Families keep anniversaries of grief — a death day, a remembrance, a meal not eaten. Years pass, circumstances change, and eventually someone asks, quietly, do we still need to do this? That is the question a delegation brings to Jerusalem. For seventy years the people had fasted in the fifth month to mourn the burning of the temple. Now a new temple is going up. Should they keep weeping? They expect a ruling. What they get is a harder question: when you fasted all those years, was it really for God — or for yourselves?
Where it sits in the story: Zechariah 7–8 is a second, separately dated section, two years after the night visions, while the temple is still being built. It sits in Act 3 as the prophet's commentary on rebuilding: the danger is that Israel restores the building and the rituals but repeats the injustice that led to exile. Zechariah deliberately echoes 'the former prophets' — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos — and retells why the land was emptied.
What this chapter is doing: To turn a question about ritual into a question about the heart and about justice, reminding the rebuilding community that exile came because their ancestors refused to listen to God's call to mercy.
- 7:1–3 — In the fourth year of Darius, in the month Kislev, men sent from Bethel — Sharezer and Regem-melech and their people — come to entreat the LORD and ask the priests and prophets: should we keep weeping and fasting in the fifth month, as we have for so many years?
- 7:4–7 — God's reply goes to the people and the priests: when you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months these seventy years, was it for me? And when you ate and drank, was that not for yourselves? This was what the earlier prophets said while Jerusalem was still inhabited.
- 7:8–10 — The heart of it, in the old prophetic words: judge truly, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the foreigner or the poor, and do not plot evil against each other in your hearts.
- 7:11–14 — The ancestors refused, turned a stubborn shoulder, and made their hearts hard as flint. So God did not listen when they called, and scattered them like a whirlwind among the nations; the pleasant land became desolate.
Key verse: Zechariah 7:9–10 · So what: Religious practice can quietly become about us — our grief, our identity, our self-respect — while the neighbour in need goes unseen. Zechariah does not scrap the fast; he asks what it is for. It is a question worth putting to any habit of devotion: is it turning me towards God and towards the widow and the stranger, or only inward?