hands as if to thrust away something horrible] Jeremiah!
Jeremiah
Why do you shrink from me? What are you afraid of? There is no longer any reason for fear. ”

“ Whether true or not, every sexagenarian hereabouts is a weather prophet, and their combined wisdom is, as might be seen, valueless. Every one of these worthy men, as such, is a delusion and a snare, but all have faithful followers. Uncle Zephaniah, for instance, was very impatient, to express it mildly, when I spoke of the winter of 1881-’82. ”

“ Or, rather, it was some other Jehoiada, his immediate predecessor in this office, who perhaps was carried to Babylon among the priests, v. 1. Zephaniah is advanced, sooner than he expected, to this place of trust and power, and Shemaiah would have him think that Providence had preferred him that he might persecute God's prophets, that he had come to this government for such a time as this, and that he was unjust and ungrateful if he did not thus improve his power, or, rather, abuse it. Their hearts are wretchedly hardened who can justify the doing of mischief by their having a power to do it. ”

“ According to late tradition Zephaniah, like Habakkuk, was of the tribe of Simeon (cf. Micah of Mareshah and Obadiah of Bethhaccerem, see Cheyne, Ency. Bib., col. 3455) . The apocryphal prophecy of Zeph. (Clement of Alex., Strom., v. 11, 77; see Schürer, Gesch. Volk. Isr., m. 271 seq.) merely illustrates the tendency to utilize older traditions. ”

“ Nay, he takes upon him to chide Zephaniah for his neglect (v. 27) : Why hast thou not rebuked and restrained Jeremiah of Anathoth? See how insolent and imperious these false prophets had grown, that, though they were in captivity, they would give law to the priests who were not only at liberty, but in power. It is common for those that pretend to more knowledge than their neighbours to be thus assuming. Now here is a remarkable instance of the hardness of the hearts of sinners, and it is enough to make us all fear lest our hearts be at any time hardened. ”

“ He was a literary man. He had been destined by his parents for agricultural pursuits, but his genius was above them. The circumstances, the trifling circumstances, which tend to develope the powers of the mind and to direct the energies into their proper channel, are always worthy of notice. Everybody knows the story of Sir Isaac Newton [55] and the apple. But everybody does not know, but soon will know, the circumstances which made Zephaniah Pringle a critic.
When Zephaniah was about twelve years old he was taken to Smatterton by his father, who had to make a call of business on Mr Kipperson. ”

“ The subject is a series of foreign nations—Philistia (5–7) , Moab and Ammon (8–10) , Egypt (11) and Assyria (13–15) . The passage has given rise to many doubts; every one must admit the difficulty of coming to a conclusion as to its authenticity. On the one hand, the destruction just predicted is so universal that, as Professor Davidson says, we should expect Zephaniah to mention other nations than Judah. [95] The concluding oracle on Niniveh must have been published before 608, and even Schwally admits that it may be Zephaniah’s own. ”

“ She shall become a praise and a name (cf. Jer. xxxiii. 9) when Yahweh brings back the captivity “before your eyes” (i.e. in your generation) .
It is a natural assumption that prophecies have a practical end and refer to existing or impending conditions. [4] But although one single leading motive runs through the book of Zephaniah there are abrupt transitions which do not concern mere subjective considerations of logical or smooth thought, but material and organic changes representing different groups of ideas. ”

“ Here, then, we have historical evidence of the admission to the sanctuary of a class of foreigners answering in all respects to the uncircumcised aliens of Ezekiel's legislation. That the practice of enlisting foreign mercenaries for the guard continued till the reign of Josiah seems to be indicated by an allusion in the book of Zephaniah, where the prophet denounces a body of men in the service of the king who observed the Philistine custom of “leaping over the threshold” (Zeph. i. 9: cf. 1 Sam. v. 5) . ”

“ Under the alarm of an immediate and general war, Zephaniah proclaims a vast destruction upon the earth. Judah must fall beneath it: the worshippers of Baal, of the host of heaven and of Milcom, the apostates from Jehovah, the princes and house of the king, the imitators of foreign fashions, and the forceful and fraudulent, shall be cut off in a great slaughter. Those who have grown sceptical and indifferent to Jehovah shall be unsettled by invasion and war. ”

“ In this dread crisis Zedekiah sent Zephaniah, the son of Maaseiah, the priest, and Jehucal, to Jeremiah, entreating his prayers for the city, [849] for he had not yet been put in prison. Doubtless he prayed, and at first it looked as if deliverance would come. Pharaoh Hophrah put in motion the Egyptian army with its Carian mercenaries and Soudanese negroes, and Nebuchadrezzar was sufficiently alarmed to raise the siege and go to meet the Egyptians. The hopes of the people probably rose high, though multitudes seized [Pg 448] the opportunity to fly to the mountains. ”

“ It was upon this return of conscience and right reason that Zedekiah sent two messengers, Passur and Zephaniah, to Jeremiah, saying, "Inquire, I pray thee, of the Lord for us; for Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon maketh war against us! if so be the Lord will deal with us according to all his wondrous works, that he may go up from us," &c. See chap. xxi. ver. 1 and 2. But a very unwelcome answer was given to the messengers, to be returned to their monarch; for the prophet confirmed all the heavy judgments (Jer. xxi. 3 to 7.) ”

“ On the whole, then, the most probable conclusion is that chap. ii. 4–15 was originally an authentic oracle of Zephaniah’s in the elegiac metre, uttered at the same date as chap. i.—ii. 3, the period of the Scythian invasion, though from a different standpoint; and that it has suffered considerable dilapidation (witness especially vv. 6 and 14) , and probably one great intrusion, vv. 8–10.
There remains the Third Chapter. The authenticity has been denied by Schwally, who transfers the whole till after the Exile. But the chapter is not a unity. ”

“ The interest of Nahum's prophecy is merely local; he does not rise beyond the politics of the hour, and we need not therefore stop to examine his utterances in detail. It may be noted, however, that an expression which has become famous through its adoption by a much later prophet, "Behold, upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace," is first found in Nahum.
Zephaniah's prophecy arose out of a great movement of nations. He lived in the reign of Josiah, but wrote before the reformation effected by that monarch. ”

“ The three memorable events of this brief epoch were, (I.) the movement of the Scythians, (II.) the rise of Babylon, and (III.) the humiliation of Nineveh, followed by her total destruction.
I. Many of Jeremiah's earlier prophecies belong to this period, and we see that both he and Zephaniah—who was probably a great-great-grandson of King [Pg 375] Hezekiah himself, [666] and prophesied in this reign [667] —are greatly occupied with a danger from the North which seems to threaten universal ruin. ”

“ From the fact that "the king's children" are included in the threatened visitation—in the Hebrew, "I will visit upon the princes and the king's children" (1:8) —some have inferred that they must have been already grown and addicted to idolatrous practices; consequently that Zephaniah wrote later than the eighteenth year of Josiah. But, as Keil and others have remarked, the mention of the king's children may have been added simply to indicate the universality of the approaching {345} visitation ”

“ Verses 18-21Verses 18-21 2Ki 25:18-21 (cf. Jer 52:24-27) . The principal officers of the temple and city, and sixty men of the population of the land, who were taken at the destruction of Jerusalem, Nebuzaradan sent to his king at Riblah, where they were put to death. Seraiah, the high priest, is the grandfather or great-grandfather of Ezra the scribe (Ezr 7:1; 1Ch 6:14) . Zephaniah, a priest of the second rank (משׁנה כּהן; in Jer. המּשׁנה כּהן: see at 2Ki 23:4) , is probably the same person as the son of Maaseiah, who took a prominent place among the priests, according to Jer 21:1 ”