Zechariah’s Seething Blood Was Just Vengeance

The accusation that in the past “The Jews Killed The Prophets” is designed by a religious establishment to explain why their own current religious situation, or someone else [the Jews’] religious situation, is the result of their Jewish ancestor’s bad behavior. Jewish priests originated the accusation, Orthodox Rabbis and Christian polemicists often used the incident of the golden calf in place of it, and Muslim polemicists returned to the Jewish priests view of it.

Outrage and fury can make ones blood seethe. Holding a grudge for decades and a long term desire for revenge can stimulate people to do terrible things. A short biblical passage (2 Chronicles 24:17-22) refers to a pre exilic prophet who was killed in the Holy Temple by order of the king.

Prophet Zechariah (not the post exilic prophet) was a priest and a prophet who stood above the people and admonished them. King Joash (who ruled 836-798 BCE) gave orders to have Zechariah killed, and he was stoned to death in the courtyard of the Temple. As he was dying, Zechariah said, “May the Lord see and requite this.”

From his call for justice and revenge, an elaborate midrash was constructed and connected to the Babylonian general Nebuzaradan whose army conquered Jerusalem over two hundred years later. (Gitten 57b and Sanhedrin 96b)

Upon entering the Temple, Nebuzaradan saw a pool of blood seething and bubbling in the inner courtyard before the altar. He asked the priests: “What is the matter with this blood?” He was told it was blood from the daily offerings. He said, “Tell me the truth or I will have all of you whipped.” The priests replied, “What can we say to you. There was a priest among us named Zechariah who was also a prophet. He used to reprove us (priests and rulers) for the transgressions we committed, so we rose up against him and killed him. It has been many years now and his blood has not become still.”

Nebuzaradan said, “I will put it to rest.” He ordered the arrest of all the judges in Jerusalem and had them executed next to the blood, but the blood did not rest. He then killed all the young priests, but the blood did not stop seething. He then ordered young men and women from the general population of the city to be killed, but the blood continued to boil. He even ordered the slaughter of school children but the blood would not rest.

Finally General Nebuzaradan drew near the blood and said, “Zechariah, Zechariah, I have slain the best of them. Do you want me to kill all of them?” At that the blood stopped seething.

Zechariah’s public stoning by priests went unpunished by judges. The priests and judges of Jerusalem were complicit in Zechariah’s death so their unrepentant descendants were held responsible. But why blame the young men and women or the school children? A zeal for justice led to a seething rage for vengeance, which became unrestrained hatred, that grew as the decades went by, because priests in later generations refused to atone for the sins of their fathers. Zealous righteousness can lead to sin.

The account of Zechariah seething blood appears multiple times in somewhat different versions in the midrash collection Eicha Rabbah: proem 23 claims Zechariah spoke arrogantly (he stood above the people); II:4 questions where the stoning took place (and thus who did it); and IV:16 lists seven sins committed on that one day.

Two instances state that Nebuzaradan regretted carrying out his slaughter, and God in response hinted to the blood to be still. This could have been added to put God into the story; to emphasize the power of Nebuzaradan’s repentance; or to play down a Gentile’s role in calming Zechariah’s seething blood by exposing the prophet’s extremism.

Another, twice repeated expansion about the outrageous murder of Zechariah (perhaps an attempt to justify the 200 year long seething blood and the mass slaughter) claims that “seven sins were committed by Israel on that day. They killed a priest, a prophet, and a judge. They shed innocent blood. They profaned the Divine Name. They defiled the Temple court. And all this was done on a Shabbat that was also Yom Kippur.” (IV: 16) Note that the guilty have now expanded from the priests and the rulers to include the people of Israel collectively.

Rabbi Judan asked Rabbi Aha, “Where did the Israelites slay Zechariah, in the Courtyard of Israel or in the Courtyard of Women?” He replied: “In neither of these. It was in the Courtyard of the Priests.” (Eicha Rabbah proem 4 & 4:16) Rabbi Judan already thinks the Israelites killed Zechariah, so the stoning of Zechariah must have taken place in one of the outer courtyards where every Jew could go. Rabbi Aha responds that it took place in the inner courtyard where only priests could go, thus limiting responsibility for the public stoning of Zechariah to the priests.

The charge that the whole people of Israel are guilty of killing God’s prophets is a vast exaggeration by some overly judgmental rabbis who were perhaps themselves guilty of self righteousness. Some rabbis also added Amos (Shalshelet haKabbalah 97, perhaps based on a Christian source) and Isaiah to the list of prophets killed by the government (Yebamot 49b, Sanhedrin 103b, and Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 10: 28c). Thus, it is not surprising that two gospels report that Jesus blamed Jerusalem for killing prophets, (Luke 13:34 & Matthew 23:29-37) even mentioning Zechariah by name.

Paul expanded the charge of killing the prophets from the Jews of Jerusalem to Jews in general. (Thessalonians 2:15) This charge was picked up and repeated by Christian and then Muslim polemicists, not as a positive example of a Jewish emphasis on honest self criticism and public confession, but as a way of condemning Jews and Judaism.

The Qur’an does not make this simplistic, and therefore erroneous charge. The Qur’an recognizes that before the rise of the Muslim community, Jews were often subject to ignominy— except for a rescue rope God, or sometimes other peoples, held out to them, even though some Jews were involved in killing the prophets. The Qur’an states, “If only the People of the Book believed, it would be sheer good for them. Among them there are believers, but most of them are transgressors….Ignominy has been their portion wherever they are found, except for a rope from God, or a rope from other peoples, they were visited with God’s wrath, and misery has been heaped on them.

All this because they persistently disbelieved our signs of truth, and killed the prophets against all right. All this because they disobeyed (God) and kept transgressing (Mitsvot). (Of course) they are not all alike; among the People of the Book there is an upright community.” (Qur’an Al Imran 110b & 112- 114)

This is the normative view of much of the midrash about the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of Israel from its land, although it is a more nuanced view than the simplistic view of Rabbi Judan mentioned above. Christian and Muslim polemicists, however, vastly expanded the charge of killing the prophets and so demonized it that by the 13th century the Muslim polemicist Imam ibn Qayyim al Jawziah could write, “they killed the prophets out of sheer aggression to the point that they massacred seventy prophets in one day.” (Guidance to the Uncertain in Reply to Jews and Christians p. 244)

Some Jews today offer harsh criticism of Israel and their own Jewish community in the same dramatically exaggerated way. Some other Jews consistently urge Jews to avoid all public criticism of Israel as a way of avoiding any criticism at all. On a personal level, some people justify severely criticizing other people in what amounts to verbal cruelty by claiming that what they say is true. Truth among individuals should always be spoken in moderation and with kindness.

But this might not be possible in democratic politics when one needs to grab attention from the media and win elections with simple slogans. A 2008 survey of Israeli Jews found that 4% thought only Jews were to blame for the outbreak and continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; 8% agreed with the Palestinian claim that Palestinian refugees left due to expulsion by the Jews; 41% said the Palestinians left due to fear and calls of Arab leaders to leave; and 39% said both were factors in creating the refuge problem. Jews seem to be unusually introspective and self-critical. Some would consider this a weakness; others a strength.

The oft repeated account of Zechariah’s seething blood can also be read as a criticism of the growing rabbinic tendency to blame every generation’s trials and troubles on the sins of the Jewish people in days of yore. When afflictions and massacres befell good and pious Jewish communities, the sins of long past generations of Jews were invoked.

Thus when Rabbi Yitzchok Argueti, a Turkish rabbi, heard about the slaughter of over 100,000 Jews during the Cossack upraising against the Poles in 1648, he wrote, “We heard what happened to our brothers in the Ashkenazi lands where tens of thousands were killed, including many lions of the Torah. This was because of our sins and we must mourn and weep and look to our own deeds, repenting so that all this should be an atonement for this generation.” (Me’am Lo’ez to Deuteronomy 4:27&26)

But seventeenth century Jews were among of the most pious Jews in Jewish history. An explanation can be found in Argueti’s reference three pages earlier that “it was decreed that the sin of the Golden Calf be visited upon the Israelites in every generation and that they should die by sword, famine and plague.” Of course this concept violates the Torah’s teaching in the Ten Commandments that the consequences of evil deeds last for only 3-4 generations while the impact of good deeds lasts for up to a thousand generations. (Exodus 20:5-6 & Deuteronomy 5: 9-10)

Eight verses in the Qur’an assert that the Jews killed their Prophets. Is this correct? No and yes. No, because the Jewish people themselves wrote down and preserved most of the words of their 600 prophets.The rabbis even identified 55 prophets by name: 48 males and 7 females. And not because none of all the non-Jewish peoples preserved the words of the monotheistic prophets sent to them, until the time of the last Jewish Prophet; Mary’s son Jesus.