1 In the eighth month of Darius's second year, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah the prophet, son of Berechiah, son of Iddo:
2 The LORD was deeply angry with your fathers.
3 So tell them: This is what the LORD of hosts says: Turn back to me, declares the LORD of hosts, and I will turn back to you, says the LORD of hosts.
4 Do not be like your fathers, to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed, "This is what the LORD of hosts says: Turn back from your evil ways and your evil deeds." Yet they would not listen or heed me, declares the LORD.
5 Where are your fathers now? And the prophets, do they go on living forever?
6 But did not my words and my decrees, which I charged my servants the prophets to deliver, catch up with your fathers? Then they turned back and said, "The LORD of hosts has done to us just what he planned to do, as our ways and our deeds deserved."
7 On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, the month of Shebat, in the second year of Darius, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah the prophet, son of Berechiah, son of Iddo, in these words:
8 During the night I had a vision: there was a man mounted on a red horse, standing among the myrtles in the hollow, and behind him horses that were red, sorrel and white.
9 I asked, "My lord, what are these?" And the angel who was speaking with me told me, "I will let you see what they are."
10 Then the man standing among the myrtles replied, "These are the ones the LORD has sent out to go back and forth through the earth."
11 They reported to the angel of the LORD standing among the myrtles, "We have gone back and forth through the earth, and the whole earth is quiet and undisturbed."
12 Then the angel of the LORD spoke: "LORD of hosts, how much longer will you withhold compassion from Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, which you have been angry with for seventy years now?"
13 The LORD replied to the angel who was speaking with me with kind words, words of comfort.
14 Then the angel who was speaking with me said, "Proclaim this: The LORD of hosts says: I burn with great jealousy for Jerusalem and for Zion,
15 and I burn with great anger against the nations that sit at ease; for I was angry only a little, but they made the harm far worse.
16 So the LORD says this: I have come back to Jerusalem with compassion; my house will be rebuilt in her, declares the LORD of hosts, and a measuring line will be stretched across Jerusalem.
17 Proclaim further: The LORD of hosts says: My cities will once more spill over with good things; the LORD will once more comfort Zion and once more choose Jerusalem."
18 Then I looked up and saw four horns.
19 I asked the angel who was speaking with me, "What are these?" He answered, "These are the horns that scattered Judah, Israel and Jerusalem abroad."
20 Next the LORD let me see four smiths.
21 I asked, "What have these come to do?" He said, "Those are the horns that scattered Judah so completely that no one could raise his head; these smiths have come to frighten them, to knock down the horns of the nations that raised a horn against the land of Judah to scatter it."