2. Beth-El. Though this was the location of one of the two principal sanctuaries of the northern kingdom, it cannot be a place-name here, and it is also not used as a designation for the Temple (its literal meaning is “house of God”). On the evidence of documents from the Jewish community of Elephantine in Egypt from this period, it was also used as a man’s name.

3. the fifth month. This is the month of Av, when the destruction of the First Temple occurred.

5. in the fifth month and the seventh. The latter would be the fast commemorating the assassination of Gedaliah, who was appointed governor of Judah after the Babylonian conquest. Neither of these fasts, of course, has any basis in the Torah, and so the people understandably want a directive from God (“to entreat the LORD,” verse 2) through the Temple priests and the Temple prophets about whether these fasts should be observed.

have you actually fasted for Me? God has not enjoined these fasts, and they are no more than a human initiative to express collective grief, which is not the thing God wants.

6. are you not the ones who eat and you the ones who drink? Eating and drinking, like abstention, are a human affair that does not really concern God.

7. Are not these the words that the LORD proclaimed through the former prophets. The words are not spelled out, but Zechariah would have in mind such prophecies as the one in Isaiah 1, where God proclaims that He does not want people to trample through the courts of the Temple when their hands are filled with blood.

dwelled tranquil. “Tranquil” does not appear here in the Hebrew. Either it was dropped in scribal transmission or “tranquil” in the preceding clause was meant to do double duty.

9. Judge true justice. Although this appears to be a new prophecy, the editorial logic of its placement here is that these demands for social justice are God’s “words,” what He wants rather than fasts.

14. And I will whirl them out over all the nations. Given Zechariah’s role promising a Davidic restoration and urging the rebuilding of the Temple, it is unlikely that he could be addressing this blistering prophecy of exile to his contemporaries. Rather, this would be a citation of God’s pronouncement of doom on the rebellious generation seven decades earlier. This situation of the prophecy in the historical moment leading up to 586 B.C.E. is spelled out in the last sentence here, which uses a past tense (the so-called converted future) for its report of turning the land into a desolation. The grandparents of Zechariah’s audience, then, ignored God’s teaching and consequently reduced their land to ruins. Now the people of Zechariah’s time, inhabiting the ruins, have been summoned to the task of rebuilding.