270 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH
convicted by the event of uttering falsehood in the name of God, incorrigible even in the thickening tokens of God s displeasure, should have been inserted among the Hebrew prophets, in times not far removed from those whose events convicted him, that one wonders that any one should have invented it. Great indeed is the credulity of the incredulous ! " l
The Uncertainties and conflicting " Results " of Rationalistic Criticism
But though the preponderating weight of modern critical opinion since the beginning of the nineteenth century is that these chapters belong to a period before the Captivity (chaps, ix. xi., somewhere in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, or Hezekiah, and chaps, xii. xiv., because of the mention of the mourning for that king as an event of the past in chap, xii., after the death of Josiah 2 ), yet over against them stands another group of critics of equal repute, who transfer these chapters to late post-exilic, post- Zecharian days.
We have already referred to Eichhorn, who, " after long vacillation," assigned these chapters (which, according to him, are made up of different fragments) to different epochs of the Greek -Maccabaean period (332 B.C. to 161 B.C.). And to him must be added H. E. G. Paulus, Bottcher, Vatke, Bernard Stade, and others.
Principal George Adam Smith is so sure of the correct ness of Stade s theory, who assigns " between 300 and 280 B.C." as the date of these chapters, that he has carried it out even in his arrangement of the order of the books. In his Book of the Twelve Prophets he places Malachi after the first part of Zechariah (chaps, i. viii.) ; then Joel,
1 Pusey.
2 Some have not been satisfied with merely two unknown writers for these six chapters. One B. G. Fliigge, in a work published in Gottingen in 1818, entitled, Die Weissagungen welche die Schriften des Propheten Zacharias bcigebogen sind, not only referred these chapters to pre-exilic days, but split them up into nine fragments, of different dates.
