ZACCARIA (Hebr. Zéhharjâh, “Jahweh has remembered”). — The name of a king, a prophet of Israel, and various minor figures of the Old Testament.
1. King of Israel, son of Jeroboam II and his successor (743 B.C.). His reign lasted only six months; Z. was killed Sellum (v.). In II Reg. 14:29; 15:8–12, only his idolatrous conduct is recalled, and it is affirmed that in Z. the prophecy made to Jehu was fulfilled, according to which he had been promised a dynasty lasting four generations (cf. ibid. 10:30).
2. High priest and prophet, killed by King Joas (799–784 B.C.) because he accused the people of apostasy and religious indifference. He was killed “in the court of the Temple” (II Par. 24:20–22). Since in Mt. 23:35 (cf. Lc. 11:51) Jesus reproaches the Jews for the killing of the prophets, culminating in that of Z., “son of Barachiah,” who was put to death “between the Temple and the altar,” since the patristic period the question has been debated whether the two individuals are to be identified (cf. Jerome, In Matthaeum, 23:35; PL 26, 180).
The simplest explanation is the one that removes the sole obstacle to the identification, namely the paternal designation, by noting that the specification “son of Barachiah” is absent from the text of Luke and from some manuscripts of Matthew; it is therefore regarded as a gloss, perhaps suggested by the memory of the prophet Z. (v.), who was in fact the son of Barachiah. The other hypothesis also has some probability: it considers Barachiah to have been Z.’s actual father, while the more than hundred-year-old Ioiada (cf. II Par. 24:15) would have been his grandfather. The biblical text, as happens in other cases, would simply have linked the two most distinguished figures: the priest who was Joas’s tutor and the prophetic grandson killed by the ungrateful king. Entirely without foundation and tendentious, however, is the interpretation that identifies the prophet remembered by Jesus with Z., son of Baris, killed by the Zealots (v.) in the Temple during the anti-Roman revolt of A.D. 66–70 (cf. Flavius Josephus, Bell. Jud., IV; G. Ricciotti, Flavio Giuseppe tradotto e commentato. La guerra giudaica, III, Turin 1937, pp. 174–76).
Approximately fifteen other figures, whose names generally occur only once, appear in the books of Kings and Paralipomena; they generally belonged to Levitical or priestly families. The name also occurs in Esd. 8:3, 11; 10:26; Neh. 11:4; Is. 8:2; I Mach. 5:18, 56.