Zechariah (Zecharias)

Zechariah (Greek Zecharias) is a Hebrew personal name meaning "Yahweh has remembered," carried by a number of different men across the Old and New Testaments, among them a priest in the Chronicler's narrative, a witness in Isaiah's day, and the post-exilic prophet whose oracles form the book that bears the name. Because the name was common, the word in a given verse identifies no one by itself; the referent has to be settled from the context and the patronymic attached to it.

The text says that the Spirit of God came on Zechariah son of Jehoiada the priest, that he stood above the people, and that he charged them with disobeying Yahweh's commandments and forsaking him, so that Yahweh had also forsaken them (2 Chronicles 24:20). His is a prophetic word delivered inside the temple precincts by a member of the priestly line, and it is the last such confrontation in the book. The name also appears in Isaiah 8, where a Zechariah son of Jeberechiah is named as a trustworthy witness alongside Uriah the priest (Isaiah 8:2), in the same chapter that speaks of the child called Immanuel, "God is with us" (Isaiah 8:10), and of Yahweh himself as sanctuary, stumbling stone, trap, and snare for both houses of Israel (Isaiah 8:13-14).

The New Testament use that raises the most questions is Matthew 23:35, where Jesus speaks of "Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar." The parallel in Luke 11:51 gives the name only, "Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary," without a patronymic. Two scriptural details complicate the identification: the Chronicler's Zechariah is the son of Jehoiada, not Barachiah, while the prophetic book opens with "Zechariah son of Berechiah" (Zechariah 1:1). It is an established observation, widely though not universally accepted, that 2 Chronicles stands last in the Hebrew ordering of the canon, so that "from Abel to Zechariah" (Matthew 23:35) spans the whole range of the Hebrew Scriptures from first to last martyr.

How the traditions read this differs. One long-standing Christian reading takes Matthew's "son of Barachiah" to point to the prophet of that name while the manner of death is drawn from the account of the priest, treating the two Zechariahs as one figure, and some have proposed a copyist's assimilation of the patronymic. Others keep the priest and the prophet distinct and hold that Matthew names a Zechariah otherwise unknown to us, of whom the murder between sanctuary and altar was remembered. Still others regard the difference between Matthew and Luke as evidence that the patronymic was supplied from tradition or from the prophetic title. The Isaiah witness is normally treated as a third, unrelated bearer of the name. No single identification commands consent across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant interpretation; the name itself is shared, and each verse must be read on its own terms.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.