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restoration from Babylon, is, according to my judgment, settled by the fact that the verb JHT (zarcf] t which is employed, is never used of scattering, or dispersing, in a bad sense, but always " to sow " ; and the prediction in this verse cannot therefore refer to a dispersion of the Jewish people to be inflicted as a punishment. It is most probable that this passage in Zechariah is based on two utterances of the former "prophets." The first is Hos. ii. 23, where we read : " And I will sow her unto Me in the earth ; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy ; and I will say to them which were not My people, Thou art My people ; and they shall say, Thou art my God" And the second is Jer. xxxi. 27: "Behold, the days come, saith Jehovah, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man, and with the seed of beasts"
It is not necessary then to understand the words in Zachariah as referring to a future act of dispersion (though, as a matter of history, a dispersion subsequent to the partial restoration from Babylon or rather, a new and more terrible and universal phase of the dispersion which was inaugurated by the Babylonian Captivity, did take place after Israel s national apostasy from God was com pleted in the rejection and crucifixion of their Messiah), but rather as a prediction first of all that in the dispersion which had already begun with the destruction of the city and Temple by the Babylonians, and which would last till the full and final restoration of the whole nation (Judah and Israel) to their own land, which is still in the future God would cause them to multiply. This increase (to judge from the analogy of their experience in Egypt, to which allusion is made more than once in this chapter) would take place toward the end of the time of their sojourning among the nations, and would be a precursor of their national restoration. 1
1 The marvellous increase of the Jewish people since their so-called "emancipation" in the nineteenth century, is, indeed, a striking sign of the times. The statement of a recent writer in the Jewish Chronicle, that at the commencement of the sixteenth century there could scarcely have been more than a million Jews left in the entire world after the untold sufferings, dispersions,
