ZACCARIA (Hebr. Zekharjah) — “Jahweh has remembered.” — Name of a king, a prophet of Israel, and several 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 slain in a revolt led by Shallum (v.). In 2 Kings 14:29; 15:8-12 only his idolatrous conduct is recorded, and it is affirmed that in Z. the prophecy made to Jehu was fulfilled, to whom a dynasty of four generations had been promised (cf. ibid. 10:30).
2. High priest and prophet, slain by King Joash (835-796 B.C.) for accusing the people of apostasy and religious indifference. He was killed in the Temple court (2 Chron. 24:20-22). Since in Matt. 23:35 (cf. Luke 11:51) Jesus reproaches the Jews for the murder of the prophets up to that of Z. “son of Barachiah,” put to death “between the Temple and the altar,” from patristic times the question of identifying the two individuals has been debated (cf. Jerome, In Matthaeum, 23:35: PL 26, 180).
The simplest explanation is that which removes the only obstacle to identification, the paternity, noting that the designation “son of Barachiah” is lacking in the text of Luke and in some manuscripts of Matthew; it is therefore considered a gloss perhaps suggested by the memory of Zechariah the prophet (v.), who was in fact the son of Barachiah. Some plausibility attaches also to the other hypothesis, which regards Barachiah as the true father of Z., while the very aged Jehoiada (cf. 2 Chron. 24:15) would have been his grandfather. As happens in other cases, the biblical text may simply have linked the two most notable figures, the priestly tutor of Joash and the prophetic grandson slain by the ungrateful king. Completely unfounded and tendentious, on the other hand, is the interpretation that identifies the prophet Jesus with Z. son of Baris, slain 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).
About fifteen other minor figures, whose names occur mostly once, appear in the Books of Kings and Chronicles; they are generally of Levitical or priestly families. The name also occurs in Ezra 8:3, 11; 10:26; Neh. 11:4; Isa. 8:2; 1 Macc. 5:18, 5. Angelo Penna