464 VISIONS AND PROPHECIES OF ZECHARIAH
prophecy in this passage that these last chapters of Zechariah must have been written in the pre-exilic period when these two great national sins were still prevalent in the land. But there is no real foundation, in fact, for this any more than for the other " proofs " of a pre-exilic authorship of these chapters, as I have already shown else where. 1 In reference to this particular point, though it be true that idolatry, and false prophecy, which was usually associated with it, did not exist any more in their gross form among the Jewish people after the Babylonian cap tivity, such passages as Neh. vi. 10; Ezra. ix. i ; Neh. xiii. 23, 24, etc., which speak of the lying prophets which existed at that time, and of marriages contracted, even by priests, with Canaanitish and other heathen women, whose children could not even speak the Jewish language show very clearly, as Keil and others point out, that " the danger of falling back into idolatry was not a remote one."
The range of the prophetic vision, however, in the six last chapters of Zechariah does not terminate with the mere immediate future, but finds its goal in the time of the end, when the great sins of idolatry and false prophecy shall reach their climax in the worship of the beast and his image, and in the " unclean spirits " z which shall go forth upon the earth to deceive the anti-Christian nations.
The four verses which follow are an amplification of the announcement in ver. 2 that idolatry and false prophecy would be utterly exterminated from the land " in that day." They set forth in realistic we might almost say dramatic form the great change which will then come over the Jewish nation, and their zeal against those sins which formerly were the chief causes of their national ruin.
The 3rd verse introduces an hypothetical case: "And it shall come to pass that, when any shall yet propliesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live : for thou speakest lies in the Name of
1 See the introduction to the second part of this book.
2 2 Thess. ii. 4 ; Rev. xiii. 1-6; xvi. 13, 14.
