REJECTION OF THE TRUE SHEPHERD 389
Lord. And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my hire ; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my hire thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said unto me, Cast it unto the potter, the goodly price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them unto the potter, in the house of the Lord. Then I cut asunder mine other staff, even Bands, that I might break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel " (Zech. xi.
7-14).
We may pause for a moment to ask whether the symbolical transaction which is here described was an inward or outward one. Most of the Jewish commentators take the latter view. Thus Abarbanel, for instance, says : " God commanded the prophet to perform a real action, and in a waking state, which action was to be an intima tion and a sign of that which was to happen in God s dealings with Israel," and adds : " By attending to the affairs of the prophets thou mayest know that God, blessed be He, sometimes commanded them to perform real actions, and in a waking state, and afterwards explained to them the reason of the command according to the sign that was in them. 1 . . . But sometimes the blessed God commanded the prophets to do things foreign to their character, and un necessary for them to do ; which things were also to be a sign and a type of coming events, and did not expound the meaning, because He knew that the thing itself could be understood" (as, for instance, Isa. viii. 1-2 ; Ezek. iv. 1-2, v. i). But, as has been observed, the narrative in this chapter differs in some respects from the symbolical actions of the prophets and from Zechariah s own visions.
" The symbolical actions of the prophets are actions of their own : this involves acts which it would be impossible to represent, except as a sort of drama. Such are the very central points, the feeding of the flock, which yet are intelligent men who understand God s doings : the cutting off of the three shepherds ; the asking for the price ; the unworthy price offered ; the casting it aside. It differs
1 He quotes Isa. xx. 2, viii. 4 ; Jer. xiii. I, etc., and Ezekiel as examples.
