Zacarias 7

A question about fasting

¹In the fourth year of King Darius’s reign, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah. It was the fourth day of Kislev, the ninth month.^{a 2}The people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-melech and their men to seek the favor of the LORD,^{b 3}and to ask the priests of the house of the LORD of Armies and the prophets, “Should I go on weeping and fasting in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?”^c

⁴Then the word of the LORD of Armies came to me: ⁵Say to all the people of the land and to the priests: “When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and the seventh months for these seventy years, did you truly fast for me?^{d 6}And when you eat and drink, are you not eating and drinking for yourselves? ⁷Are these not the very words that the LORD proclaimed through the earlier prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous, along with the towns around it, and when people lived in the Negev and the Shephelah?”

Judge with true justice

⁸Then the word of the LORD came to Zechariah: ⁹The LORD of Armies says this: Judge with true justice. Show loyal love and compassion to one another. ¹⁰Do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the outsider or the poor. And do not plot evil against one another in your hearts. ¹¹But they refused to pay attention. They turned their shoulders away stubbornly and stopped up their ears so that they would not hear. ¹²They made their hearts as hard as diamond so that they would not listen to the instruction and the words that the LORD of Armies had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So great wrath came from the LORD of Armies. ¹³Just as he called and they would not listen, so they called and I would not listen, says the LORD of Armies. ¹⁴I scattered them like a whirlwind among all the nations they had not known. The land they left behind was so desolate that no one came or went. They turned the pleasant land into a wasteland.