248 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



staves afterwards takes up the instruments symbolic of 

 an evil shepherd. If the reference is primarily to him, 

 why is all this so ? But the difficulty vanishes if the 

 prophet s action is typical of Christ s ; for every type 

 must not only have some things in common with, but 

 some things diverse from, the antitype. And thus, too, 

 we get over the confusion above remarked between the 

 true Kingdom of God and the fleshly Israel. In the 

 days of our Lord these fell apart. But in the prophet s 

 day the two were really bound up together, so that the 

 whole prophecy is from his historical standpoint one and 

 consistent. 



And now there comes the question : Shall we cast all 

 these harmonious internal evidences to the winds to save 

 the tradition of authorship ? Surely not, if we are to 

 hold the Protestant principle that the Bible is to be 

 interpreted by itself and not by tradition. A tradition 

 that overturns the whole natural exegesis must have 

 strong proofs, indeed, to lead us to adopt it. But, in fact, 

 we have no distinct external evidence. We have only 

 the juxtaposition with Zechariah unaccompanied by 

 any such formal title as heads each of the prophecies 

 that form Zech. i.-viii. We have not even the assurance 

 that when the prophetic books were first collected this 

 work was held to be Zechariah s, or that anything but 

 its position made such an opinion prevail. And, finally, 

 there is at least one plausible theory that might explain 

 how this state of things arose. In Isaiah viii. 2 there 

 appears in association with the prophet Isaiah a certain 

 Zekharjahu, son of Jeberekhiahu. Now the post-exile 

 prophet who in Ezra is called the son of Iddo appears 

 in the heading of his prophecy as son of Berekhja, son 

 of Iddo. Berekhiah and Berekhiahu are the same name. 

 The older Zechariah from his association with Isaiah 

 may have been a prophet, and if there were two prophets 

 sons of Berechiah the juxtaposition of their oracles ceases 

 to be surprising. But this is, of course, only a conjecture 



