Zephaniah 1:12

"And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search Jerusalem with lamps; and I will punish the men that are settled on their lees, that say in their heart, Jehovah will not do good, neither will he do evil."

"I will search Jerusalem with lamps ..." Here is the reason why ancient and mediaeval artists depicted Zephaniah as the man with a lamp or candle, thus missing the main point that it is not Zephaniah who will search Jerusalem, but the Lord God Almighty. This verse deals particularly with people who hide from responsibility; and the thrust of it is that God will find and punish them anyway. In the fall of Jerusalem depicted here, it doubtless happened exactly as it did in 70 A.D., an event described by Josephus:

"Princes and priests and chieftains were dragged from sewers, pits, caves, and tombs, where they had hidden themselves in fear of death, and were mercilessly slain wherever they were found."[33]

"I will punish the men that are settled on their lees ..." As explained in the next clause, these were the people who were totally indifferent to God, the practical atheists who did not take God into account as either a plus or minus factor in their lives. They simply lived as if God were not.

The figure of being "settled on their lees" is most appropriate. Laetsch commented on it thus:

"Judah had settled down on its dregs and impurities (the "lees" is the solid waste that settles to the bottom in the wine-making process; and unless the wine is periodically removed from these, it is ruined), until the lusts of its wicked flesh had completely permeated the good wine of sanctification and obedience to the Lord and had changed God's chosen people to a nation of hardened iniquity, equaling and surpassing the Gentiles in moral impurities, shameless vices, and self-satisfied lip-service."[34]

The classical comment of George Adam Smith has also been cited by many commentators in this context:

"We have today the same mass of obscure, nameless persons, who oppose their almost unconquerable inertia against all vital religion. The great causes of God and humanity are not defeated by the hot assaults of the devil, but by the slow, crushing, glacier-like mass of thousands and thousands of indifferent nobodies. God's causes are never destroyed by being blown up, but by being sat upon."[35]

This figure of being settled "on their lees," described by Taylor as, "perhaps the most striking in the whole book,"[36] was also used by Jeremiah:

"Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into captivity: therefore his taste remaineth in him, and his scent is not changed (Jeremiah 48:11)."

In a word, the Judah of Zephaniah's day was permeated by a large class of those revealed in the New Testament as Laodiceans, "neither cold nor hot," and fit only to be spat out.