NOTES for Zec 10:1-12

The prophetic denunciation of false prophets and soothsayers remains relevant today: one need only open the advertising papers, overflowing with advertisements for sorcerers and bogus healers, and so far there seems to be no lack of demand for their services. Such people are said to see falsehood, which means that not all soothsayers are deliberate charlatans: many are quite sincere in their delusions. But this makes their wanderings in darkness all the more dangerous, their immersion in a world of illusions all the more terrible. The fog they serve seems to cover the earth, but it is already doomed and will disperse, like all the works of the father of lies; and all his servants, triumphant for now, are already put to shame before the Lord.

The prophet says that Ephraim will be like a mighty warrior. Yet this is the very same Ephraim who, sinking into paganism, strayed from the paths of walking before the Lord. Something more is being said here than merely that there is hope for the weak, for those who failed to stand firm and stumbled, as the apostle Peter would stumble several centuries later. The prophecy reveals to us the profound humanity—not to be confused with a ‘humanism’ indulgent towards sin—of the biblical approach to the human person, an approach that was incompatible, even in the stern Old Testament age, with the Nietzschean injunction to ‘push the one who is falling’. Among our contemporaries, one not infrequently encounters a condescending attitude towards the moral principles contained in the Old Testament. But is everyone fully acquainted with them, and how many of us measure up to them even today?