1 It was in King Darius's fourth year, on the fourth day of the ninth month, Chislev, that the word of the LORD came to Zechariah.
2 Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-melech and their men to seek the LORD's favor
3 and to ask the priests of the house of the LORD of hosts and the prophets, "Am I to go on weeping in the fifth month and keeping myself apart, as I have done for so many years?"
4 Then the word of the LORD of hosts came to me:
5 Tell all the people of the land and the priests: When you fasted and lamented in the fifth and the seventh months these seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted?
6 And when you eat and drink, are you not the ones eating and the ones drinking?
7 Are these not the same words the LORD called out through the earlier prophets, back when Jerusalem was settled and secure, along with the towns around her, and when people lived in the Negev and the Shephelah?
8 And the word of the LORD came to Zechariah:
9 This is what the LORD of hosts says: Judge with true justice, and practice kindness and compassion, each of you toward his brother.
10 Do not exploit widow or orphan, foreigner or poor man, and do not scheme in your hearts to harm one another.
11 But they would not listen; they turned away with a defiant shoulder and plugged their ears so they would not hear.
12 They made their hearts hard as flint so as not to listen to the law and the words the LORD of hosts had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets; and so the LORD of hosts was greatly angered.
13 Just as he called and they did not listen, so they would call and I would not listen, says the LORD of hosts;
14 I blew them away in a storm among all the nations they had never known, and the land they left behind was so desolate that no one traveled through it; that is how they turned a delightful land into a wasteland.